What we’re now experiencing is not, I suggest, a Truth Crisis or even a Scientific Authority Crisis. The problems we are confronting are real but they are quite specific. Reflect back on the problems introduced at the outset. I’ve asked many people over the past months about the Crisis of Truth. They seemed to know what I meant and they agreed that there was such a Crisis. But, when asked to provide examples, practically all of them mentioned the same three instances — climate change denial, anti-vaccine sentiment, and various forms of anti-evolutionary thought. There’s no denying their importance. Material consequences follow from belief or disbelief in anthropogenic climate change or the safety of vaccines, but, although it’s depressing that anti-evolutionary attitudes are so widely distributed, it’s not evident that much of practical significance — beyond what’s taught in schools — flows from skepticism about Darwinism. [...]
Those who offer More Science in the curriculum and in the media as solutions of the Truth Crisis tend to equate science with accomplished science, textbook science, secure scientific facts and well-supported theories. A public better educated in these things will, it’s presumed, be better able to sort out reliable science from junk, pseudoscience, errors, and lies. But recall the shortlist of wrongly challenged knowledge that, on reflection, actually constitutes the alleged scientific Crisis of Truth. Evolution by natural selection is disputed in part because it opposes cherished articles of faith in strands of fundamentalist religion; vaccine safety is disputed in part because parents are desperately concerned to avoid risk to the health of their kids; human-caused climate change is disputed in part because, if it’s the case, people may have to ride a bike, eat less meat, and bring reusable bags to do their shopping. To put it in the blandest terms: disputed science is science that seems worth dispute. In the 17th century, Thomas Hobbes noted, and accounted for, a crucial difference between geometry and ethics — the deliverances of the latter are endemically subject to dispute, those of the former almost never: [...]
The problem we confront is better described not as too little science in public culture but as too much. Given the absurdities and errors abroad in the land, it may seem crazy to say this, yet the point can be pressed. Consider, again, the climate change deniers, the anti-vaxxers, and the creationists. They’re wrong-headed of course, but, like the Moon-landing deniers and the Flat-Earthers, their rejection of Right Thinking is not delivered as anti-science. Instead, it comes garnished with the supposed facts, theories, approved methods, and postures of objectivity and disinterestedness associated with genuine science. Wrong-headedness often advertises its embrace of officially cherished scientific values — skepticism, disinterestedness, universalism, the distinction between secure facts and provisional theories — and frequently does so more vigorously than the science rejected. The deniers’ notion of science sometimes seems, so to speak, hyperscientific, more royalist than the king. And, if you want examples of hyperscientific tendencies in so-called pseudoscience, there are now sensitive studies of the biblical astronomy craze instigated in the 1950s by the psychiatrist Immanuel Velikovsky, or you can consider the meticulous methodological attentiveness of parapsychology, or you can reflect on why it might be that students of the human sciences are deluged with lessons on The Scientific Method while chemists and geologists are typically content with mastering just the various methods of their specialties. The Truth-Deniers find scientific facts and theories shamefully ignored by the elites; they embrace conceptions of a coherent, stable, and effective Scientific Method that the elites are said to violate; they insist on the necessity of radical scientific skepticism, universal replication, and openness to alternative views that the elites contravene. On those criteria, who’s really anti-scientific? Who are the real Truth-Deniers? [...]
Rather, a difference between the two — and a consideration pertinent to links between expert Truth and political consequences — isn’t knowing science but knowing where science lives: who to recognize as knowledgeable and reliable; who to trust; which institutions to consider as the homes of genuine knowledge. Knowing this sort of thing — call it a kind of social knowledge — is a different matter than knowing the laws of motion, the nucleotide makeup of DNA, or the statistical means of determining global temperature and establishing its rate of change. This type of knowledge involves rightly knowing the scientific reputation of institutions; rightly knowing the integrity of those who testify to those reputations; rightly knowing the ascribed virtues and vices of the institutions and their procedures; and even rightly knowing the personal characteristics and material interests of the spokespersons for these institutions and those who testify to their qualities. It involves knowing whose opinion to take, and to take seriously, about matters of which you happen to be ignorant. That sort of knowledge isn’t technical, and people might say that it isn’t scientific, or even that it isn’t really knowledge — but almost all of the technical knowledge that we have is held on that basis. In the distant past, I did advanced scientific work (in genetics, as it happens), but — and I speak here just for myself — everything that I know about climate change, including my knowing that Trump is wrong, is held courtesy of this social knowledge. Being a knowledgeable person may mean knowing a lot of stuff, but it certainly means knowing who knows and who does not know.
No comments:
Post a Comment