Why Democracies Need Science
Review by Bruce Lewenstein
Science deserves its special place at the public policy table not because of its findings, but because of its moral commitments to openness, expertise, observation, and a list of other norms.
Whether we are researchers or practitioners, we care about science communication for many reasons: practical, economic, cultural, and more. Virtually every list of reasons includes “democracy”. Science communication is fundamental to modern democracy, we say, because science is fundamental to so many decisions that need to be made in a democratic society. Moreover, the “norms” of science enumerated by the sociologist Robert Merton in the 1940s were explicitly intended to link science and democracy.
Yet as science communication moves away from a deficit “just-provide-information” model to a “dialogue” model, it runs into a fundamental truth: expertise and democracy are in tension. How can a democratic dialogue be truly two-sided when the very nature of science is that only some people know all the details, have the expertise? If we care about public communication of science and technology, we need to care about the relationship of science and democracy.
Collins, a sociologist of science, was one of the first to fully develop the idea of the social construction of scientific knowledge. Through case studies of (among other topics) parapsychology, the TEA laser, and especially gravity waves, he showed how various levels of social interaction are crucial to the production of reliable knowledge about the natural world. By the late 1980s, he was exploring issues of public communication, showing how television documentaries helped define the limits of certainty and uncertainty in scientific knowledge.
However, long before the era of “fake news”, Collins worried that our attention to the social forces shaping knowledge had distracted us from a key point: whatever the social process, science does work. The bulk of what scientists do creates reliable knowledge on which we can act, making both personal and political decisions. Whatever the value of “lay knowledge” is in addressing various environmental, health, and other issues, “expert knowledge” is still the base on which everything else builds. For more than 15 years, he and his colleague Robert Evans (also a sociologist) have been trying to redefine expertise in a way that both acknowledges the social construction of knowledge and protects the value of hard-won scientific expertise.
In this book, Collins and Evans argue that science deserves its special place at the public policy table not because of its findings, but because of its moral commitments to openness, expertise, observation, and a list of other norms. “Elective modernism”, as they call the choice to value science, does not (they say) preclude other values from being at the table — faith, political balance, etc. But if decisions are based on those other values, they say, those making the decisions must be explicit about rejecting the “elective modernism” value.
Collins and Evans acknowledge the place of values within science, as well. That has been well-established by the research tradition that Collins helped create — what they call Wave 2 of science and technology studies (STS). Wave 1 was the simplistic explanation of science as a special version of rationality that achieves ever closer approximations to truth. Now, in Wave 3, they want to return to a world where scientists try to avoid values, where the division between fact and values can continue to exist.
To manage the process of elective modernism, they would create a new institution, called Owls, for their ability to look in two diametrically opposed directions — towards facts and towards values. The Owls would be social scientists and reflective scientists, capable of understanding the multiple perspectives necessary to make scientific knowledge robust and inclusive in the ways that Wave 2 scholars have suggested is necessary. The Owls would tell policymakers what the current scientific consensus is for issues of public concern.
Collins and Evans have written a cri-de-coeur, accepting the empirical descriptive findings of Wave 2 STS about social construction, but horrified at the implications of questioning expertise. They create what they acknowledge is a normative statement about what should be. Unfortunately, in doing so, they reintroduce from Wave 1 the idealised visions of scientists being able to distinguish between facts and values, of politicians who will yield to scientific facts, and of scientific controversies capable of agreed-upon closure at least at a level sufficient for policy-making.
The authors claim that elective modernism is still compatible with all the findings of Wave 2 STS, just that it is willing to take a normative stand. But in my reading, elective modernism requires a level of distinction between fact and value, a self-reflective scientific practice, a personal disinterestedness, and an institutional flexibility that is directly contrary to what Wave 2 has shown us about how scientists (as opposed to science) acts. Collins and Evans yearn for an idealised scientific process that will produce, if not facts, at least reasonably uncontested conclusions in the policy realm. In doing so, I fear, they seek a world specifically rejected by their own earlier work.
Science and Democracy: Controversies and Conflicts
The collection edited by Italian philosophers Pierluigi Barrotta and Giovanni Scarafile brings together recent papers seeking to create philosophical understanding that explicitly addresses the role of science communication in the science/democracy tension. Cases range from the collapse of an Italian dam to the introduction of genetically modified crops in Hungary to the effect of claims of perpetual motion on an Israeli election. As with most collections, no single message emerges. But that in itself is telling: the idealised vision of science, democracy, and communication envisioned by Collins and Evans is so counter to reality as to be of little value for finding a way forward in balancing deficit and dialogue.
Bruce Lewestein is Professor of Science Communication in the Departments of Communication and of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University, USA, and a widely-published author on a large range of topics in science communication with a particular interest in the history of public communication of science. He is a former editor of Public Understanding of Science.
