Science and Society Lecture Notes Week 1 Seminar
Introduction
What happens if we think about science as an ‘independent institution’ like the law, the police, the media…
is science a sort of dictatorial body that tells us what to do. ‘Experts’?
- Trump’s attack on independent institutions
- Institutions… structural relationship, interdependence… they guide/advice/influence us while reflecting what we want them to be… trump & populism doesn’t trust this
- Science has a tension ridden relationship with ‘us’ – the ‘people’
- Science is not a distant happening, we are directly involved… two ends of a spectrum; totally under- politicised, and totally over-political.
Science philosophers look back and say that scientists who’s findings have a positive relationship with current science are ‘good’ scientists, ‘rational’ scientist… ‘rational true belief’ – what criteria can you adopt to determine what counts as science and ‘good’ science?
What is ‘modern’ science?
- Professionalised – not about wealth…
- Scientists are in the same family as politicians and accountants, you need some kind of education, certification, training and career paths
- Unsustainable growth? Science is increasingly coming into competition with other professions of its kind and will constantly have to justify itself (Derek de Solla 1963)
What happens when science comes into politics or policy making?
- There is no ‘phew, we know what to do now’
- You can find, very easily, multiple different perspectives of data… EG Finnish nuclear energy - ‘I’ve got the truth of the matter’ – the way that technical information enters our discussion is by
people choosing the technical information that helps them tell their narrative… different specialists produce different information which is perceived in a politicised fashion (what is the genuineness and authenticity of these presentations?)
- Society (the people) cherry-pick the information that suits them as well
- Even when all the technical information is the same, people present largely different assessments of this data which are extremely politicised… how do we understand these dynamics?
- Wind power in Australia; when black outs occurred, the experts called the prime minister and said HELLO X Y AND Z MEAN ITS NOT OUR FAULT, but then the conservative party blamed them
anyway… and then the decision making process was largely informed by public opinion based on what the conservatives said. And then the result when they found out the truth (system couldn’t deal with both fossil fuels and renewable energy), was people saying ‘why didn’t the experts have more say?’
- Do we trust the experts (wind power) or do we want them to have less say (nuclear energy)? How do value judgments and morality come into this? Sometimes we want scientific information to play more and less of a role in society? How do we know when to opt for one option or the other?
- What is it about pieces of science that intersect with pieces of society that lead us to the judgments that we make? How can we be more analytic about it?
Why do we like science sometimes, and not others? What gets in the way of reasonable analytic judgements?
- We tend to have an asocial model of scientists… We have some normative criteria for how we assess things and people which is largely unreflective. We see scientists as robots, aliens, mad or
eccentric… we often look for an ‘objective’, ‘impartial’, ‘dispassionate’ scientist removed from their context to provide the ‘true’ analysis of a situation.
- Rachel Carsons – pesticides in agriculture… at the time she was attacked for being passionate and un-objective.
- Repercussions of ‘objectivity’ – you are a good scientist as long as you are antithetical, outside of, removed from society. Scientists are just as bad at propagating this image as society is.
- ‘The best science is isolated science’? Has it become too isolated from broader social goals? In practice, science was never isolated in the first place…
