Further disorientation in the hall of mirrors

1. Introduction

Public Understanding of Science has witnessed some radical changes in the object whose understanding, in one important new dimension – publics – the journal was founded to assist. Yet while publics have naturally gained copious attention, those transformations in ‘science’, and also the dense confusion of meanings given to it, remain neglected. It remains puzzling to me, how we can aim seriously to make sense of publics in responding to ‘science’, if we neglect to examine what it is that those publics experience – epistemically, materially, normatively, and institutionally – in its ambiguous and changing name. Unable to do this problem full justice here, I attempt to delineate some of its neglected manifestations over the period before and during the journal’s life, and to indicate some ways of addressing it. However, perhaps the crucial point, consistent with my opening remark above, is that better research alone will not make inroads into the problem, until this could resonate with a science which is peopled with leaders and coal-face workers also trained to be reflective about science’s own human and social dimensions, including about how it imagines and attempts to form its publics. This is about more than scholarly research and dissemination themselves, but includes the politics and political economy of science in all its forms.

This journal was largely inspired in the 1980s, through the anxious international reactions of institutions, patrons and beneficiaries of science to emergent public movements that had begun questioning the radical programmes of innovation with momentous social consequences developed in the post-war years. ¹ Notably, their political and scientific promoters identified these political programmes with ‘science’, embodying and enacting inflated scientific presumptions and promises of control, and of spectacular resultant societal transformations. ‘Science’ was rigidly identified with those technological innovation mega-programmes, in military power, nuclear energy, ionising radiation uses, climate modification, chemicals, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, industrial food, and more. This was an idolatrous attribution of self-unfolding deterministic power to ‘science’ – of alleged necessity, not choice – perhaps partly as attempted self-reassurance in face of science’s centrality in the 1950s cold-war security paradigm of annihilation for all, when prototype nuclear fusion bomb-testing terrified even the scientists involved (Weart, 1988).

Across the industrial world, ‘Science’ was soon justifying what were huge normative social interventions, promises and ambitions. Crucially no qualms appeared to exist – then, and now –about trading for public authority on the starkly contradictory self-image of this ‘science’ as only modestly self-sceptical, utterly disinterested research. Well before the London Royal Society’s (1985) report on the Public Understanding of Science, which led to the inaugural UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Research Programme of the same name in 1988, then to the journal in 1992, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) had established its own Public Understanding of Science programme in 1958, and in 1976 its programmes on Science for Citizens, and on Ethics and Values in Science and Technology, EVIST. Richard Atkinson, then NSF Director, acknowledged that those US initiatives also reflected insecurities amongst scientific bodies about public trust in science as chief proponent of what was then a historically unprecedented scale and ambition of technological-‘scientific’ interventions in society (Atkinson, 1978). These have only continued to intensify, yet Atkinson’s tentative attempt to open a serious public agenda concerning science has been left neglected.

2. The deficit model fallacies – who defines public meanings?

The increasingly mobilised, informed, and effective public questioning of those unbounded normative commitments presented as innocent ‘Science’ – by scientific leaders as much as by others, we should note – was mistaken by institutional scientists to be public refusal or misunderstanding of science itself. This itself betrayed the problematic scientistic (Cameron and Edge, 1982) presumption, projected onto society, that science has natural sovereignty over public meanings.

I suggest that the post-war identification of those hugely ambitious promissory technological and political programmes with the imagined virtue and supra-human autonomy of ‘Science’, with the denial of any such normative dimensions of the science which was thus experienced in public domains, encouraged a particular development in science–society relations which has been largely unnoticed, and unaddressed, amidst all the noise of controversy, misunderstanding, uncertainty, and accusation which has beset many (but by no means all) technoscientific innovations over recent decades. This is the way in which science’s classical proper role (in addition to assisting innovation), of informing policy and public debate, has been quietly extended into something different.

After seamlessly extending from informing policy, to justifying resultant political commitments, science now plays a further role – with no debate over its rights, wrongs, or conditions – as de facto author of public meanings, thus also of proper public concerns. The confusion, indeed sometimes denial, within science itself about both these important distinctions has also not been examined. It needs to be. It connects with the deeply problematic presumption which many scientific spokespersons and their policy counterparts seem to have, that scientific meanings themselves, as given to public objects like ‘risk’, are also just facts, which therefore have natural proper authority over those of non-experts. To question this, as I do, is not to oppose the legitimate, if always questionable, authority of relevant scientific experts over relevant propositional questions in their field.

