Abstract
Building, restoring and maintaining well-placed trust between scientists and the public is a difficult yet crucial social task requiring the successful cooperation of various social actors and institutions. Kitcher’s (Science in a democratic society, Prometheus Books, Amherst, 2011) takes up this challenge in the context of liberal democratic societies by extending his ideal model of “well-ordered science” that he had originally formulated in his (Science, truth, and democracy, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001). However, Kitcher nowhere offers an explicit account of what it means for the public to invest epistemic trust in science. Yet in order to understand how his extended model and its implementation in the actual world address the problem of trust as well as to evaluate it critically, an explicit account of epistemic public trust in science needs to be given first. In this article we first present such an account and then scrutinize his project of building public trust in science in light of it. We argue that even though Kitcher’s ideal model and his proposals for its implementation in the real world face a number of problems, they can be addressed with the resources of our account.
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Notes
This last difference is picked out by survey questions asking members of the public whether they have confidence that scientists “act in the best interests of the public” and trust scientists “to give full and accurate information” about certain topics. For an example see The PEW Research Center’s report (Funk and Kennedy 2016).
This restriction in the scope of our account is in line with Kitcher’s approach. See Kitcher (2011, pp. 155–168).
For further discussion, see Irzık and Kurtulmus (forthcoming).
This qualification is necessary because when inductive risks are not relevant to the public, they need not play a role in the public’s trust. However, this introduces a complication: research that does not appear to be relevant to the public’s welfare may later turn out to be relevant. Thus, there may be cases when we, as individuals, mistakenly assume that considerations of enhanced trust are irrelevant. Such errors on our part are unavoidable. Nevertheless, judgments regarding trust are not made once and for all. We can revise our judgments about trust in the light of new information and correct our errors.
We thank one of the anonymous referees for urging us to clarify this aspect of our account.
To be exact, in contrast to the original formulation, the ideal deliberators now represent the entire world population and future generations, but for our purposes we will focus on a single society.
Kitcher speaks of the system of public knowledge here, but recall that science is its most central and successful component.
This way of numbering is intended to capture the parallel to the conditions in our account.
In a recent article Stephen John has offered a critique of the requirement of transparency. He uses the negative impact of the leaked emails from Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia to illustrate his reservations about transparency. As John observes, many of the practices that the scientists whose emails were hacked engaged in were “normal and respectable” (John 2018, p. 81). However, given a set of false background beliefs about how science works, these practices were seen as outrageous and undermined trust. In light of these, John maintains that non-experts’ epistemic interests would be better served in the absence of transparency. Note that he is making a conditional claim: if people have mistaken views about how science operates, then transparency is dangerous. Taken as a whole, Kitcher’s proposal undermines the antecedent of this conditional. When Kitcher’s ideal obtains, people have an accurate understanding of how science works. Nevertheless, John is also making a broader point, which is important. Under non-ideal conditions transparency can have costs. Thus, when we seek to bring about conditions necessary for warranted trust, we should not myopically focus on improving only one set of conditions but pursue a more holistic approach.
We thank one of the anonymous referees for raising the challenge of establishing trust between the tutors and the representative citizens.
For an overview and the evaluation of the deficit model, see Sturgis and Allum (2004).
This assumption is made also by others who argue for the relevance of moral and social values in scientific research and science policy. See, for example, Wilholt (2013).
When members of the public do not have enhanced epistemic trust in scientists, this does not entail that scientists are at fault. It is possible that in certain cases the public is at fault for withholding enhanced trust. In fact, John argues that parents who demanded higher epistemic standards than the ones employed by scientists in the MMR case were morally wrong to do so. See John (2011).
For the view that the roles of African Americans in the study have been exaggerated see Washington (2008, pp. 175–177).
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Acknowledgements
We thank the audience members at the workshop, Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI): Coming to Grips with a Contentious Concept, held at the University of Bielefeld on 30 March–1 April 2017 for their feedback on an earlier version of this paper. We are also grateful to Martin Carrier, Torsten Wilholt and the three anonymous referees for this journal for their comments.
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Irzik, G., Kurtulmus, F. Well-ordered science and public trust in science. Synthese 198 (Suppl 19), 4731–4748 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-02022-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-02022-7