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Under the microscope. www.shutterstock.com
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Worldwide, we are facing a joint crisis in science and expertise. This has led some observers to speak of a post-factual democracy – with Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump the results.
Today, the scientific enterprise produces
somewhere in the order of 2m papers ayear, published in roughly 30,000 different journals. A blunt assessment
has been made that perhaps half or
more of all this production “will not stand the test of time”.
Meanwhile, science has been challenged as an
authoritative source of knowledge for both policy and everyday life, with noted
major misdiagnoses in fields as disparate as forensics, preclinical and clinical medicine, chemistry, psychology and economics.
Perhaps nutrition is the field most in the
spotlight. It took several decades for cholesterol to
be absolved and for sugar to be re-indicted as the more serious health threat,
thanks to the fact that the sugar industry sponsored a research program in the
1960s and 1970s, which successfully cast doubt on the hazards of sucrose – while promoting fat as the dietary
culprit.
Destructive
trend
We think of science as producing truths about the
universe. Triumphs of science, like the recent confirmation of the existence
of gravitational waves and the landing of a probe on a comet flying around the sun, bring more urgency to the
need to reverse the present crisis of confidence in other areas of the
scientific endeavour.
Science is tied up with our ideas about democracy
– not in the cold war sense of science being an attribute of open democratic
societies, but because it provides legitimacy to existing power arrangements:
those who rule need to know what needs to be done, and in modern society this
knowledge is provided by science. The science-knowledge-power relationship is
one of the master narratives of modernity, whose end was announced by
philosopher Jean-FrançoisLyotard four decades ago. The contemporary loss of trust in expertise
seems to support his views.
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Hidden culprit. Gleb
Garanich/Reuters
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Still, techno-science is at the heart of
contemporary narratives: the convictions that we will innovate our way out of
the economic crisis, overcome our planetary boundaries, achieve a
dematerialized economy, improve the fabric of nature, and allow universal
well-being.
The appeal of reassuring narratives about our
future depends on our trust in science, and the feared collapse of this trust will have far-reaching consequences.
The cult of science is still adhered to by many.
Most of us need to believe in a neutral science, detached from material
interests and political bargaining, capable of discovering the wonders of
nature. For this reason, no political party has so far argued for a reduction
in science funding on the basis of the crisis in science, but this threat could
soon materialize.
The crisis
we saw coming
The crisis in science is not a surprise – some
scholars of history and philosophy of science had predicted it four decades
ago.
Derek de Solla Price, the father of scientometrics –
literally the scientific study of science – feared the quality crisis. He noted
in his 1963 book, Little
Science, Big Science, that the exponential growth of science might lead to
saturation, and possibly to senility (an incapacity to progress any further).
For contemporary philosopher Elijah Millgram, this disease takes the form of disciplines becoming alien to one
another, separated by different languages and standards.
Jerome R Ravetz noted in 1971 that science is a social activity, and that changes in the social
fabric of science – once made up of restricted clubs whose members were linked
by common interests and now a system ruled by impersonal metrics - would entail
serious problems for its quality assurance system and important repercussions
for its social functions.
Ravetz, whose analysis of science’s contradictions has continued to the present day, noted
that neither a technical fix would remedy this, nor would a system of enforced
rules. Scientific quality is too delicate a matter to be resolved with a set of
recipes.
A perfect illustration of his thesis is the
recent debate about the P value – commonly used in experiments to judge the quality of
scientific results. The inappropriate use of this technique has been strongly criticized,
provoking alarm – and statements of concern – at the highest levels in the profession of statistics.
But no clear agreement has been reached on the nature of the problem, as shown
by the high number of critical comments in the ensuing debate.
Philip Mirowski’s recent book offers
a fresh reading of the crisis in terms of the commercialization of science’s
production. Scientific research deteriorates when it is entrusted to contract
research organizations, working on a short leash held by commercial interests.
The present trajectory will result in an impasse
in many areas of science, where it may become impossible to sort out the good papers from the bad.
