The climate change debate as a persuasion game [El debate sobre el cambio climático interpretado como un juego de persuasión]

Abstract

Scientists try to persuade their colleagues, and ultimately the whole society, of the acceptability of their claims, discoveries and proposals. In order to reach that goal, they develop a number of strategies that can be studied as a 'game of persuasion', in which, besides the processes of formal and informal argumentation typically studied by logic and methodology of science, there are also 'sociological' aspects intervening. This paper analyses the debate on climate change science as a 'persuasion game', from an inferentialist point of view, according to the lines of a Zamora Bonilla (2006a).