Humans' Place in Geophysics: Understanding the Vertigo of Deep Time

We define here “denialism” the public refusal of empirically corroborated scientific evidences, like biological evolution by natural selection, or shared scientific consensus, like climate change as a global process also due to human activities. We focus on scientific denialism, leaving apart a more general definition of the concept that includes historical denialism (the refusal of proven historical events). Any form of denialism is clearly related to social and political issues, like religious fundamentalism spreading around Western countries and conservative movements, but here we concentrate mainly on its philosophical and cognitive features. It could be argued that denialism is an expression of trivial irrationalism, opposed to the use of common sense and rationality. For a philosopher of science, the allegedly simple contradiction between the self-evident rationality of science and the obscurity of a lazy superstition is not the whole story. We propose here to consider denialism as based on much more influential cognitive roots, on the ambiguities of the demarcation of sciences, and on the counter-intuitive results of many scientific researches.