Why Trust Science? Read online

  173. Cartwright and Hardie, Evidence-Based Policy.

  174. “The Medical Benefit of Daily Flossing Called into Question.”

  175. Saint Louis, “Feeling Guilty about Not Flossing?”

  176. Ibid.

  177. Crichton, “Aliens Cause Global Warming”; Perry, “For Earth Day”; Bushway, “Eugenics,” and many more.

  178. “From the Editor.”

  179. Institute of Medicine (US) Committee on the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Initiative on the Future of Nursing, “Transforming Leadership”; Editorial Board, “Opinion: Are Midwives Safer Than Doctors?”. Also see Bourdieu and Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, for a discussion of how authoritative expertise is created and reproduced. We should not assume that “other professionals” are necessarily correct in their views simply because they are “on the ground”; many American farmers were enthusiastic proponents of eugenics, but then we could argue about whether these were really experts … and so on.

  180. Finlayson, Fishing for Truth; On farmers, see the classic study by Brian Wynne, May the Sheep Safely Graze?, as well as his more recent work, e.g., “Participatory Mass Observation and Citizen Science.” On patients as people who hold relevant knowledge, see Epstein, Impure Science.

  181. Wynne, May the Sheep Safely Graze?, p. 61.

  182. Garber, Academic Instincts.

  183. Conversely, when scientists stray outside their domains of expertise and experience, we have a right to view their claims with caution, if not alarm. Elsewhere I have noted that a characteristic feature of “merchants of doubt” is their making confident pronouncements that conflict with mainstream science, yet fall far outside their own domains of expertise. See discussion in chapter 1.

  184. Wynne, May the Sheep Safely Graze?, p. 74 and again on p. 77.

  185. Mnookin, The Panic Virus.

  186. Oreskes and Conway, Merchants of Doubt; Brandt, The Cigarette Century; Proctor, Golden Holocaust; Proctor and Schiebinger, Agnotology; McGarity and Wagner, Bending Science; Wagner, “How Exxon Mobil ‘Bends’ Science to Cast Doubt on Climate Change”; Michaels, Doubt Is Their Product, 2008; Markowitz and Rosner, Deceit and Denial. A recent useful addition to this literature is Richard Staley, Partisanal Knowledge: On Hayek and Heretics in Climate Science and Discourse, in prep.

  187. Mnookin, The Panic Virus.

  188. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/opinion/sunday/playing-dumb-on-climate-change.html.

  189. Bateman, “Sex in Education: A Case Study of the Establishment of Scientific Authority in the Service of a Social Agenda,” p. 11.

  190. For a similar argument in the world of technology, see Emily Chang’s discussion of “meritocracy” in Silicon Valley in Chang, Brotopia.

  191. Oreskes and Conway, Merchants of Doubt.

  192. In his now-classic 1992 study of Cumbrian sheep farmers affected by radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, Brian Wynne concluded that lay people “showed themselves to be more ready than the scientific experts to reflect upon the status of their own knowledge” (Wynne, Misunderstood Misunderstanding, p. 298). His example may not be unique; many of us have found scientists often to be defensive when asked to reflect on the status of their knowledge, seeing any attempt to so reflect as an attack on that status, even when the request is made in the interest of making science stronger, or more objective (chapter 1). Wynne also raises another important point. He notes that “in the real world [sic] people have to reconcile or adapt to living with contradictions which are not necessarily within their control to dissolve,” whereas “the implicit moral imperative driving science is to reorganize and control the world so as to iron out contradiction and ambiguity.” No doubt he is right about this (although I would say that scientists live in the real world, too, even if they wish they did not), but it seems to me that increasingly scientists have come to recognize that, in many domains, they are unable to reorganize and control the world and must find ways to live with contradiction and ambiguity. Again, a feminist perspective may be useful here: women scientists spend their lives living with the contradiction of being women and scientists in a world that still tells them that the qualities of being female (read: emotional) are at odds with those of being scientific (read: rational). In this sense women scientists live with the sort of “double consciousness” of which W.E.B. DuBois famously wrote. See also Wynne's follow-up paper, May the Sheep Safely Graze?