I describe below one typical recent manifestation of this moral fallacy on the part of scientific spokespersons and the interests they represent. However, I suggest, and provide illustrative evidence, that such specific fundamentalism over the proper extent and conditions of public scientific authority is not an isolated case, but has instead become normal institutional culture, in policy, science, commerce, and media.

Over 20 years of hindsight now allows us to see that this scientistic presumption was also what generated and has sustained the favourite ‘public deficit model’ explanations of public dissent which scientific bodies articulated, and continue to perpetrate. These were criticised (Wynne, 1991; Irwin and Wynne, 1996), sometimes overtly abandoned by scientific authorities (e.g., May, 2000; UK House of Lords, 2000) – but then were continually reinvented in new forms, despite their stated abandonment. As only later became clear to bemused observer-participants like myself (Wynne, 2006), this seemingly self-contradictory institutional scientific behaviour could be explained once that dogmatic, anti-democratic political presumption by scientific leaders, slavishly reproduced by media and policy actors, that public meanings are properly defined by science, was understood. After all, if public meanings are or should be naturally science-framed, then how can public dissent from ‘scientific’ assertions (but these embodying their unacknowledged normative commitments) be anything but misunderstanding, or rejection, of science? The continual return to what became a veritable medley of deficit model explanations of public dissent (Wynne, 2006) originates in that deeper implicit scientistic dogma over what ‘the public issue’ is, or should be. This cannot be countered with evidence, as I and colleagues earlier naively assumed, and attempted.

3. Hermeneutic imperialism: Scientific and public meanings

This same authoritarian scientistic politics is evident in current repetitions of 1990s science wars fundamentalism. One such current warrior (Kuntz, 2012), in the prestigious journal of the European Molecular Biology Organisation, railed against “The post-modern assault on science”, choosing two of my own co-authored STS papers, one on climate science and uncertainties (Shackley and Wynne, 1996), another a critical analysis of the European Commission’s way of using ‘science’ in attempting since 2010 (and so-far failing) to establish legislation for an EU member-states ‘free-for-all’ on GM crops cultivation in their own territories (Wickson and Wynne, 2012), as examples of this so-called assault, by ‘post-modernist’ STS (a perspective I have never accepted, insofar as I ever understood it). Amongst several misunderstandings, Kuntz repeats apparently in ignorance the central fallacy of the 1990s Science Wars attacks on STS – “if all truths are equal, who cares what science has to say?” is his subtitle – that social analysis of scientific knowledge is automatically anti-realist, and a licence for ‘believe what you like’. I (and my co-authors) have never believed that, nor do we suggest it in the articles. Kuntz evidently cannot understand what STS scholars including myself have explained, that social explanation of scientific knowledge has always perfectly well accommodated the organised and highly varied, always situated, social practices of disciplined observation of nature’s processes, without thereby debunking its reference to nature. He shows no awareness of earlier (nor more recent: Bloor, 2008) refutations of those false premises of such fundamentalist scientism articulated in late 20th century versions of an apparently continuing syndrome of scientific culture, such as the 1990s ‘Science Wars’ attacks of Gross and Levitt (1994) and others on STS (Barnes and Bloor, 1982; Collins, 1981; Jasanoff, 1999; Lynch, 1996, 2004; Wynne, 1996). ²

Locked within such a brittle science-centred hermeneutic dogma, Kuntz commits the further fallacy, that critically questioning, as Wickson and Wynne (2012) do, how genetically modified (GM) risk assessment science is socially framed but then represented as ‘only nature’, is asserting, contrary to official science, that GM crops/foods are unsafe! This is the deficit model’s false premise again, as explained above. Our point about scientists’ manipulation of meanings of ‘science’ is reduced to, and misrepresented as, a substantive counter-scientific claim! Our point that an unaccountable political shaping of public policy meaning is misrepresented as a natural, scientifically declared public meaning, is thus erased. Challenges – whether ours as analysts, or those of publics – to the presumption that scientific meanings should automatically predominate as public meaning, are to this worldview apparently as illegitimate as (indeed identical to) challenges to dominant facts.

