A matter of trust

What a difference a few months can make. When science historian Naomi Oreskes was writing her latest book Why Trust Science? a large part of the context seemed to be climate change. Indeed, this is a topic on which she has previously exposed the deceits of denialists in her 2010 book with Erik Conway, Merchants of Doubt. That problem remains: huge numbers of people continue to ignore or deny the stark facts that science – and indeed experience – confronts us with: the world is warming dangerously fast and is likely to change catastrophically unless urgent action is taken.

But suddenly the most pressing scientific issue is another one entirely: the global COVID-19 pandemic. Whereas the scientific evidence on climate change warns of serious perils, including massive social disruption and fatality, within decades, for COVID-19 those things came upon us in a matter of weeks. While it would be unwise to draw the parallels too closely, the pandemic has become a lens that focuses many of the same issues about why, when and how to trust science; and reading Oreskes’ arguments in this light is eye-opening.

Arising from a series of lectures Oreskes gave at Princeton University, and incorporating essay-length responses by experts from several disciplines, the book begins with a primer on the philosophy of science that all scientists would do well to read. Many still labour under the conviction that the philosophical foundation of their enterprise is either Karl Popper’s notion of falsifiability (theories can never be proved, only disproved) or Thomas Kuhn’s concept of paradigm shifts. But philosophers of science have long recognized the shortcomings of both frameworks, and many now take the pragmatic view that science is a makeshift affair, beyond any one universal “method”, that nevertheless mostly works well enough to generate knowledge proved reliable by experience.

Oreskes explains how that happens – and why sometimes it goes awry. In certain cases – such as the 19th-century “limited energy” theory that “explained” why higher education was not good for women, eugenics and the recent controversy about the efficacy of dental flossing – she explains both the social and technical factors that can distort the evidence. But Oreskes argues that science as a whole has enough error-correcting mechanisms and a good enough track record to warrant public trust. Reliable knowledge, she says, is produced by five factors: crucially, method and evidence, but also consensus, values and humility. When science has gone astray, it is often because of powerful scientists who lacked the humility to listen to all the evidence.

The inclusion here of “values” might surprise some – but it shouldn’t. The popular idea that science is “value-free” flies in the face of science’s history. Besides, acknowledgement of values is vital to social dialogue. Scientists, says Oreskes, “have made the mistake of thinking that people would trust them if they believed that science was value-free”. On the contrary, people are often more ready to listen to others with whom they can see some shared values. It’s well attested that people are less suspicious of medical innovations when told they have been developed to solve specific health problems, rather than just “because we can”.

Oreskes also dismantles the notion that science is a meritocracy that rewards only excellence, and has no need of initiatives for diversity and inclusion. She points out that diversity of viewpoint is precisely what can make science so powerful – and shows how several past errors, especially in the science of “race” and gender, were highlighted by precisely those groups who suffered from them.

Although always readable, Why Trust Science? is not pitched in a manner that seems likely to convert antivaxxers and climate-change deniers – but that is not really its goal. It’s better to see the book as an aid to scientists and their advocates. The sometimes-shrill insistence from scientists that they have a perfectly designed, intellectually rigorous truth-generating machine is not only philosophically unconvincing, but demonstrably false. As Oreskes argues, the thing that discomfits many scientists – that science is a social process – is actually its real strength. For instance, those who seek to undermine scientific findings by claiming that consensus has no place in science are wrong; it is precisely because science is fallible that consensus – a “social condition” – matters. “We use consensus as a proxy because we have no way to know, for sure, what the truth is,” Oreskes writes.

And it really is not hard to spot when consensus arises among trustworthy experts. “Most climate-change deniers are not climate scientists, and…objections to evolutionary theory largely emerge from non-scientific domains”, she points out. Sure, conflicts of interest – climate-change deniers funded by oil companies – can be hidden, but rarely very well. And they should weigh heavily on the balance of our judgements. We should trust scientists just as we do other experts, such as plumbers and dentists: not because they have a hotline to truth, but because they have been specifically trained to do their job, which is “studying the natural world and sorting out the complex issues that arise in it”. (There are bad plumbers and dentists, but plumbing and dentistry still work.)

The idea “that scientists follow a magic formula (‘the scientific method’) that guarantees results”, Oreskes says, “persists in textbooks and in the popular imagination, but it does not stand up to historical scrutiny. What does stand up is a portrait of science as a communal activity of experts, who use diverse methods to gather empirical evidence, and critically vet claims deriving from it.” It is this social process, she says, that enables science to do that rather marvellous thing of producing both stability and novelty.

And we shouldn’t exaggerate the problem of trust. Despite all the crazed COVID-19 conspiracy theories about the 5G network and bioweapons, there is no massive anti-science sentiment out there. Most people are desperate to know what “the science” is saying about the pandemic, and will be delighted to see a vaccine. As science historian Susan Lindee points out in her essay, most people do trust science on the whole – they just don’t always realize it. Indeed, scientists have so determinedly separated technology from science, for rhetorical reasons, that people don’t even appreciate that a faith in iPhones entails trust in science.

Climate-change scepticism, then, is not the same as generalized science-denial. As the overlap between that group and those questioning scientific expertise on COVID-19 has revealed, this is not about ignorance but ideology – it signals a difference in values. (Lockdown and mask-wearing, like climate action, seems to constrain the liberty to do as you please.) The problem with getting someone like Donald Trump (or at least, many of his supporters; Trump himself defies categorization as well as belief) to heed science is almost orthogonal to the question of whether he “trusts” it or not.

So when science is traduced or ignored, the answer is not to formulate an airtight philosophical argument for its veracity. That problem is vastly complex, connected for example to cognitive biases, access to information, political tribalism and the boundless human capacity for self-deception. It needs to be understood as a social, psychological and political issue. All this is far too much to be tackled in so short a text, but Oreskes does an excellent job of showing scientists and their advocates where they might usefully focus their energies.

• 2019 Princeton University Press £22hb 376pp