In science communication,why does the idea of a public deficit always return? The eternal recurrence of the public deficit

The persistence of the rejected model and the schism that it feeds

In January 2007, an editorial comment in this journal celebrated the evolution of Public Understanding of Science (PUS) studies, finally released from the ‘oppressive burden of a label’ that had constrained them for years: ‘We have clearly moved from the old days of the deficit frame’ stated Einsiedel (2007: 5). Her confidence in the obsolescence of the original research programme is currently a widespread attitude in the field, now committed to explore less straightforward paths of the dissemination and social appropriation of scientific ideas. Through these changes, the deficit model was to be buried without grief, leaving behind the hindrance of the once hegemonic approach.

However, this perception is not unanimous. With nuances, Trench (2008), Bauer et al. (2007) and Wynne (2006) hold that, in most cases, the shift was more nominal than effective; others have alleged that different perspectives on scientific culture and science communication coexist, each defining its main problems and solutions (Burns et al., 2003; Sturgis and Allum, 2004). This call to critically reflect on ‘Why does the idea of a public deficit always return?’ is, thus, appropriate to tackle the current state of the art in a field whose founder view seems to resist all kinds of rejections. On the one hand, the deficit model is still a common topic in several epistemological, theoretical and methodological analyses, even if they aim to point out its shortcomings; on the other, an overview of empirical studies also shows many works that continue to ascribe the problem of the perception of and attitudes towards science to the laypeople’s (low) level of knowledge. Finally, the literacy goals fostered by the model still underlie a great deal of the strategies directed to close the gap – especially those encouraged by public policies (Cortassa and Polino, 2015). Despite the decline of its influence, to sing a requiem for the notion sounds, at least, too hasty.

Set out in the first part of this essay, the simplest explanation for the persistence of the deficit model is that it represents an intuitive and reassuring mode to conceive the barriers that hinder science-society encounters. By isolating the impediment to be targeted, it supports a variety of practices devoted to improve the relationships between scientists and the public. However, to more deeply dig at the issue allows for an alternative interpretation. In the second part, it will be argued that, today, one of the major constraints for the field of PUS derives from an insistence on attaching to the deficit notion the characteristic of a problem – practical or theoretical – pointlessly prolonging the debates around it. My proposal, based in specific approaches to social epistemology, aims to understand the dissemination and collective appropriation of knowledge on the basis of cognitive asymmetry among agents and not against it, considering it as an assumption instead as the obstacle to be overcome.

Comfort and uneasiness with the deficit

The first survey on science perception in the United States (Davis, 1958 (for the National Association of Scientific Writers (NASW))) outlined dimensions that would later become the hard core of the quantitative tradition in the field of PUS: levels of interest and information; information sources; understanding of scientific facts, methods and process; attitudes towards science and images of scientists. Since the mid-twentieth century, interest, knowledge and attitudes built the frame that accompanied the evolution of these kinds of studies. However, the NASW survey’s heritage was not only to set forth the relevant aspects for further research. Even more importantly, its results led to the drawing of an inference about a linear correlation between the cognitive and attitudinal indicators. ¹ The strong premise of the programme had been posed and the next movement went deeper: it went from confirming an empirical association to holding the almost causal role of the former on the latter. That was the beginning of everything. Heavily influenced in its origins by the deficit model, ² the quantitative tradition expanded among national and international contexts promoted a standard measure of scientific literacy based on two dimensions – the knowledge of basic scientific terms and concepts and of the process and methods of research – that soon became paradigmatic (Durant et al., 1992; Miller, 1998).

If the dependence of attitudes on knowledge suggested by the early studies was true, the solution would be arduous but simple: to educate the public would improve their appreciation and diminish their reticence, and hence, a greater level of commitment to scientific and technological development could be expected. As a result, a large amount of funding and efforts were allocated to promote scientific literacy through educational reforms and the boost of massive popularization (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1993; Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1993; Rutherford and Ahlgren, 1991; The Royal Society, 1985).

To frame the problem in terms of a cognitive deficit seems an intuitive and optimistic way to conceive the scenario. In the same way that a temporary budgetary shortfall can be overcome by implementing the right policies, to circumscribe the gap between people and science to the difficulties of the former to understand the latter allows one to suppose that the situation can be resolved using the appropriate mechanisms. Once the starting status of ignorance has been established, the task is to apply the correctives needed – to inject cognitive resources – periodically assessing progress until the pursued levels of literacy are achieved. This therapeutic view assumes that to bridge the gap is sufficient to address the shortcomings of knowledge that people suffer, rescuing them from obscurantism.