Kuntz’s individual misrepresentation of our position sadly reflects a more general culture, indicated by a similar misunderstanding in the dismissive response to Wickson and Wynne (2012) by a group of (unannounced) scientists from the European Food Safety Authority’s GM scientific advisory panel (Perry et al., 2012; Wynne and Wickson, 2012). This reflects the same basic scientism dogma which I identified before as origin of the repeatedly falsified but reinvented public deficit model. This institutionalised scientific misunderstanding dogmatically asserts that public concerns over such technoscientific innovations as GM crops can only be about the ‘science’ as defined by those institutions, that is, the (institutionally recognised) scientific propositions about the risks. From this premise, any other concerns are illegitimate ‘hidden interests’, and ‘anti-scientific’ as they do not accord science with automatic authority over public meanings as does Kuntz, but also, more important, as do mainstream institutional scientific authorities (and their uncritical media repetition). Thus as further illustration beyond EFSA’s GMO expert panel (the EU’s official scientific authority), the President of the London Royal Society (Nurse, 2011), and the then UK Government Chief Scientist (Beddington, 2011), not to mention the EU’s Chief Scientific Adviser (Glover, 2013), and key EU scientific regulatory authorities, are given mainstream media attention as well as political privilege for their repetition of just such deeply political scientistic fallacies.

It is an interesting question, beyond the scope of this set of reflections, as to the international validity or variability of the condition of science as political culture which I have lamented here. The examples I have mainly used might suggest a specifically UK or perhaps EU character to this, as also extensively analysed by the Europe-wide STS working group report on Science and Governance (Felt and Wynne, 2007). ³ The same fundamental issues can also be recognised as international ones in global science and policy on climate change (Hulme, 2009; Wynne, 2010).

In this, science (with its backgrounded normative choices) is not only given pre-emptive authority over public meanings and concerns, as when it is asserted on scientific authority that public concerns over new technologies, their political-economic drivers and effects as well as their weak ‘scientific’ regulation and the denial of scientific lack of predictive control, are only concerns about health risks, on which scientific authorities have exclusive voice. In addition, these scientifically clothed normative impositions extend to the scientifically imagined and declared social benefits of the risk-bearing technologies in question (e.g., Burke, 2004), which also become ‘public facts’, whose disputation is ‘anti-science’.

In these multiple ways the authority of science is seamlessly, silently and illegitimately extended over such democratically debatable questions. Science’s own specialist local meanings, authoritative as they may or may not be over such specialist questions as health risks (which themselves need to be subjected to properly independent scientific processes), need to be further questioned and negotiated when these parochial meanings are extended into public arenas as if they have exclusive sovereignty.

This emphasis on the question of public meanings has two distinct if interconnected aspects. One is a research and proposed policy focus: how do we understand what different public groups mean? The other asks: how are collective meanings constructed as representative meanings, in the public sphere? This was why I called our successful bid for funding under the UK ESRC’s first (1988) research programme in Public Understanding of Science, “Public Interpretations of Science and Technology – PISTE”.

On twenty or more years’ reflection, the larger importance of this specific move to problematise questions of (collective) meanings was probably unclear for me, maybe more intuitive, at that time. ⁴ That original interpretive emphasis, on public meanings as a question, has only grown in importance, if still unrecognised. De facto political-economic as well as scientific ‘advisory’ reflexes have been to presume that key public issues such as anthropogenic climate change, or sustainable global food security and the role of GM agricultural technologies, are scientific issues only – either as risk issues, or as with food security or energy, as production-supply-innovation issues only (and then only selective, big-corporate controlled forms of production). Yet they also embody much larger political-economic and human questions and concerns, including about how (i) scientific research and innovation, as well as (ii) scientific advice to policy, is selectively conducted and controlled. Therefore these are not ‘scientific issues’, if the phrase means (as it should) questions which specialist scientists can properly address. Instead they are public issues involving science. ⁵ The (scientistic) confusion which prevails here, allows scientists (often silently on behalf of patrons and other powers) to exercise pre-emptive sovereignty over questions that are deeply political.