Science-based narratives and the social functions
of science will then lose their appeal. No solution is possible without a
change in the prevailing vision and ideology, but can scientific institutions offer one?
The
supremacy of expertise
Here the stakes are high and perverse systems of
incentives entrenched. Many scientists are highly defensive of their work. They
adhere to the deficit model, in its standard or glorified form, whereby if only
people understood science – or at least understood who the true experts were – then progress would be achieved.
Scientists often subscribe to the myth of one
science, and promote actions for or against a policy based on their position as
scientists. In a recent case, more than 100 Nobel laureates took a side in a dispute over a genetically modified rice, a rather complex case
where more prudence would have been in order.
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See me after class. CC BY-SA
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Climate is another battlefield where the idea
that “science has spoken” or “doubt has been eliminated” have become common refrains.
Many scientists defend the supremacy of
expertise; if lay citizens disagree with experts, it is the former who are
wrong. This because scientists are better than bankers and politicians, or simply better human beings, who need protection
from political interference.
There is an evident tension between this view and
what takes place in the arena of evidence-based (or informed) policy.
Here legislation developed to fight racketeering is used by activists and scientists to
target their peers in the opposing faction, in hot fields from climate to biotechnologies.
The science of economics is still in control of
the master narrative. The same craft that failed to predict the latest great
recession – and worse, directly engineered it thanks to its financial
recklessness – is still dictating market-based approaches to overcome present
challenges. By its own admission, the discipline, which supported austerity
policies with a theorem based on a coding error, has little clue as to what to do if the global
economy will face another downturn.
The economic historian Erik Reinert notes that
economics is the only discipline impermeable to paradigm shifts. For
economics, he says, the earth is round and flat at the same time, all the time, with
fashions changing in cyclical shifts.
One can see in the present critique of finance –
as something having outgrown its original function into a self-serving entity – the same ingredients of
the social critique of science.
Thus the ethos of “little science” reminds us of
the local banker of old times. Scientists in a given field knew one another,
just as local bankers had lunch and played golf with their most important
customers. The ethos of techno-science or mega-science is similar to that of
the modern Lehman bankers, where the key actors know one another only through
performance metrics.
Change takes place at an ever-accelerating pace;
the number of initiatives to heal science’s diseases multiply every day from within the house of
science.
Increasingly, philosophers warn that not all is
well in our ever-stronger symbiotic relation with technology. The effects
of innovation on jobs, on inequality, on
our way of knowing and of making sense of reality, are all becoming problematic. Everything moves at a pace
that frustrates our hope of control.
What can we
do?
If this wave of concern will merge with the
science crisis, then important facets of our modernity might be up for
discussion. Will this lead to a new humanism as hoped by some philosophers or
to a new dark age, as feared by others?
The conflicts described thus far involve values
in conflict, of the type dealt with in something called “post-normal science”. Many dislike the name of this approach for its postmodern
associations, but appreciate its model of extended peer communities.
These communities bring together experts from across disciplines – as different
disciplines see through different lenses – and anyone affected or concerned
with the subject at hand, with possibly different views about what the problem
is.
Today, extended peer communities are set up by
some activist citizens and scientists. This format encourages a humbler, more reflexive
attitude. It suggests to citizens a more critical and participatory attitude in
matters of science and technology, with less deference towards experts.
New media provides fertile ground for these
communities. “Could the internet be to science what the printing press was to
the church?” asks the science and technology philosoper Silvio Funtowicz.
If this process leads to reform in science and
challenges the monopoly of knowledge and authority – as to some extent we
see happening in health-
then we might go some way to rebuilding trust in one of the most important
facets of modern life.
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Perhaps not the most
helpful attitude. DanaK~WaterPenny, CC BY
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Andrea Saltelli is adjunct professor at the Centre for the Study of the Sciences and the Humanities
(SVT) - University of Bergen (UIB), where he cooperates with a team interested
in post normal science, and visiting fellow at Open Evidence Research,
Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, in Barcelona.
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