Although this may sound simple, the limitations of the approach soon became evident. The encouraging interpretation promptly collided with many surveys’ results that tended to refute it, raising a growing feeling of frustration (Miller, 2001, 2004). On the one hand, the cognitive deficit remained unbeatable, resisting every course of action based on the comforting linear hypothesis. On the other, a growing body of empirical evidence contradicted the alleged positive correlation between the people’s scientific literacy and their appraisal of science. Either at small-scale studies (Evans and Durant, 1995) or at extended ones (Durant et al., 2000), the data showed uniformly that there was nothing like a uniform sense in the relation between the cognitive and attitudinal dimensions of public perception. Sometimes they are positive, sometimes they are not. Those who are better informed about nuclear issues can be more supportive of an energy policy based on it, but others just a little less aware can be their fiercest opponents (Peters, 2000).

Contrary to what St Catherine of Siena claimed, it is not always true that those who know more love more.

The holistic critic: ethnographic-contextual studies

Under the influence of Social Studies of Science, a set of perspectives broadly known as the ‘ethnographic turn’ (Irwin and Michael, 2003) or the ‘contextual approach’ (Miller, 2001) came to refresh and nourish the agenda of PUS scholarship during the 1990s. Among others, the works of Wynne (1991, 1992, 1995), Shapin (1992), Michael (1992) or Epstein (1996) posed an all-encompassing challenge towards the heuristic value of the deficit-based programme, ³ calling into question its capacity to address the complexities of the science and society relationships. Given the labile nature of the boundaries between scientific and lay knowledge, the generic categories of expert and layperson were to be re-examined as well as the cognitive-oriented idea of understanding. Not even the notion of science could remain out of discussion.

Along these lines, the ethnographic-contextual approaches maintain that the public’s (il)literacy is insufficient or even irrelevant to explain their interactions with scientists because specialized knowledge is not the only knowledge nor in principle the most valuable at play. Instead of being regarded as passive recipients, people should be seen as fully competent agents who assume an active role in the relationship relying on their own expertise, skills, values and criteria. The new programme introduces a different way to analyse the rationality of public attitudes, whose scope cannot be restricted to a cognitive dimension (Wynne, 1991: 116).

The 3D model – of dialogue, discussion and debate (Miller, 2001) – provides the basis for much of the ongoing work in PUS, having largely exceeded the previous attention devoted to the triad of interests, knowledge and attitudes not only among researchers and practitioners but also among policymakers. ⁴ The high degree of consensus achieved by the ethnographic-contextual perspective allows the explanation of why the deficit idea has become practically a stigma. However, even though objections are not frequent – as is usual in the case of progressive research programmes – there is not complete absence of dissenting voices. Lewenstein (2003), for instance, argues that the vindication of the agent’s and communities’ knowledges – in an attempt to strengthen them against the overwhelming potential of science – has led to raise popular expertise at the expense of almost discarding science. In this sense, I believe it is worthwhile to recall an early warning – to which I shall return later:

We do not want a public understanding of science political correctness in which the very idea that scientists are more knowledgeable than ordinary citizens is taboo. Scientists and lay people are not on the same footing where scientific information is concerned, and knowledge, hard won by hours of research, and tried and tested over the years and decades, deserves respect. (Miller, 2001: 118)

Another line of critique that challenges the contextual approach deals with a certain trend to replace the passive image of the public for an idealized picture of their competences and response capacities. Trying to avoid this simplification is key because otherwise it might lead to an internal inconsistency: to acknowledge that people are moved by quite diverse interests and experiences, that their attitudes are rooted in particular objective and subjective circumstances, implies the recognition that in their heterogeneity, ‘the publics can also be inattentive, unmotivated and, yes, ignorant’ (Einsiedel, 2000: 211).

From the literacy monologue to the epistemic dialogue – and the deficit’s persistence

On the basis of the above, the current state of affairs in the field can be described in terms of two distinct but co-existing ways to conceive its main questions and answers. In a Lakatosian sense, the contextual approach could be considered the progressive research programme at its peak; for its part, the deficit-based perspective should have entered into a degenerative stage, having its hard core of assumptions severely questioned and, for its most unmerciful critics, run dry in its capacity to tackle the complexity of the matters at play. However, at least judging by the seemingly unavoidable return of one of its mottos, its definitive expiry date is still uncertain. Moreover, the epistemic controversy does not seem to have harmed its instrumental value at a practical level: the recurring requests to spread science among the public reveals the tenacity of the original literacy concerns.

