Legitimate Doubt and Science Denial in the Age of Technology: A Kantian Perspective

In earlier work, I examined the moral status of doubt through the case of climate change denial. That analysis led me to argue that the rejection of well-established scientific consensus often functions as a way of distancing oneself from public responsibility, instead of expressing genuine critical reflection. Drawing on Kant’s writings on enlightenment, orientation in thinking, and logical egoism, I developed normative criteria for distinguishing legitimate doubt from forms of doubt that corrode the conditions of public reason. This paper takes that argument as its point of departure and extends it to science denial as a broader and persistent phenomenon in the age of technology. I argue that technological mediation reshapes how doubt is produced, circulated, and sustained in public discourse. Within digital media and algorithmic information environments, doubt becomes intertwined with communicative infrastructures structured by engagement, asymmetric visibility, and platform-based governance, with significant consequences for shared standards of justification and accountability. From a Kantian perspective, this transformation raises pressing questions about enlightenment understood as a social process. In fact, Kant’s account of thinking for oneself relies on communicability, corrigibility, and the public testing of judgment, conditions that come under strain in technologically mediated environments that fragment audiences and encourage insulated patterns of reasoning. Therefore, also drawing on Kant’s critique of logical egoism, I suggest that such environments foster forms of social irrationality in which doubt gradually loses its critical role and contributes to the persistence of science denial. Moreover, I conclude that Kantian criteria for legitimate doubt remain normatively compelling, while their practical force increasingly depends on how the public use of reason is institutionally and technologically organized in the age of technology.