Why do lay people doubt or outright reject science? Why do they deny scientific claims such as climate
change, evolution, effects of additions on human brain, biological and environmental
effects on cognitive abilities, expert findings on the causes of highly
publicized disasters etc.? Popular answers circulated by academics and
intellectuals stipulate two possibilities: that lay people are either stupid,
brainwashed or both. They either are not as rational as the learned
folk are, and thus cannot grasp the intricate complexity of connections that
the superior minds can see, or they are consumed by irrational passions, such
as bigotry, ideology, or religion that clouds their judgment (“motivate cognition”
is the technical term).
Aside the fact that these “explanations” are self-serving,
as they perpetuate the myth of the superiority of the learned folk who
circulate these stories, they are not explanations at all. They are thinly disguised attempts to
demonize people who disagree with us instead of a far more intellectually
challenging task of trying to understand how those people actually think. The shortcoming of these explanations become
evident when we realize that these supposedly dumb and biased people behave
quite rationally in most aspects of everyday life. Folks who deny the laws of thermodynamics as
they apply to the climate, nonetheless accept in any other area of life – they would
never deny for example that car interiors or hot houses heat up to a much
higher temperature than the outside temperature. Folks who deny the effects of evolution on the
human species, nonetheless rely on those effects when breeding chicken, dogs,
horses or plants. So clearly the lay folks
are not as irrational as the university credentialed folks want us to believe.
To solve this puzzle we first need to examine the nature of
scientific claims themselves. A good starting point of this inquiry is the
times when science as we understand it today, i.e. deductive reasoning based on
systematic empirical observations, was struggling and competing for recognition
with other forms of human cognition. Although
few people today doubt the ability of science to penetrate and explain the
universe, that proposition was not so obvious when science could not claim the
accomplishments that the modern science can.
The problem that the learned folk in these supposedly “dark” ages faced
was quite real and can be summarized as follows: given the narrow limits of
human cognitive capacity and the infinite nature of the subject matter that
humans attempt to understand (whether its deity or the nature itself), how can
we say that we know anything at all?
There are only two possible solutions of this problem, either reject the
possibility of any true knowledge at all, or to claim that true knowledge can
be derived from sources other than scientific reasoning.
The first answer is a non-starter for people who make their
living by creating knowledge, so the philosophers naturally opted for the
second solution. Thus, the 15th century German philosopher Nicolas
of Cusa claimed that true knowledge must necessarily involve both rational and
extra-rational means, a synthesis which he called docta ignorantia (learned ignorance). Rational in this context means deductive
reasoning (especially mathematics), whereas non-rational means are less
clear. In the conventional theological
interpretation it is religious faith as laid out and endorsed by ecclesiastic g
authorities, but in the mystic tradition it implies a special human capacity of
insight or seeing things ‘as they are.’
Thus, the 13th century Italian philosopher Saint Bonaventure
talks about the highest state of knowledge (apex
mentis) achieved through spiritual union with deity, while the 17th
century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza identifies this source of highest
knowledge as intuition or knowledge derived directly (rather than through
deduction) from an adequate idea of attributes of god (or nature, which in
Spinoza’s system is one and the same thing).
The critical element here is the belief that knowledge is
not based on reason alone, that is, something else is needed to transform
reasoning into knowledge. The particular
solutions of what that something is that the philosophers provided are not
important, what really matters is the concept of knowledge as a synthesis of the
rational (i.e. deductive and empirical) and the non-rational (not to be
confused with irrational) components.
With that in mind, it is quite possible to be rational and reject
science at the same time. All one needs
to do is to question the non-rational components of scientific knowledge. This provides a partial answer to our puzzle
why otherwise rational lay people sometimes doubt scientific claims. However, to provide a fuller answer we need
to examine what that non-rational component of science is.
The solutions provided by the medieval philosophers – the claim
of a special cognitive faculty- have one shortcoming, they all boarder on circular
reasoning, or assuming the answer in their premises. That is, the claim to that special faculty – apex mentis or intuition – is valid only
if we assume that we have true knowledge of it, that is, if we assume that we
have that special faculty. So we need to
look elsewhere. One promising place is the work of the contemporary French
sociologist Bruno Latour who examined the actual process by which science is
actually created.
Contrary to how they are presented in scientific literature,
scientific facts do not emerge from nature by themselves, they are derived from
it by humans. I use the term “derived”
rather than “constructed” to avoid certain misleading post-modernist
interpretations of science as a collection purely subjective claims. Such views are a modern version of the first
answer to the medieval question about the possibility of knowledge – that no
objective knowledge exists. We reject
that interpretation because it is self-contradicting, as it necessarily implies
its opposite – that at least one claim about the subjectivity of knowledge is
objective. But I am digressing.
Latour’s work focuses on the process of the derivation of
scientific facts. This process starts
with claims made by people who engage in scientific research. Claims are not facts until they are accepted
as facts by the scientific community. Today,
we may consider the Earth orbiting the Sun to be the fact, but it was anything
but a fact in the Middle Ages when the ‘established fact’ was that every
celestial body orbits the Earth. What is
more, that medieval “fact” was what everyone could see with their own eyes
whereas we do not see the modern fact of Earth orbiting the Sun. So in the period of a few hundred years, a
fact ceased to be a fact and became an unsupported claim, and another claim about
the very same reality became a fact. How
did that happen?
