Tuesday, June 23, 2009

STS

It's nice but rare when commentators say something like this about science (from Massimiano Bucchi):
The challenge is not to inform everybody about everything but the way politics deals with the challenges of science and technology. It is clear that when it comes to science and technology issues, our system of electing people who afterwards decide for us, together with the experts, on nuclear energy for example, is not sufficient anymore. It leads to conflicts one day after another. The crucial challenge for European society is to invent a new form of democracy which can face the wealth, complexity and importance of science and technology issues in contemporary society.

9 comments:

MT said...

I don't see how we could democratically circumvent political opposition to stem cells or nuclear power in this country.There has to be a public discourse, and even if the scientific details are not decisive, this discourse is bound to be unsatisfying and indecisive if details make no appearance or if nobody understands them. Maybe the big problem is that the public recognizes no scientific body as speaking with authority. Authoritative testimony about a consensus scientific opinion--recognized as authoritative--might prevent a lot of he-said/she-said discourse. But no such authority exists in a culture that's not prepared to recognize it. If you weren't encouraged in school to believe that the Earth revolves the Sun, then I hope you will find encouragement in the media.

helmut said...

The creationists are a limit case that just happens to be loud-mouthed. I honestly don't think many politicians or other Americans are prepared to, say, put their lives at risk because creationist "science" says there's no risk in a given action. There's a pragmatic test for all this.

Talk about a science authority worries me. Scientists often seem to think the whole problem is that the public just doesn't get science. So, the problem is how best to communicate it to a dumb public.

The point here is that this idea of the science-public interface reflects a simplistic understanding of policy. It's not that we all somehow have to make democratic decisions about science. It's that a better public discourse - whatever its form - is important for discussing what we as a society ought to do with scientific findings when they potentially affect us all. We don't really do that. In this sense it's non-democratic.

MT said...

Re: climate change deniers and activists cited contradictory scientific opinions, and though the science on one side was far less credible than on the other to scientists overall, that wasn't obvious to the public, which was relatively free to judge the science from whoever was citing it and/or to believe whoever they wanted. If the American public were ready to accept the word of the National Academy of Scientists, for example, as the government traditionally often has done, then this wouldn't happen or when it did, ought not to last long. That is, even if the word of the NAS on some matter, when it finally comes, is that scientists have reached no consensus, it's liable to speak to the preponderance of the conflicting views and their bases. Public advocates might feel less free to cherry pick what science they cite in that case, if people knew and trusted the report; and consumers of advocacy will know better what to make of a cherry-picked line of scientific evidence pertaining to the matter, as opposed to simply believing or rejecting it according to irrelevant predilections. Even though all we have to go by in this world is testimony, "scientists say" is about as complete a citation as the average American appreciates or cares to know regarding scientific evidence. Most will give extra credence to something "Harvard scientists say," but there is a lot more testimony than what one person at a famous school might have to say, and better ways to judge credibility than by school affiliation or whether you've heard of it. Right now "science from Harvard" carries about as much authority as an alleged science can carry. That shouldn't be the case. People should be able to recognize science that carries a collective stamp of approval by other reputable institutions, such as the NAS. Also they should be able to distinguish when a Harvard scientist is talking about a conjecture, a theory, an inference, or an observation, for example, and appreciate what interests the scientist has in speaking so. Traditionally journalists are supposed to help with this, but less and less these days is traditional journalism.

helmut said...

I enthusiastically agree with everything you say except for the bit about authority, once again. Yeah, when "Harvard science" becomes shorthand for "wisdom in all things," whether by the random citizen or the Harvard scientist him/herself, then we have a real problem. A Harvard scientist may be an expert on, say climate change, but they're not necessarily in any better position than anyone else to understand the policy options and which may be the best. That requires all sorts of other inputs, including expertise that Harvard scientist doesn't have, including the expertise regular joes get about their own lives from just being alive.

My claim is that both the scientist and the short-handing citizen get things backwards when it comes to policy. That's precisely why we end up with creationism being advanced in the public discourse as serious science. There are different claims to authority without many people possessing any means to deliberate about them. Scientists also tend to see it as a matter of competing authorities over conclusions, rather than a problem of deliberation. You're right that it would be a real advance if the general citizen understood the difference between an inference, a conjecture, a theory, axiom, etc. But scientists ought to take this advice too when it comes to leaving the realm of science for the policy realm. In general, I don't think they do a very good job of this because some are often already convinced of a self-possessing authority often assumed to be boundless.

MT said...

My concept was that scientists wouldn't be opining on policy or deliberating policy options in their capacity as scientists. I see science providing facts or likely facts that the deliberations must address. In representing as a fact something outside of your own personal experience, you should be able to cite science--in some way--that everybody recognizes as certifying credibility and likely truth (contingent on verification of the citation and not with regard to just any science but, e.g. as in an NAS report, "consensus" scientific opinion).

helmut said...

