Photo: Florian Fisch

Disinformation makes people more sceptical towards a source, according to the Science Barometer Switzerland in 2022. In itself, that’s not a bad thing. According to the philosophers Maria Baghramian and Silvia Caprioglio Panizza of University College Dublin, “moderate scepticism is valuable, not just as an intellectual virtue, but also as a civic virtue. So researchers too ought to be moderately sceptical – especially towards their own hypotheses.

Climate and vaccination sceptics also try to claim this positive connotation of the term for themselves. But their aim isn’t to get to the bottom of the facts. Instead, according to Lawrence Torcello, a philosopher at the Rochester Institute of Technology, they’re merely concerned with maintaining their own ideology or belief systems. He calls this ‘pseudoskepticism’: “Referring to science denialists as skeptics serves to strengthen their rhetorical position by implying an intellectual virtue that they do not demonstrate”.