  193. Indeed, we would not now study it, had it not been. We would just view it as an idea that turned out not to be true …

  194. Rudner, “The Scientist qua Scientist Makes Value Judgments”; Douglas, “Inductive Risk and Values in Science,” 2000; Douglas, Science, Policy, and the Value-Free Ideal; Elliot and Richards, Exploring Inductive Risk.

  195. Stern, The Economics of Climate Change; Stern, Why Are We Waiting?; Nordhaus, The Climate Casino.

  196. Brandt, The Cigarette Century; Proctor, Golden Holocaust; Michaels, Doubt Is Their Product, 2008; Oreskes and Conway, Merchants of Doubt.

  197. Pearce et al., “Beyond Counting Climate Consensus.”

  198. Wynne, “Misunderstood Misunderstanding,” p. 301.

  199. Stark, Behind Closed Doors, p. 10.

  200. “Gender Diversity in Senior Positions and Firm Performance.” Discussed in Emily Chang, Brotopia, p. 251.

  201. Heather Douglas, Science, Policy, and the Value-Free Ideal.

  202. This argument has sometimes been made to suggest that diversity does not matter in physics. Karen Barad has taken on this issue in her book Meeting the Universe Halfway, which begins with the wonderful line from a poem by Alice Fulton, “Because truths we don’t expect have a hard time making themselves felt …”

  203. Elsewhere I have argued that, had World War II not broken out, continental drift might well have been accepted in the 1940s, but whether or not that is true it is also relevant that when new information became available in the late 1950s and ’60s, earth scientists embraced that information and rapidly developed plate tectonic theory. Oreskes, Science on a Mission: American Oceanography in the Cold War and Beyond.

  204. Duesberg, “Peter Duesberg on AIDS.”

  205. Duesberg asserts, on his website, that his colleagues will not engage in debate, and uses this to solicit contributions to support his research. But his extensive publication record refutes this assertion. It may well be that he has trouble raising grant money for research in support of his hypothesis, but the funding environment is highly competitive, and it is reasonable that reviewers would not be supportive of spending money on investigations that they consider fruitless. Again, his colleagues may be wrong in their judgments, but this is not the same as suppressing dissent.

  Coda. Values in Science

  1. Zycher, “The Absurdity That Is the Paris Climate Agreement.”

  2. Philosopher Dale Jamieson has been eloquent on this point. See Jamieson, Reason in a Dark Time; and also Howe, Behind the Curve.

  3. Heather Douglas makes this point, citing Herrick, “Junk Science and Environmental Policy,” that the term “junk science” was used by critics to tarnish work whose implications they did not like (Douglas, Science, Policy, and the Value-Free Ideal, p. 11). What she misses, however, is that the term was not used promiscuously; it was promoted by industry groups wishing to tarnish science whose implications were adverse to their products or activities. Similarly, the term “sound science” was promulgated by the tobacco industry as a means to discredit science they wanted to tarnish as “unsound.” Thus they created, with the help of PR men, TASSC: “The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition” (Oreskes and Conway, Merchants of Doubt. pp. 150–52).

  4. Leiserowitz and Smith, “Knowledge of Climate Change across Global Warming’s Six Americas”; see also Oreskes and Conway, Merchants of Doubt.

  5. Moore, Disrupting Science, p. 23; Jewett, Science, Democracy, and the American University, particularly pp. 366–67.

  6. Oreskes and Conway, Merchants of Doubt
; Posner, A Failure of Capitalism; Brulle, “Institutionalizing Delay”; Dunlap and Brulle, Climate Change and Society; McCright and Dunlap, “Challenging Global Warming as a Social Problem”; McCright and Dunlap, “Social Movement Identity and Belief Systems.”

  7. Deen, “U.S. Lifestyle Is Not up for Negotiation”; “A Greener Bush.”

  8. Leiserowitz and Smith, “Knowledge of Climate Change across Global Warming’s Six Americas.”

  9. Antonio and Brulle, “The Unbearable Lightness of Politics.”

  10. Numbers, Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion, ch. 20.

  11. K. Miller, Only a Theory, p. 139. See also Miller, Finding Darwin’s God.

  12. Proctor, Value-Free Science?; Douglas, Science, Policy, and the Value-Free Ideal.

  13. Shapin, A Social History of Truth; Weber, “Science as a Vocation.”

  14. One example: Siegrist, Cvetkovich, and Gutscher, “Shared Values, Social Trust, and the Perception of Geographic Cancer Clusters.” This paper argues that a lack of trust in public health experts is one reason why people believe in cancer clusters even when they have been shown to be statistical clusters and not causally related.