At first glance, the discipline remains immersed in a lengthy turning point, hardly debating at the same time its future and its fundaments. If one could argue that the proliferation of views around certain issues reveals the fruitfulness of a research field, then the PUS studies can be regarded as going through a period of effervescence. Nonetheless, the other side of the coin must be also recognized: when a debate revolves around the same arguments over and over again, its mere existence cannot be considered per se a sign of progress. On the contrary, it is showing evidence of standstill. After years of rejection, the academic realm seems to be trapped in a nearly vicious circle of discussion about how to understand the relationships between people and science, caught in the cage of questions that it imposes. Examining the apparently vehement debates up close, the feeling is that the field has stabilized in the controversy around the still ‘oppressive burden of a label’: the burden that implies one must keep assigning the deficit priority as problematic.

Although the classical programme acknowledges the need to refine both its conceptual and methodological dimensions, it leaves untouched scientific illiteracy as the obstacle to be overcome (see Pardo and Calvo, 2002, 2004). The topic as such is not of great concern for the contextual approaches, more focused on understanding the situated processes of controversy and negotiation between different types of expertise and how the scopes of epistemic authority are drawn and redrawn in each case. But there are times in which the objective imbalance does play a central role in the relationship – times when issues are framed in such a way that no one without a certain kind of (scientific, technical) knowledge can feasibly enter into the discussion in fair conditions. On these occasions, scientists and the public need to share at least a minimum threshold of common concepts and terms in order to make the dialogue effective. To understand how this can be possible requires exploring further the basic epistemic asymmetry as one of the premises that are part and parcel of the surrounding context framing and influencing their interactions.

Removed from the pejorative, almost incriminating, connotation involved in the idea of a certain kind of deficiency, accounting for the agents’ uneven positions as an assumption of their epistemic exchanges allows for a new perspective on the way in which scientific knowledge circulates and is shared. Starting from acknowledging the existence of an objective gap that constrains science-public encounters can be useful to open new paths to explore the problem, and by doing so, it can also help to overcome the immobility imposed by the deficit idea. Drawing on claims that reflected on the essential role of credibility and trust in PUS studies (Gregory and Miller, 1998; Von Grote and Dierkes, 2000; Wynne, 1991), in the following section, the issue of the epistemic asymmetry is settled beyond the limits of the discussion: deficit yes or no. As a consequence, an entirely different assortment of questions arises.

Cognitive asymmetry as a starting point

The contribution of the contextual approach to capture the complex nature of science and society relationships was previously highlighted. However, if the purpose is to fully understand the context that conditions their interaction, a deeper interest on its part in the knowledge imbalances between agents is required. Although the perspective is correct in asserting that the public’s deficit is just another feature among others that determine their links with science, at many times, the disposition of scientific knowledge does play a relevant role in the discussion in such a way that the absence of a minimum mastery rules out all possibility of participating.

The approach developed in this section retrieves previous concerns and proposes new itineraries to explore them. On the one hand, it recovers the interest in dialogue, but stresses a set of constraints that structures interactions between scientists and laypeople; on the other, the cognitive heterogeneity is conceived more drastically than that of the deficit idea because it does not regard the amount of knowledge each have at their disposal but rather the nature of its attainment and justification. Thus, the asymmetry is not limited to the quantitative aspect of what scientists know and people ignore but responds to the qualitative difference between two ways of accessing the contents of science: autonomously and vicariously respectively.

Uneasiness radicalized

In Le partage du savoir, Roqueplo (1974) arrives at an uncomfortable conclusion: science cannot be properly communicated beyond the limits of specialized communities. Therefore, it is doubtful that it could in any way be understood by the public and it is absolutely unfeasible trying to achieve this goal through popularization. That is to say that the cognitive gap not only exists but, what is more, cannot be bridged.