As philosophers have underlined (Arendt, 2005; Lacey, 2005), democratic public meanings for such public issues, much as they need to be informed by relevant independent science, should not be subordinated to scientific definitions. Not surprisingly, the unaccountable normative commitments articulated through science often further the also-unaccountable interests of science’s commercial and political patrons. Lack of serious attention to this political problem of scientism has been a continuing failure since before the birth of this journal, not only from scientific institutions in public policy arenas. However, it has since become all the more important, in proportion to the growth of commercial cultures in science, and of those commercial-scientific cultures in public life (Mirowski, 2011; Rudy et al., 2007). These deeper shifts in the political economy and political culture of science need to be more thoroughly addressed by academic research with publics of ‘science’, as well as by public policy itself. This leads to an important further blind-spot created by the systematic problematisation of publics, but not of science. This blindness is about silently suppressed potential avenues of alternative R&D, and innovation.

4. Scientism as tacit political economy of innovation

The Royal Society and its now-disbanded promotional institution COPUS, the Committee on the Public Understanding of Science, chaired by the chair of the Royal Society’s (1985) PUS Report working group, eminent geneticist Sir Walter Bodmer, seamlessly defined public understanding of science with public compliance with those normative choices woven into ‘science’. Not only this, but it systematically deflected questions about the institutional interrelations which entrenched those normative choices, by systematically misinterpreting the prevailing social scientific work in PUS. For example, the general insight from the first 1988 ESRC programme (Irwin and Wynne, 1996; Wynne, 1991), that public concerns about science, discriminating as they were, included the institutional organisation and control of scientific research and advice. COPUS (1992: 3) represented those findings as follows:

Many individuals and organisations outside the scientific community believe that the attitudes and behaviour of scientists in the past have alienated a large sector of society. COPUS recognizes this and realizes that it must change scientists’ perception of the need for a greater public understanding of science … [and] increase significantly their involvement in improving public understanding. (original emphasis)

This bowdlerised the social scientific insights as communicated in the 1991 special issue of Science, Technology, and Human Values, into something which, to paraphrase, appeared as exclusively a matter of ‘the public’s wish for more communication from scientists; and the need to persuade scientists of this’ – as if it were only this scientific reluctance to communicate with publics which was causing whatever public alienation from science there may be. This also pre-emptively eradicated institutional reflexivity issues (Wynne, 1993), and silenced legitimate public questions about the forces controlling science, by translation into exclusively matters of individual scientists’ motivations (see also Welsh and Wynne, 2013).

One of the typical questions that publics are found to have about science, is about the innovations and interventions it promotes – ‘why this trajectory and not others?’ is one such question, about science’s institutional control and ownership. This arose also in the UK BBSRC’s (2010) synthetic biology public dialogue. While to their credit, research councils in the UK and internationally have developed valuable practical processes of public responsiveness (Chilvers and Macnaghten, 2011; Doubleday and Wynne, 2010), they have faced an uphill struggle against the entrenched institutional culture of scientism I refer to above. This culture, intensified by political-economic forces, also erases this major issue from debate in science, policy, and media domains. It has produced a political economy of lock-in to questionable hegemonic innovation trajectories, in agriculture (van Loqueren and Baret, 2009; Quist et al., 2013), energy, and other key global domains (Leach et al., 2010), again by rigid definition of the established dominant trajectory as ‘scientific’, alternative innovation trajectories being dismissed as unscientific and unviable without even having been properly researched and tested (e.g., Lacey, 2005).

The PUS field’s neglect of the systematic problematisation of science, when this is an essential element of understanding publics in relation to science, is not just an omission. It also undermines its capacity to fulfil its central task, of understanding those publics themselves. The political economy of innovation outlined above is one such important domain where ‘publics’, their concerns, meanings, questions, and emergent needs, cannot be understood in a thoroughly mature and informed political sense, when systematic distortions of potential innovation forms and directions are being – inadvertently – sustained by redefining public concerns over such matters as illegitimate ‘misunderstandings’.

