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In the psychology of human behavior, denialism is a person's choice to deny reality, as a way to avoid a psychologically uncomfortable truth. Denialism is an essentially irrational action that withholds the validation of an historical experience or event, by the person refusing to accept an empirically verifiable reality. In the sciences, denialism is the rejection of basic facts and concepts that are undisputed, well-supported parts of the scientific consensus on a subject, in favor of radical and controversial ideas. The terms ''Holocaust denialism'' and ''AIDS denialism'' describe the denial of the facts and the reality of the subject matters,〔Usages of Holocaust and AIDS denialism: ; ; ; ; .〕 and the term ''climate change denialist'' is applied to people who argue against the scientific consensus that the global warming of planet Earth is a real and occurring event primarily caused by human activity.〔Usages of global-warming denialism: ; ; .〕 The forms of denialism present the common feature of the person rejecting overwhelming evidence and the generation of political controversy with attempts to deny the existence of consensus. The motivations and causes of denialism include religion and self-interest (economic, political, financial) and defence mechanisms meant to protect the psyche of the denialist against mentally disturbing facts and ideas. ==Orthodoxy and heterodoxy== Anthropologist Didier Fassin distinguishes between ''denial'', defined as "the empirical observation that reality and truth are being denied", and ''denialism'', which he defines as "an ideological position whereby one systematically reacts by refusing reality and truth".〔Didier Fassin, ''When bodies remember: experiences and politics of AIDS in South Africa'', Volume 15 of California Series in Public Anthropology, University of California Press, 2007, ISBN 978-0-520-25027-7. (p. 115 )〕 Persons and social groups who reject propositions on which a there exists mainstream and scientific consensus engage in ''denialism'' when they use rhetorical tactics to give the appearance of argument and legitimate debate, when there is none. Rick Stoff quoted Chris Hoofnagle—a senior staff attorney at the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic and a senior fellow at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology at the UC Berkeley School of Law—as follows: In a 2003 newspaper article, Edwin Cameron—a senior South African judge who has AIDS—described the tactics used by those who deny the Holocaust and by those who deny that the AIDS pandemic is due to infection with HIV. He states that "For denialists, the facts are unacceptable. They engage in radical controversion, for ideological purposes, of facts that, by and large, are accepted by almost all experts and lay persons as having been established on the basis of overwhelming evidence".〔(The dead hand of denialism ) Edwin Cameron. Mail & Guardian (Johannesburg), April 17, 2003.〕 To do this they employ "distortions, half-truths, misrepresentation of their opponents' positions and expedient shifts of premises and logic."〔 Edwin Cameron notes that a common tactic used by denialists is to "make great play of the inescapable indeterminacy of figures and statistics",〔 as scientific studies of many areas rely on probability analysis of sets of data, and in historical studies the precise numbers of victims and other facts may not be available in the primary sources. Such "recourse to data debates and pseudo-scientific 'evidence has also been noted as a common feature of several types of denialism in a 2009 article published in the journal ''Globalization and Health''. This is an area which British historian Richard J. Evans mentioned as part of his analysis of the David Irving's work which he presented for the defence when Irving sued Deborah Lipstadt for libel: Mark Hoofnagle (brother of Chris Hoofnagle) has described denialism as "the employment of rhetorical tactics to give the appearance of argument or legitimate debate, when in actuality there is none". It is a process that operates by employing one or more of the following five tactics in order to maintain the appearance of legitimate controversy: #Conspiracy theories — Dismissing the data or observation by suggesting opponents are involved in "a conspiracy to suppress the truth". #Cherry picking — Selecting an anomalous critical paper supporting their idea, or using outdated, flawed, and discredited papers in order to make their opponents look as though they base their ideas on weak research. #False experts — Paying an expert in the field, or another field, to lend supporting evidence or credibility. #Moving the goalpost — Dismissing evidence presented in response to a specific claim by continually demanding some other (often unfulfillable) piece of evidence. #Other logical fallacies — Usually one or more of false analogy, appeal to consequences, straw man, or red herring. Tara Smith of the University of Iowa also stated that moving goalposts, conspiracy theories, and cherry-picking evidence are general characteristics of denialist arguments, but went on to note that these groups spend the "majority of their efforts critiquing the mainstream theory" in an apparent belief that if they manage to discredit the mainstream view, their own "unproven ideas will fill the void". In 2009 author Michael Specter defined group denialism as "when an entire segment of society, often struggling with the trauma of change, turns away from reality in favor of a more comfortable lie". 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Denialism」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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