Roqueplo’s premise is that scientific knowledge sits in a twofold operative dimension: theoretical-practical and experimental-practical. In the first, concepts are manipulated to acquire meaning and functions in the context of models and theories; in the second, tools and concepts are manipulated as well and, as a result, become linked to their objective referents. The gap between experts and the public rests in the intrinsic unutterable character of the dual founding practice of the scientific discourse: there is an insurmountable distance between the effective experience through which knowledge is attained and the narrated experience through which it is socially distributed. For that reasons, it is useless trying to explain scientific contents in order to upgrade scientific literacy: the distance between the agents does not regard the order of the non-shared information – as the deficit model assumes – but mainly the order of the non-shared practices. Le partage du savoir suggests that limits to the spread of specialized knowledge are not a methodological and contingent matter but an epistemological and structural one.

In the Roqueplian version, thus, the cognitive breach is an a priori, a constitutive element of the relationship between experts and the public. This seems to affect both PUS programmes. His conclusions hit at the heart of the optimistic view of the classical model since all actions devoted to communicate science would be in principle condemned to fail. But if knowledge cannot be shared out of the context in which it is produced, that also affects the viability of fostering a broader discussion about science in the public sphere. Because it is not clear how effective it could be, on which basis it could be settled in absence, as aforementioned, of a common threshold of terms and concepts that allows for a fair communication, a debate in which both parties make an effort to understand the other’s arguments and reasons. Otherwise, nothing ensures that people and scientists are talking about the same thing and disputing the same issues. If each faces the interaction drawing mostly on her own knowledges and values, then the pretend dialogue turns into a duet monologue: ‘a mere modus vivendi, in which both social groups and scientific communities tolerate each other’ (Broncano, 2006: 223).

A further consequence of the mutual (lack of) comprehension is even more serious. When it is not minimally pursued, those who are unaware of the terms in which the discussion is set forth miss any chance to take part meaningfully. Most of the time, public discussions about scientific-related topics involve a great deal of specialized concepts, technical details, references to processes and methods, disputes about the pros and cons of different arguments, reasons that must be carefully assessed and among which people should, at risk of sounding redundant, reasonably decide. When things are framed in such a way, when scientific expertise is at the core of the interaction, the options for the public are either to gain access in some form or to be out of the discussion. Negotiating with experts the length of a drug’s clinical test requires negotiators to know the distinctions between phases of a protocol and consequences of shortening or lengthening them; intervening in a debate about embryonic stem cell research implies one has at least a partial idea of what embryonic stem cells are. And to participate in a public audience regarding the question of whether and why a nuclear energy policy is preferable to the use of wind power demands sufficient awareness about the procedures entailed in each case, the functioning of both kinds of plants and their respective technical measures of control and security. One can clearly notice that many other types of reasons and values besides the epistemic and technical will be at play at different occasions – social, political, economical, pragmatic, moral – but it is still true that no one could even enter into the game – not to say ‘enter in good conditions’ – without a minimum mastery of the basic, most relevant, scientific knowledges at stake.

At this point, Roqueplo’s version of the gap seems to take us to a dead end. If a fair dialogue between people and scientists demands they share an essential nucleus of concepts, but these are not shareable stricto sensu, then the only apparent option is to meekly accept the unfeasibility of any discussion about science that involves an epistemic exchange.

Deference to epistemic authority

The conclusion of Le partage du savoir ultimately entails that one cannot genuinely affirm knowing something about the world unless one becomes oneself an expert; otherwise, precluded from accessing its tacit and non-communicable constitutive features, what a person obtains is no more than an imitation of knowledge.

Under a subjectivist epistemological conception, the public’s position is in this regard much more disadvantageous than the one assumed by the deficit model: they do not only lack of information but, when this is available, it cannot be considered strictly knowledge because they cannot independently justify it. However, people take many things for granted – for instance, the solar system’s structure or that the poles are cold – even when they have never individually tested them. If the only valid way to know was the exercise of one’s own intellectual skills, then we should admit that most of us are irrational, since we hold a number of beliefs without possessing either first-hand evidence nor having the intention to obtain it (Hardwig, 1985). Relevant among them are the beliefs produced by science.

Nevertheless, it is feasible to retain the first part of Roqueplo’s argument eluding at the same time the accusation of ‘irrationality’ by rejecting his conclusion. It may be true that scientific knowledge cannot be strictly shared if that means the full apprehension of its generating and validating practices, but that does not imply that the public – that only access them vicariously – cannot know something. At this point, it is well worth to critically examine what it means to know in this context and to which kind of epistemic agent it refers. If knowing entails the disposal of first-hand evidence that allows an autonomous judgement regarding the epistemic value of a certain scientific assertion, then most of the concerns in the field of PUS should be considered nonsensical. But if one can admit that a good reason to hold a belief is to accept the good reasons that support others’ believing, then there should be no objections to recognize members of the public as genuine cognitive agents and to maintain that second-hand knowledge acquired through dialogue with experts constitutes genuine knowledge.