  15. Merton, “Science and the Social Order,” p. 329. See also discussion in Dant, Knowledge, Ideology, Discourse, and Mazotti, Knowledge as Social Order.

  16. Daniels, “The Pure-Science Ideal and Democratic Culture”; Kevles, The Physicists; England, A Patron for Pure Science. The National Science Foundation’s Formative Years, 1945–57. NSF 82–24; Greenberg, Maddox, and Shapin, The Politics of Pure Science.

  17. Merton, “Science and the Social Order,” p. 328.

  18. Proctor, Value-Free Science?; Longino, The Fate of Knowledge; Douglas, Science, Policy, and the Value-Free Ideal.

  19. Heilbron, The Sun in the Church.

  20. Merton, Science, Technology & Society in Seventeenth-Century England.

  21. Oreskes, Science on a Mission.

  22. Oreskes and Krige, Science and Technology in the Global Cold War; Fleming, Fixing the Sky; Fleming, Meteorology in America, 1800–1870; Kohler, Partners in Science; H. S. Miller, Dollars for Research.

  23. Unless those values are informed by falsehoods. In fact, I would argue this for a good deal of climate change denial. Right-wing commentators like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and many members of the Cato Institute follow the arguments of Frederick von Hayek that social democracy inevitably leads toward totalitarianism. In the years since The Road to Serfdom was published, this claim has been shown to be untrue. See discussion in Collapse of Western Civilization. Similarly, many rural Americans dislike “big government” and the federal income tax because they think that the lion’s share of government programs support people in the inner city. In fact, studies show that, per capita, rural America is the disproportionate recipient of federal funds. See Reeder and Bagi, “Federal Funding in Rural America Goes Far Beyond Agriculture,” and Olson, “Study: Urban Tax Money Subsidizes Rural Counties.”

  24. In graduate school, I once asked my thesis advisor what pronoun I should use in writing a single-authored paper. He told me to avoid pronouns altogether and make the data the author: as in “the evidence suggests,” “the data indicate,” or the “results show”; to use the passive voice, “The ore deposit was produced by high-temperature fluids …”; or, when all else failed, to use the royal “we.” Nowadays most scientific papers are coauthored, so the “I” problem is obviated. But these patterns help to explain why passive voice is so common in scientific writing.

  25. Daston and Galison, Objectivity. This is related to the idea of the “view from nowhere.” The authorless paper is the ideal expression of objective knowledge.

  26. Correspondents pointed out the many biblical passages that note that only God knows when the end will come and it is presumptuous for ordinary men to suggest otherwise. See, for example, https://www.openbible.info/topics/when_the_world_will_end. Katherine Hayhoe points out that in 1 Thessalonians 4:9–12 and 2 Thessalonians 3:6–16, Paul addressed this exact point. “Many believe that some of the Thessalonians had stopped working because the end times were at hand. They might have felt that they were already living in God’s kingdom, and there was no need to work; or they might have felt that Jesus was coming at any minute, and thus there was no point to work. The Thessalonian letters do speak quite a bit about misunderstandings about the end times, and it is interesting that the passages about idleness in 1 Thessalonians 4:9–12 and 2 Thessalonians 3:6–16 both come in the context of teaching on the end times” (Hayhoe, email communication). Thus, even if the end is at hand, that is not justification for idleness or complacency. Another correspondent suggested to me that one might suggest to evangelical Christians that when Jesus arrives and finds the mess that we have made of his Father’s work, he won’t be happy! See also Mooney, “How to Convince Conservative Christians That Global Warming Is Real.”

  27. Dietz, “Bringing Values and Deliberation to Science Communication”; See also Fischhoff, “The Sciences of Science Communication”; National Academies of Sciences, Using Science to Improve Science Communication.

