CLIMATE CHANGE AS SECOND-HAND KNOWLEDGE: ON THE SOCIAL EPISTEMOLOGY OF A SCIENTIFIC CONCEPT

Abstract

The issue of climate change has been ubiquitous in media discourse in recent decades. Having become a subject of common knowledge, the concept is commonly used outside the strict domain of environmental science, affecting the way human communities understand the transformation of their relationship with nature. Climate change tends to be presented in the media as a universalistic narrative, although the argument is based on scientific predictions whose inherent uncertainty remains difficult for common sense to accept. The concept of social representation is an interdisciplinary construct, with a remarkable analytical potential, which allows a theoretical investigation of the cognitive appropriation of knowledge objects as a psychosocial process. Our aim is an epistemological analysis of how the scientific identity of the concept of climate change is re-created in common knowledge as a consequence of what Moscovici and Hewstone call "second-hand" knowledge, which emerges through what they call the scientification of common sense. Representations of climate change tend to become autonomous, both in relation to the academic environment from which they emerge as a particular species of scientific discourse, and in relation to militant groups professing pro-environmentalist ideologies. As a complex, unknown and threatening reality, climate change becomes, via conceptual appropriation, a structural social object in the sense that, by re-producing it through re-signification, human communities tend to redefine themselves in relation to nature, re-evaluating their relationship with the environment.

Keywords

• social representations
• climate change
• second-hand knowledge
• indexicality
• scientific incertitude
• cognitive discomfort