Though these kinds of question about ‘science’ were posed right at the outset of PUS, indeed beforehand, and have been asked in different ways ever since, they have still not gained purchase in science itself, in policy, nor in other practical ways, including, significantly, in science media circles. Indeed quite the opposite seems to be occurring. Thus a Nature (2012) editorial asserted that the proper relationship of publics and their representatives to science and policy is one of “appropriate awe”, a form of idolatry which resonates with 1950s nuclear cultivation of public awe (Welsh and Wynne, 2013; Wynne, 1982, 2011). Thus a relationship in which mutual respect would be earned, and monitored, has instead become, as a normative assertion from serious scientific circles, something close to abject servility.

5. Escaping scientism’s traps?

The idolatrous tendencies to scientism which I have described and challenged here are not only failings of natural science when seen as public authority. We should also look closer to home. John Durant’s inaugural editorial proposed a typically articulate account of the needs which the journal could meet, and of its capacious future agenda. However, the need for social sciences and humanities to question the meanings and material forms of technoscience as symbolic action with political-cultural dimensions, and how these are articulated with respect to publics, and vice versa, was an important lacuna. This itself reflected a continuing problem, that mainstream social sciences remain confined within the metaphysics which STS in its earliest formulations as sociology of scientific knowledge had already abandoned. ⁶ Thus work in the journal has productively questioned ‘publics’, but markedly less so the ‘science’ which is supposed to be the object of their meanings, and which lays down the larger historical frames of their material experiences and formations as publics (Latour, 2010; Latour and Weibel, 2005).

All the uneven and sometimes wayward adventures in public engagement and dialogue over the last decade or more have generated some occasional revision of the original assumption that ‘public understanding of science’ meant only successful public assimilation and reproduction of scientific understanding of its own objects – electrons, isotopes, ionising radiation, bosons, genes, transgenes, or ‘risks’ (Wynne, 1992). Even this apparently unproblematic (for science) original PUS agenda, inadequate as it already was, generated further problems when it encountered the practical political falsification of these authoritarian premises concerning the proper authorship of public meanings, but sadly it seems beyond our self-proclaimed rational science-informed society to learn from these mistakes. We have already wasted about twenty-five years, and counting.

Intellectually, such political differences and their misunderstanding have turned on the scientific assumption that a scientifically defined object, like ‘risk’, carries a natural meaning, rather than a socially constructed one. Yet social construction of scientific risk, for example, does not mean that such construction is not interested in real processes bearing on possible harms; nor that, as in the infantile caricature, we can believe anything we like about those risks. Social actors are interested in knowledge which works; but of course, what ‘works’ (for whose purposes?) needs open democratic debate, and this renders ‘science’ and its driving assumptions also open to broader debate. Returning to the scientific object, it means that the definition of the object – say, risk (but we could also say, ‘gene’, for example) – reflects social selection of which aspects of a far bigger object-reality are deemed relevant, and tractable – and which ones irrelevant. These judgements legitimately differ, according to what purposes are invested in explanation, and knowledge. The typical idea that it is only pure curiosity which rules here is laughable. Constructivism is about understanding much more complex, always-emergent realities and their meanings, including scientific ones (Oyama, 2000), not about claiming reality does not matter, nor even exist.

I hope that over the next twenty years, the journal could build on its previous path-finding achievements by encouraging sustained critical attention to unearthing and clarifying, thus in hope dissolving, the continuing public mystifications which science as authority articulates, mediates, and cultivates, while denying its role in them. This is where the ideological roles of science as public authority discourse interweave with the political-economic forces which shape not only those discourses but the material forms of innovation, society, and culture which undermine the rational exploration of sustainable and just alternative trajectories of knowledge, relationships, and practices. I have been tempted to define this historical process as one of ‘public disorientation by’, not ‘public understanding of’, science.

A parting suggestion is also that public – government – science, could explicitly disavow the ideology of determinism which remains a key obstruction to diverse, distributed, direction-sensitive, and accountable technoscientific R&D and innovation. The political-economic forces of lock-in which narrow and reduce the potential social benefits of scientific knowledge-development suppress the versatility of science, were it properly open (Leach et al., 2010), for producing diverse alternatives. These anti-scientific forces are perversely claiming the terrain and voice of science, protected by the culture of scientism. A science struggling to achieve autonomy from such forces would be one which could develop a more socially attuned and appreciated science than the mainly tortured and alienated, not to mention alienating, science of today.