Totally agreed. Part of what makes modern science, generally speaking, so important and influential is that when done well (i.e., truly following scientific method) its results don't depend on the views or thoughts of any particular scientists or anyone else. These results are objective, the best we can do in describing and understanding what is materially real. To deny such results is to deny reality (or our best understanding of it), which is what creationists and like-minded fantasists do.

Further, there should be better ways to communicate this reality in the public sphere so that non-science decisions that we deliberate and make in democratic societies - i.e., policy decisions - are informed by the best that humans can do in discerning facts about the world.

On this second point, however, I think scientists and their representation in the public sphere (by media and by the public itself) unnecessarily mystifies science by portraying the scientist as a kind of oracle on matters of fact. Scientists themselves buy into this by thinking that the public is stupid and needs child-like similes, analogies, metaphors to understand anything about science. If this really is the case - that only scientists can really truly understand science and that it's so removed from people's daily lives that scientists have to communicate it in John Q's pop culture language - we can seriously ask the question why science should matter to the general public at all. I think this is a problem that scientists themselves don't fully understand. And it's a problem that leaves the door open to any old sophist posing as an authority on matters of reality. Continued below...

helmut said...

...Third, some facts are non-scientific in the sense of having little to do with science as typically conceived (science as describing and hypothesizing the facts of material reality).

We could, for example, make a case that "it is a fact that democracy is the best form of government." That statement isn't scientifically factual in that it describes some immutable material truth about the world (it's possible that in the future we could find a better form of government than democracy). It's a value statement that we can take as objective and therefore fact-like. It's a firm enough feature of the world that we can find pretty broad agreement across individuals and cultures.

But this is where objectivity means something more like intersubjectivity. A reductionist scientific view really can't make sense of such a statement (except, maybe, to say that a person's brain has certain unique electrochemical activity when making the statement). In this case, it's not the postmodern theorist or the stupid John Q who contaminates fact with value. It's the scientist who implicitly suggests that we cannot say anything objective about anything other than material facts discerned by science. That in itself is a judgment about the nature of objectivity and the nature of parts of our lives and thinking such as ethics.

Science flourishes because the testability of any scientific claim yields objectivity. But we don't pronounce the results of one scientific experiment to be truth - the results demand verification, further testing by other means and by other scientists. Science requires a kind of intersubjectivity as the basis of objectivity. This is built into the method of science. The best non-scientific deliberation can also use that method of intersubjectivity and testability, as in the statement about democracy above.

But when scientists treat their discipline as a kind of religion, an oracle, it becomes easy to slip over into making authoritative statements about non-scientific areas of life and world. Then it becomes pseudoscience, like economics, where testability can produce the illusion of objective results because what's tested is a theory based upon any number of non-rigorous, non-scientific assumptions, which are confirmed by the theory that's tested. These assumptions are often about the nature of value and the nature of the fact-value relation.

Anyway, I don't think scientists do themselves any favors by worrying about their authority on factual matters. The reason some people can't make distinctions between creationist "scientific" claims and genuinely scientific claims is because they don't understand the nature of scientific method, not because they don't recognize the authority of scientists.

If scientists spent more time trying to help the public understand the method of science, they would be giving the public the tools to understand their work (and recognize the scientists' authority as a result, if that's really necessary), while also helping them develop better tools for understanding non-scientific, more obviously intersubjective realities of their lives.

MT said...

If scientists spent more time trying to help the public understand the method of science, they would be giving the public the tools to understand their work (and recognize the scientists' authority as a result, if that's really necessary), while also helping them develop better tools for understanding non-scientific, more obviously intersubjective realities of their lives.

What is this "method of science" though? Just to mirror your own tack, I don't know that the philosophers do themselves any favor by suggesting that any simply interpretable formula for scientific progress exists. Faced with the choice of rejecting or granting credence to an ostensible assertion of fact in a talk or report or a textbook, unless we're talking about a geometric theorem that's demonstrated before my eyes, I have no direct knowledge of the experiences, observations or reasons which have brought about the assertion in question. I get the text and a variety of signifiers of the kind of office the author holds and at what institution, and of whatever organization is publishing the text. At a talk I get also intonation and body language and occasionally the opportunity to recognize a face (although of course many people look alike). I get my memory of having been taught or persuaded in school or elsewhere of the truth of matters to which the assertion pertains. I must choose to trust people in their representations of what they have experienced and of the institutions and offices they represent, and I have to trust institutions. Above all I have to trust my past choices, being unable to remember how I came to believe everything I believe about this author and the associated institution. Listening to the way a person talks and argues sometimes I sense they have habits or standards of belief that make me unable to trust what they assert. Maybe instead of a scientific method we should be talking about epistemological method. But then we'd have to say unflattering things about religion, which is a no-no.

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Science flourishes because the testability of any scientific claim yields objectivity. But we don't pronounce the results of one scientific experiment to be truth - the results demand verification, further testing by other means and by other scientists. Science requires a kind of intersubjectivity as the basis of objectivity. This is built into the method of science. The best non-scientific deliberation can also use that method of intersubjectivity and testability, as in the statement about democracy above.