Latour’s answer to this question is: by a social process of
convincing sufficient number of people that a claim made by a researcher is, in
fact, a fact. The initial research claim
if far from being a fact. It can go unnoticed and soon be forgotten, it can be
contested by others and rejected, or it can be examined by others and eventually
accepted as fact, if enough scientists accept its validity. It is therefore clear that the acceptance of
others is a critical element of establishing facts, that is, modern knowledge. Although
evidence plays a critical role in that process, procurement of that evidence itself
requires convincing others. It is so, because the procurement of evidence
requires considerable resources, research funds, laboratories, research programs,
expeditions that involve many people – those who control the resources
necessary to finance these endeavors, and those who are willing to engage in
those endeavors rather than in other less risky pursuits. The bottom line is that science is produced
by a group of people collaborating with each other in different capacities on
establishing or ‘deriving from nature’ scientific facts. Stated differently, the production of science
has two components – one rational based on empirical observation and deductive
reasoning and one social (i.e. non-rational) based on collaboration of people
involved in the process of establishing or deriving facts.
Latour describes this social element of modern knowledge as
a “network” – which implies a relatively small number of individuals, including
scientists, sponsors, promoters, publicists, or implementers, all of whom have
stakes in the success of a particular research program. This implies the existence of efficient means
of communication among network members, which means not having to explain anew
what has been already accepted or “stock knowledge” in sociological lingo,
using specialized technical language or jargon , and knowledge of what other members
of the network are doing. The “network”
concept also implies that the group of involved individuals is spread and
embedded in different socio-cultural settings that are not a part of their
networks, including family members, neighbors, communities, countries.
This social division between scientific networks and broader
communities in which these networks are embedded explains, in my view, the
roots of the rejection of scientific claims by the lay public, or certain
segments of that public. There are two inter-related
elements of that explanation – one linked to communication and the other one to
power relations.
The communication element is linked to a difficulty that
members of scientific networks have in communicating with non-members. One aspect of that difficulty is the
specialized technical language or jargon that non-members may not understand. But a more critical aspect is what
sociologists call ‘stock knowledge’ or knowledge that members of a particular
social group treat as self-evident and accepted on faith without further
proof. One of the most important
insights of Latour’s work is that scientists accept most scientific facts on
faith, without further proof. This is,
of course necessary, because current science is based on vast amount of
previous research already accepted by the scientific community or assumed as valid
in building scientific instruments. No
researcher has the time or expertise to verify each of these previous claims
anew, and any attempt to do so would not only distract him from his current research
but also cast doubt about his knowledge of science.
This may be obvious to members to scientific networks, but
not necessarily to the lay public. When scientists
communicates something as a “fact” they assumes that there has been a long and
arduous process of establishing this fact, claims and counter-claims, evidence
and counter-evidence and increasingly greater number of scientists accepting
the claim until it has become accepted as “fact.” An individual scientist may
not be familiar with all the specifics, but she knows that this is the process
and no claim would be considered a “fact” in scientific community if it did not
successfully went through this process.
But that ‘stock knowledge’ of scientific networks gets lost in
translation in communication with the lay public. The lay public does not know the process by
which a claim becomes a fact in scientific discourse. All they see is claims accepted on faith or at
best by reference to opinion of other people.
Those other people are, of course, scientists who provided the evidence,
but members of the general public do not know that. All they hear is that some guy the scientist
knows says it is true, which is indistinguishable from claims made by some guy
on the internet.
Scientists themselves have difficulty communicating the
results of their research to non-scientists because they have very little
practice doing it. They communicate
mainly with other scientists and do not need to justify their ‘stock knowledge.’ So if someone starts questioning that stock
knowledge, they become annoyed as the subjects of the well-know ‘breaching
experiments’ of the sociologist Harold Garfinkel, in which the experimenter
deliberately questioned commonly accepted social norms and understanding. As a consequence of such lay questioning, the
scientists become defensive and dismissive, which the lay persons see as arrogance
and patronizing.
The power relation element is linked to the fact scientific
networks are frequently linked to power networks. Not only people who occupy positions of power
in a society are often members of scientific networks as sponsors, but the
scientific research is used as an instrument of power. Policy decisions are ostensibly based on scientific
studies – for example, authorities may implement or refuse to implement a
project claiming studies showing supposed
economic or environmental impact. But
more importantly science is directly linked to power exercised by elite over
commoners. The so called ‘scientific
management’ or Taylorism was a deliberate tool to control and discipline
workers. Information technology is routinely
used for the same purpose – to scrutinize, to discipline, and to punish. Last but not least, social science,
psychology and economics are widely used to discipline workers, manipulate and
defraud consumers, to deny access to education or public services, to justify
discrimination, and to spread political propaganda. The “science” behind this research and surveys
is often flimsy or outright fraud, but does not stop it from being used as a policy
instrument.
It does not take an Ivy League PhD to see a connection
between science and exercise of power by the elite. The general public may not be able to properly
debunk the flimsy assumptions and procedures underlying this science, but they
clearly see that science is being used against them. So they have every reason to reject these
claims regardless of their scientific merits or lack thereof. Far from being irrational stubbornness in
accepting the facts, this rejection is a rational and very sensible reaction
against uses of science as an instrument of class war.
So next time you hear some smarty-panty PhD pontificating
about stupid people denying science, you may tell him that it is the karma of
the Brahmin and the pundit class. Not
only do they fail to communicate what they know but they prostitute it in the
name of power and profit. People see
through their bullshit and react rationally to it, and the expertocracy should
be thankful for that. Had they been less
rational, they would have brought guns and pitchforks to the conversation.
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