Abstract
The “post-fact society” in which we now live raises powerful questions for scholarly communities that have spent the last several decades examining the social construction of knowledge and “deconstructing” knowledge claims and knowledge institutions. Nowhere has soul-searching been more widespread than in science and technology studies (STS), a field where some have prized epistemological relativism and others have systematically critiqued the blind acceptance of expertise and argued for the democratization of science. How can we and should we balance critique of, support for, and use of science?
Enter Harry Collins and Robert Evans. Collins was once a self-described philosophical relativist. Today, he and Evans argue in their new book, Why Democracies Need Science, that we must seek to rigidly separate science and politics (a claim many in STS asserted for a half-century was impossible) and that we should aspire to realize the Mertonian norms of science—a desire that many STS scholars in the post-Mertonian era would view as naïve.
The core of Collins and Evans’s book is an argument for how to think about the relationship between science and democracy. The authors contend that science is a moral institution and that what makes science different from other “forms of life” is its aspirations and intentions. Science, according to Collins and Evans, “is driven by the desire to find the truth of the matter, along with the belief that the truth of the matter can be found” (p. 40). Science is not about getting to ultimate truth, but aspiring to do so. Along related lines, Collins and Evans say, scientists (and STS scholars) may recognize that no effort at falsification (à la Karl Popper) is “completely secure” but still aspire to falsify and to structure research to be plausibly falsifiable. Finally, Mertonian norms of science (communism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism) are good in and of themselves, whether or not they are socially efficacious; and these and the other broad aspirations (e.g., honesty and integrity, clarity, generality) provide the basis for science’s moral leadership.
With Merton, Collins and Evans believe that science needs democratic states and societies to thrive. Science can only be effectively practiced in an environment of freedom and openness. And science has a place in policy-making in democratic polities. The findings from research undertaken in an environment underpinned by the formative aspirations of science can inform debates about policy, and social scientists can provide citizens and policy-makers with an understanding of the extent of scientific consensus on issues of crucial public interest. Inevitably, social values will shape public policy, as Collins and Evans recognize, but not independent of scientific findings about which there is relatively unambiguous consensus.
While it seems likely that most STS scholars share Collins and Evans’s distress about the threats to science and truth we currently face, the authors’ oversimplifications make their normative arguments seem too easy and their overall claims less effective than they could be. By focusing on aspirations, Collins and Evans seem to feel justified in making only passing reference to the complexities of science and politics in the world in which we live. Aspirational notions of science and politics might allow us to imagine that science is the realm of fact and politics is the environment of values. But this perspective leads us to ignore, for example, that choices of acceptable p-values, preference for type I over type II errors, and accepting reductionist-centered methods over complexity-driven approaches are all matters of values. Similarly, focusing on aspirations likely will lead us to devote insufficient time to analyzing how power asymmetries in laboratory environments affect research findings or how assumptions about gender affect the metaphors that guide analyses in some areas of science. In short, our aspirations notwithstanding, facts and values and politics and science are not easily separated; and attending to and understanding the nuances of blurred boundaries between science and politics are crucial to moving beyond the current “post-fact” moment.
This leads to a second oversimplification that troubles me. In what seems like an effort to end up on the “right side” of epistemic debates (the side viewed as common sense among scientists), Collins and Evans lump all social studies of science together (or at least ignore the vast range of work that never engaged in debates around epistemological relativism). Their characterization of what they term the second wave in science and technology studies (the social constructivist trend that displaced a Mertonian orientation as the favored approach to STS) ignores scholarship that clearly documents how the social organization of science affects the questions that are asked and what we ultimately know and do not (e.g., Kloppenburg 2005; Frickel and Vincent 2007; Wynne 1996). To my mind, this is among the most valuable scholarship to come out of STS over the last two decades or more and is crucially necessary to realizing Collins and Evans’s aspirational goals.
With Collins and Evans, I worry deeply about our post-truth public sphere, and I admire (and we depend on) the truth-seeking goals of science. However, I don’t believe outlines of an expanded, enriched, and rehabilitated Mertonianism (as valuable as Merton’s work remains) will allow us to get to a policy environment in which scientific findings are treated as more than “mere opinion.” Instead, we need to promote a progressive science education (e.g., Feinstein, Allen, and Jenkins 2013) that includes learning about how science “really” works and how science always and inevitably embodies values. We should encourage renderings of scientific findings that are realistic and not overhyped, and we will continue to benefit from systematic analyses of the factors that shape the institutions and practices of science (e.g., Frickel and Moore 2006). Together, efforts on these fronts will improve social understandings of “why democracies need science” and how science can allow us to confront the largest challenges we face.