by Judith Curry
Science is the most formidable intellectual force of our age, perhaps any age. The irony is that, without the insights of the humanities, it may still find itself without words. – Mark Thompson
Bishop Hill points to a remarkable essay by Mark Thompson, the former head of the BBC. This was a lecture given at Oxford about science and rhetoric, focusing on the climate change debate and the problems of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. It is rather lengthy (16 pages), the whole essay is well worth reading. I excerpt here the parts of his argument that I found particularly interesting:
I’m going to explore the present state of the argument from authority through a single prism—namely the way in which science is handled in argumentation about public policy. And I’m going to attempt to tease apart a paradox which genuinely perplexes most of the scientists that I know, which is this: almost everyone accepts that science gives us our most secure understanding of the physical world – so why doesn’t it always carry the day?
Surely, if anything can, science can pierce what I’ve called the cloud of unknowing and replace public bewilderment with public enlightenment. So why is it so often questioned and challenged by non-scientists witout anyone accusing them of stupidity or absurdity? Why, when it comes to public policy formulation or media discussions, is science typically regarded as one of the considerations rather than the card that trumps every other card?
Hume’s sense that science represents an epistemological gold standard almost universal today. Like most non-scientists of my age and background, I accept that fundamental authority completely and whenever it comes to an argument I usually find myself instinctively on the side of mainstream science. I don’t do that because I have personally checked the evidence which underpins The Origin of Species or examined Bohr’s or Schrodinger’s equations: I haven’t the expertise to do either. No, I back science because I find Popper’s account of the scientific method and its falsifiability intellectually compelling and because, at the level of common sense, the explanatory and predictive success of science is so overwhelming. Moreover, I’ve spent enough time with scientists to be wholly convinced that the culture and practice of science genuinely aim at truth.
As non-scientists then, our acceptance of the primacy of science is based less on our own scientific training than on a mixture of cultural, social and philosophical factors. This is exactly what is implied by the argumentum ad verecundiam: if you can work out the equation for yourself, after all, you don’t have to take it on trust.
At the same time, many of us know that it’s too simplistic to say that science always and immediately right. Sometimes there’s not enough data, or the puzzle of what the data means has yet to cracked, or the whole thing is still a work in progress: sometimes, in other words, the science is or at least appears unfinished.
On other occasions, scientists disagree and there are rival explanations, or there’s one candidate explanation which some sicntists back but others oppose: in these cases, the science is disputed.
On still other occasions, someone may call into question the good faith of the scientists – they’rein the pay of the government or Big Pharma or they’re committed to some cause and therefore their work may lack impartiality and thus reliability: we might call this corrupted or even perverted science.
We also know that, on a few very rare occasions, there have been dramatic revolutions in the history of science when a consensus view has been overturned in favour of a radical new theory Copernicus, Einstein and that, before such revolutions, scientific group-think is possible; this is what Lee Smolin alleged about contemporary American physics and M-theory and string theory in his 2006 book The Trouble with Physics, though one would need to understand the science rather better than I do to judge whether he’s right or not.
So as we listen to a given scientific debate, in theory any number of doubts can appear. Yes, of course we still believe in the authority of good, finished, honest science but maybe in this case it’s not quite ready; or maybe we’re in the middle of a he-says-she-says wrangle and God only knows who’s right; or maybe there is something fishy about the way that report was paid for; or maybe that lone scientist I heard on the radio is right and it’s the other 99% of physicists who will be proven wrong in the end. In an age of pervasive suspicion and uncertainty, and it doesn’t take much for the weevils to get to work.
Sometimes one comes across a letter about some matter of public concern signed by a long list of notables from many different and unconnected backgrounds: this is authority sliced and diced and repackaged like the Collateralised Debt Obligations which precipitated the financial crisis, the authority each piece of which may be far from its point of origin and justification, but where it’s still hoped that the whole can be greater than the parts.
We might have hoped that authority might be one sure way of piercing the cloud of unknowing. Instead, we find that even the most clear-cut authority, that derived from science, can find itself in the most opaque, impenetrable regions of the cloud. And if what I’ve said this evening is true of science, it is probably even more true of economics and the other social sciences, indeed of any area of professional expertise which intersects with the world of public debate and policy.
Misrepresentation is undoubtedly often part of the problem, but it’s too easy to blame the public’s lack of knowledge of, or unwillingness to trust science entirely on the dark forces of misrepresentation. When science enters the public arena, it almost always ends up having to play by at least some of the rules of that arena, rules which often confuse the question of authority. It also finds itself in competition with radically asymmetrical rhetorical forces which derive their power from the spheres of morality, culture, superstition, even the mystic.
But to wish we could eliminate those ‘divisive cultural meanings’ is to wish away the freedom and openness on which modern democracies are built –and, short of dictatorship, its impossible to achieve anyway. In my view our task rather is to find practical ways of helping the public to pick their own way through this difficult, cluttered landscape. I’ve tried this evening to give some examples of how it is possible to parse public statements about science and disentangle them so that one can analyse and understand the different elements: exposition, assertion, opinion and advocacy. It takes time and, in its own way, a little training. Our challenge is how to encourage more people to take the time and acquire the skills to do this for themselves.