  28. Heather Douglas makes a similar argument, although on slightly different grounds. She argues that the value-free ideal is not only unattainable (with which I agree) but undesirable (with which I agree but for different reasons). Her reason is that science as an activity should not be value-neutral, because it should not stand apart from society. For science to be an appropriate part of democratic society, scientists “must consider the consequences of their work as part of a basic responsibility we all share.” From Douglas, Science, Policy, and the Value-Free Ideal, p. 15. I think that is probably correct, but my primary reason for rejecting value-neutrality is the argument here: that scientists-as individuals need to express and share their values to connect with our fellow citizens and build bonds of trust. My secondary reason is that we cannot be truly value-neutral (nor should we), so to claim that we are is to claim something that is impossible, which means either we are stupid, naïve, or lying, and that is no basis for building bonds of trust.

  29. See for example, “Shaping Tomorrow’s World: Our Values.” For a practical example of values bridging the trust gap between scientists and science skeptics, see Webb and Hayhoe, “Assessing the Influence of an Educational Presentation on Climate Change Beliefs at an Evangelical Christian College.”

  30. Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty; see also discussion in Baum and Nicols, Isaiah Berlin and the Politics of Freedom, p. 43. See also Abraham Lincoln: “We all declare for liberty, but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing.… The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty.”

  31. Prothero, Religious Literacy.

  32. Stern, Report on the Economics of Climate Change.

  33. See my introduction on page ix of the Melville Press edition of Pope Francis, Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality.

  34. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Global Warming of 1.5 °C.

  Chapter 3. The Epistemology of Frozen Peas: Innocence, Violence, and Everyday Trust in Twentieth-Century Science

  1. For a particularly chilling account of the people and processes involved in current approaches to science, see Daniel Engber’s detailed story about one-time Linus Pauling collaborator Art Robinson. Robinson has a scientific pedigree and a home laboratory. And he has played a key role in climate science skepticism. Engber, “The Grandfather of Alt-Science.”

  2. I recognize all the assumptions in the idea of an a priori relationship between science filtering “down” to become technology (or machinery), but I am using the assumptions because they are so widely shared. For a much more critical interrogation of the issue, see Pisano and Bussati, “Historical and Epistemological Reflections.”

  3. Several historians of technology, include Ruth Schwartz Cowan and Priscilla Brewer, hav
e looked thoughtfully at the uses and meanings of domestic technologies. They have not, however, emphasized the high scientific origins of stoves or vacuum cleaners. Rather, historians of technology have been interested in how users modify and make sense of technologies and technological change. See also Jane Busch’s fascinating 1983 paper about gas and electric cookers, though again, the focus is not on how scientific ideas mattered to the marketers and manufacturers of stoves.

  4. Engdahl and Lidskog, “Risk Communication and Trust,” have proposed that trust is not just rational/cognitive but also emotional, and current discussions on public trust “have a restricted rationalistic bias in which the cognitive-reflexive aspect of trust is emphasized at the expense of its emotional aspect,” p. 704. Their work is an effort to develop a theory of trust that addresses this emotional character.

  5. See for example Cartwright, Hunting Causes and Using Them: Approaches in Philosophy and Economics.

  6. Remember Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Thought.

  7. Wynne, Risk Management and Hazardous Wastes, emphasizes that trust is relational and that the emotional–rational dichotomy is fundamentally misleading when analyzing public trust in science.

  8. See Mitchell, Test Cases: Reconfiguring American Law, Technoscience and Democracy in the Nuclear Pacific.

  9. Crawford, “Internationalism in Science.”

  10. On ideas of purity and new forms of “scientism,” see Shapin, “The Virtue of Scientific Thinking.”

  11. http://www.vqronline.org/essay/technology-history-and-culture-appreciation-melvin-kranzberg.

  12. Wang, “Physics, Emotion, and the Scientific Self.”

  13. July 9, 1954, Ernest Pollard to Thomas E. Murray, Commissioner to the Atomic Energy Commission, copy to Smyth, in Henry DeWolf Smyth Papers, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia. Pollard was responding to Murray’s recent statement that scientists doing any kind of defense work had to guard against all associations with those who could be suspicious. Pollard viewed this as “impossible” for those teaching in a university, who might have no means of discerning the loyalties of their students. Pollard said such an expectation could cause many university scientists to cease defense work.