Indifferentism as Excessive Mistrust in Reason: Kant on Science Denial

Recent surveys (e.g., Contessa 2025; McIntyre 2021) indicate that science denial is an increasingly widespread phenomenon, extending beyond disagreement with this or that argument or set of data. In its contemporary form, it often involves disqualifying science and reason themselves as sources of knowledge. In this paper, I suggest that we find an account of such science denial already in Kant’s philosophy, particularly in his logic lectures. This may not come as a surprise, given Kant’s story of skepticism as a reaction to dogmatism. Yet I will argue that it is not skepticism but a different attitude, indifferentism, that better fits science denial in the sense in which we think of it today. In the logic lectures, especially when commenting on §168 of Meier’s Excerpts, Kant distinguishes four epistemic attitudes—Denkungsarten—toward uncertain judgments: affirmative dogmatism and skeptical dogmatism, which decide with full conviction in opposite directions; criticism, which postpones judgment for the sake of inquiry; and indifferentism, which withdraws from judgment. In discussing prejudice (§§169–170) and doubt (§§176–178), Kant goes on to clarify where all three attitudes besides criticism go wrong. He inquires into the causes of their underlying prejudices, situating them within a schema of maturation that applies especially to metaphysics. In youth, the default is dogmatism. People rush to decide because prejudices lead them to put too much trust in reason. They may put too much trust in specific others (the prejudice of excessive trust in authority); take common sense, what everybody thinks, to be the criterion of truth (the prejudice of the multitude); or put too much trust in their own reason (the prejudice of logical egoism). A second phase emerges through engagement with science and consists of the accumulated experience of deficiencies. Disappointment resulting from initial excessive expectations may lead to the opposite extreme of a skeptical-dogmatic renunciation of certainty, but at some point one may become aware that this position does not hold either. This awareness marks the third phase, that of the scholar who “had virtually run through the circle of the sciences” (V-Lo/Vienna, 24:873). Kant distinguishes between two reactions to the accumulated experience of deficiencies in science: criticism and indifferentism. Indifferentism is explained through the prejudice of excessive mistrust, whereby initial excessive trust and accumulated adverse experience lead people to withdraw their judgment. Kant connects this withdrawal with a return to common sense. His assertions, both in the logic lectures and the CpR, leave room for two readings of this relation. In weak indifferentism, one withdraws from science and takes common reason as an alternative method. In strong indifferentism, appealing to common sense is not an alternative but a thinking-stopper, an attempt no longer to be troubled by these uncertainties. Like the contemporary science denier, the weak indifferentist denies the authority of science, while the strong indifferentist loses trust in reason entirely.