Most fundamentally, the groups we studied believe that science is a process, and not an institution. As we have outlined in the case study, these groups mistrust the scientific establishment (“Science”) because they believe that the institution has been corrupted by profit motives and politics. The knowledge that the CDC and academics have created cannot be trusted because they need to be subject to increased doubt, and not accepted as consensus. In the same way that climate change skeptics have appealed to Karl Popper’s theory of falsification to show why climate science needs to be subjected to continuous scrutiny in order to be valid [42], we have found that anti-mask groups point to Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to show how their anomalous evidence— once dismissed by the scientific establishment—will pave the way to a new paradigm (“As I’ve recently described, I’m no stranger to presenting data that are inconsistent with the narrative. It can get ugly. People do not give up their paradigms easily. [...] Thomas Kuhn wrote about this phenomenon, which occurs repeatedly throughout history. Now is the time to hunker down. Stand with the data,” August 5, 2020). For anti-maskers, valid science must be a process they can critically engage for themselves in an unmediated way. Increased doubt, not consensus, is the marker of scientific certitude.
covid-19.ontario.ca
globalnews.ca