All this hardly evokes the notion of the subject portrayed by the deficit model: a person who can achieve a full scientific literacy via an information bath and come out of the immersion mastering a set of specialized terms and concepts. Once the epistemic asymmetry is admitted, the image is far from being the case of someone who progresses from a disadvantageous condition towards a higher status of cognitive parity. Instead, to analyse the path of knowledge from experts to non-experts from this perspective implies the premise that the latter are, and will always be, in a situation of epistemic dependence, derived from the fact ⁵ of not being part of the knowledge production:

[the layman’s epistemic dependence can be even more radical because she/he] ‘(1) has not performed the inquiry that would provide the evidence for his belief that p, (2) is not competent and perhaps could not even become competent to perform that inquiry, (3) is not able to assess the merits of the evidence provided by expert A’s inquiry, and (4) may not even be able to understand the evidence and how it supports A’s belief that p’. (Hardwig, 1985: 339)

However, considering the only valid type of knowledge is independently obtained and justified would be a ‘cognitive suicide’ (Blais, 1987). In absence of other reasons, a person can know something – what are the stem cells or the structure of the DNA molecule – by epistemically deferring to those who know it for their own reasons and communicate both things – the belief and the reasons that justify it. In this frame, trust in the epistemic authority of a scientist entitles the public to accept the knowledge conveyed during their encounters.

Social epistemology and PUS

The label of social epistemology is nowadays vindicated by a number of heterogeneous perspectives incorporating the social dimensions that influence both knowledge and the act of knowing, usually excluded as extrinsic by the subjectivist approaches. However, beyond that general coincidence, the versions differ sharply from each other in their interests, on what is meant by knowledge and the social in their respective frameworks and, above all, at the weight attributed to non-epistemic factors in the cognitive activity.

The contextual approach in PUS has been largely inspired by ideas and arguments set out by a constructivist view in social epistemology. The interest in tackling the complexity of relationships between experts and laypeople in a social environment – involving conflicts, roles disputes, alliances and negotiations among the actors – extrapolates the interest in unveiling the same features in relations that take place inside the scientific community. At the same time, the aim to open up the black box of specialized knowledge in order to strengthen the public discussion about it also mirrors the previous epistemological shift aimed at de-constructing laboratory life, the science-in-the-making behind the apparently indisputable facts presented in a paper.

However, other lines of thought in social epistemology hold a different view on the impact of social relations in the processes of production and exchange of scientific knowledge that can contribute to improving and enriching the PUS studies. Among others, the works of Kitcher (1992), Goldman (1999) or Fricker (2002) explore the role of trust as a usual mechanism for knowing in the context of epistemic communities – including contemporary science – built on the basis of specialization, division of cognitive labour and cooperation among its members. Along this line, approaches tackling this issue in the realm of science itself also provide useful clues to understand the underlying mechanisms of its social spread and appropriation. According to Hardwig’s (1991) account of the Principle of Testimony, in order to access it, the public must delegate their own cognitive faculties to those of the experts:

If A [the public] has good reasons to believe that B [the scientist] has good reasons to believe p [a fact] then A has good reasons to believe p. (p. 697).

Under certain circumstances, people know via accepting the knowledge conveyed by others regarded as trustworthy. Thus, le partage du savoir can be interpreted as a particular instance of the social interactions allowing any kind of knowledge to be disseminated among the members of a certain epistemic community. In this peculiar case, the highly specialized type of knowledge at play implies that the interlocutors are per se in uneven conditions to manage contents shared during the dialogue. For that reason, adoption of a stance of trust and deference to epistemic authority are crucial for the process to be successful – that is, that as an outcome of the exchange, the concept of stem cell has been acquired by those who initially lacked it.

To embrace cognitive asymmetry as a premise, and not as a deficit that must be overcome, does not result in the same problems as usual for the field of PUS; quite the contrary, it demands not only to reread those problems from a different angle but also to address emerging challenges. What would be point, for instance, of putting the unpleasant concept of an appeal to authority on the basis of the process of knowledge exchange? In which circumstances, under what conditions, is a person entitled to accept scientists’ testimonies? Does their vulnerable epistemic position confine the public to an overwhelming dependence on experts? Which is the role of science communication in a thus redrawn scenario? All these questions are linked to a core of related concepts – authority, epistemic trust, credibility, critical judgement, among others – that must be disentangled in the frame of PUS studies.

Deference to authority and critical judgement

Since the times of the Enlightenment, the idea of authority has received a lot of bad press in the epistemological realm – a context in which it is regarded as a danger that must be averted to prevent any harm to the subjects’ rational autonomy. Not only should self-government replace any form of authoritarian external power, knowers should put their own opinions and judgements above every external consideration. In his 1784 essay Answering the question: What is Enlightenment? Kant synthetizes the contrast between the supreme value of intellectual autonomy against a heteronomous condition by appealing to the Latin phrase Sapere Aude – Dare to Know. Cognitive self-sufficiency demands trust in nothing else but one’s own evidence and ability to know.

Nonetheless, it is worth noting that to live according to the principle of radical epistemic autonomy is not only limiting: it is clearly unrealistic. Most of the knowledge that people have has not been independently attained: it has been obtained from other agents that have, in turn, obtained it by themselves. Under this light, the Kantian claim can be reinterpreted as Dare to know from those who have known by themselves, identifying trust to be a valid mechanism of knowledge acquisition. At different levels, people are prepared to individually or collectively identify agents in a better position to attain a certain kind of knowledge, to judge whether they are worthy of reliance in virtue of some parameters and, thus, to decide whether it is reasonable (or not) to accept their testimony. Despite their apparent conflict, deference to an epistemic authority and intellectual autonomy are not in principle inconsistent. The recognition of the former as such rests on a careful, responsible, exercise of the latter.

This links with another typical issue in PUS: the need to promote the critical judgement of the public. It could be objected that conceiving access to knowledge in terms of putting aside one’s own rationality to rely on others’ clearly contradicts one of the discipline’s major pillars, and that the deferential model would be indistinguishable from the deficit one, given that both support a passive view of the public, limited to accepting externally imposed knowledge. However, to realize that their position is vulnerable does not imply the reduction of people’s options to blind trust. To better understand the issue, it can be readdressed as follows: what is the role of public critical judgement in assessing a scientist’s credibility, in order to entitle acceptance of the offered knowledge?

To answer this requires overcoming a false dichotomy. Being confident – implicitly associated with being credulous – and being critical have usually been regarded as alternative attitudes towards science – the former working to the detriment of the latter that, thus, has to be constantly reinforced. Credulous is defined as ‘having or showing too great a readiness to believe things’ and ‘ready to believe especially on slight or uncertain evidence’; ⁶ that means, someone who decides to believe without worrying whether this attitude is warranted. Credulity can be indeed identified with blind trust, an irresponsible attitude that may bring serious consequences.

If a nuclear physicist assures that the radioactive waste deposited in an area remains within acceptable limits and people admit it in absence of a severe scrutiny of her qualities as informant, this reckless conduct carries the risk of seriously jeopardizing their health and safety. The public may not be in position to attain independent evidence on the issue at the level of the content conveyed or to judge the quality of the proofs presented; therefore, a responsible epistemic attitude demands over-caution when assessing the informant’s reliability. When faced with ‘X says p’ – X being a scientist and p a scientific assertion – it would only be epistemically grounded to accept p if there are good reasons to believe that ‘X is competent and reliable to affirm p’ (Fricker, 2006).

The asymmetry regarding what is said does not imply that the person is completely unable to judge the qualities of who says so. That requires achieving additional premises that allow critical evaluation of the credibility of the informant and, on that basis, to decide whether what she says can be reasonably accepted, rejected or questioned: how did the physicist know the waste was under control? In which circumstances and under which conditions did she obtain this knowledge? What are her credentials? Does she work for anyone who, in order to use her statement for their advantage, could have impelled her to lie, hide information, manipulate or distort the evidence?

The source’s cognitive and moral reliability must be carefully calibrated using all available means before the acceptance of her affirmations. To extend the chain of appeals to authority can be extremely helpful in this sense: how do other experts in the field appraise the physicist’s training and competence to lead the inquiry as well as the epistemic and technical quality of the evidence provided? How do peers value her trustworthiness?

It seems clear that being reasonably trustful – and not merely credulous – entails being critical. The antagonism between both attitudes is only superficial: nothing but the exercise of a fair, critical and informed judgement allows people to identify reliable epistemic authorities whose words are acceptable, neither blindly nor in principle, but justifiably.

However, it must be noticed that attitudes in this respect are also contextually anchored. People do not uniformly operate in the same ‘full critical mode’ regarding scientists or scientific knowledge; sometimes it depends on what is at stake, other times it relates to the issue in itself, sometimes to the person’s subjective circumstances. The existence of black holes does not plague people as acutely as the safety of nuclear waste in their neighbourhood; in the latter case, they will not only strive to get a minimum understanding of the measurements taken but will also engage in a rigorous appraisal of the reliability of those in charge of doing it. Patients suffering from a rare disease will be more likely to gain mastery of the differences between adult and embryonic stem cells, and to exhaust all available information to calibrate the merits of a research group before enrolling in a clinical trial of a new treatment, in contrast to others for whom neither the concepts nor the researchers’ credibility are of a vital concern.

How do people manage in each circumstance to weigh the character of the knowledge-source – or even of alternative sources or competing explanations, as is the case for instance in the realm of climate change? What strategies do they implement to overcome the asymmetry and with what limitations? At a different level, how do they act in common, uncontroversial situations, in the face of matters that neither affect nor concern them directly? For instance, on which basis is a person willing to accept and reassert that water has been discovered on an extra-solar planet? Today, when the boundaries of knowledge are constantly pushed forwards, there are times when the limits between sound science, heterodoxies and absurdities are blurred; in cases like this, taking into account that people are precluded from assessing the differential epistemic value of a statement, is the informant’s credibility the only feature that warrants acceptance or rejection of her words? Of course, it can be said that these questions have been empirically tackled in PUS studies hitherto, but it is to be expected that they will gain more relevance among its theoretical insights.

The role of interfaces

As mentioned above, a previous careful assessment of the source of knowledge is not only the practical attitude that a person should adopt to prevent falling into credulity but, rather, it is the normative requirement that must be fulfilled in order to consider her decision about that knowledge epistemically warranted. The entitlement to trust depends on the appraisal of a series of features regarding the competences and trustworthiness of the teller. These signs may not be exhaustive, and to collect them does not necessarily imply direct contact between the agents. People can obtain those premises from alternative sources – others’ references – or even retrieve them from their own general understanding of the skills and values that could be expected from someone at a certain realm or institution.

This nuance is key in the case of the relationship between scientists and the public. First, because it is not always easy for the latter to acquire relevant information to judge the former’s intellectual competences; and second, because their links with scientists are rarely close or sustained enough to provide evidence about the aptitudes and qualities of a given speaker. Yet, it is completely feasible that anyone moderately informed has access to a set of indirect clues that can be helpful in the process. For example: the identification of the scientist or research group with a well-renowned institution – a University, a laboratory, a National Research Council or Academy; prominence in public opinion; awards received; a supportive past track record. Even to have an idea, although a very basic one, about the credentials required to publicly consider someone a scientist can be useful in assessing those who pretend to be such.

Science communicators are among the most important, sometimes the exclusive, suppliers of this kind of detail – the agents responsible to make available every piece of information that could help the public adopt a reasonable stance. Besides reporting the latest advances on stem cell therapies and explaining the greenhouse effect, one of their basic roles in the epistemic interaction is to search, check and provide people with the relevant information needed to assess the reliability of a scientific source. Acknowledging this key function in the process of credit attribution raises new questions concerning science communication practices. Which and why are those more appropriate for the knowledge exchange under the constraints of the epistemic asymmetry? What are the best strategies to develop the critical judgement thus reframed?

The communicator is herself an active agent in the chain of testimonies through which knowledge circulates and, therefore, is also subject to the public’s assessment; in this sense, as stated (Cortassa, 2015), her own credibility and reputation can nuance, reinforce or diminish the credit ascribed to a certain scientific source. There lies another set of questions to be untied: whose authority stands behind the scientific claims that circulate publicly? On whom do people actually rely? To fully explore how people’s reasoning articulates the judgements about social and epistemical authority of scientists and mediators, and on the basis of which features is confidence built up in each case, may also be of great interest for PUS.

The return of the deficit idea is not in fact unavoidable. At least that is what seems to be the case in the light of the wide range of compelling and exciting questions that arise as soon as we are ready to abandon the byzantine discussions that it has imposed for too long.