Why Trust Science?

by Naomi Oreskes

  To return to the question: Would you trust a person who has no values? The answer is obvious: you would not. Such as person would be a sociopath. Nor would you trust a person whose values you considered to be anathema to your own. But if you thought that person shared at least some of your values—even if perhaps not all of them—you might be willing to listen. And you might accept some of what you were hearing. Therefore, whether or not claims of value-neutrality are epistemologically defensible, it is clear that they do not work in practice, because they do not work to permit communication and build bonds of trust.

  The dominant style in scientific writing is not only to hide the values of the authors, but to hide their humanity altogether. Not only are values unexpressed, emotions expunged, and adjectives eschewed, but the word “I” is implicitly forbidden, even in single-authored papers.24 This is tied to the performance of objectivity: The ideal scientific paper is written not only as if the author had no values or feelings, but as if there were no human author at all.25

  Scientists may feel that there is simply no way for them to forge bonds of trust with climate change deniers or people who think the world is six thousand years old. Perhaps that is true. I once despaired publicly of reaching millenarians whose eschatology tells them the world is about to end, so why worry about climate change? But when I did so despair, the next day several correspondents offered me strategies to reach them based on Christian values and teachings.26 People suggested that the way to reach people was through their values. And social science research supports this idea.27

  Conclusion

  In suppressing their values and insisting on the value-neutrality of science, scientists have gone down a wrong road.28 They have made the mistake of thinking that people would trust them if they believed that science was value-free.

  Merton certainly thought so, but he may have been wrong. It may be that the opposite is true. Here’s why.

  While the rejection of evolution or the denial of anthropogenic climate change has led analysts to focus on the value clashes between scientists and politically and socially conservative Christians, Libertarians, and Republicans, I believe that the values that motivate most scientists overlap with the values of most Americans, including many conservatives and religious believers. Recently, some scientists have begun to declare their values publicly, in part, I think, because they believe that these values are broadly shared and therefore offer a basis for building bonds of trust.29 I think they are right.

  Most scientists I know want to prevent disease and improve human health, strengthen the economy through innovation and discovery, and protect the natural beauty of America and the world. Former Republican congressman Bob Inglis has spoken eloquently of visiting the Great Barrier Reef with a marine biologist. As the two men, side by side, admired the stunning beauty of the life around the reef, Inglis had a realization: He saw “Creation,” the scientist saw “biodiversity,” but they were, in fact, looking at, caring about, and cherishing the same thing.

  This is a good story, because most people appreciate nature in at least some way. National parks and forests are visited by large numbers of diverse Americans—hiking, fishing, camping, driving, photographing, wondering, complaining—but sharing some appreciation for what they are seeing and experiencing. Yet, there are genuine conflicts of value in our relationship to the natural world. The desire of some to ride snowmobiles through Yellowstone in winter conflicts with the desire of others for contemplative recreation. Nearly all Americans would affirm their belief in freedom, yet what we understand by that word and which particular freedoms we prioritize can vary greatly. As Isaiah Berlin memorably put it, freedom for wolves can mean death for lambs.30 Agreeing on the word “freedom” only gets us so far.

  Historian of religion Stephen Prothero has noted that while Jews, Catholics, and Protestants all affirm the Ten Commandments, there are surprisingly different versions of them.31 Catholics, for example, abandoned the injunction against graven images onto which Jews and Protestants firmly held, and having thus lost a commandment—and finding themselves awkwardly left with only nine—they divided the last one into two, the ninth for coveting your neighbor’s wife and the tenth for coveting everything else. Nonetheless, these three religions—which encompass about 70% of American adults—agree that we should not kill, steal, commit adultery, or bear false witness. They also agree that we should worship only one God, not take his [sic] name in vain, keep the Sabbath, and honor our fathers and mothers. Islam agrees with these, although it stresses charity more centrally than the other three do: zakat—the giving of alms—is one of its five pillars. Yet note how similar the word zakat is to the Hebrew word tzedakah—charitable giving—which is considered a moral obligation in Jewish life. Charity is a central Christian value as well. Observant Mormons tithe.

  Even as we disagree about many political issues, our core values overlap to a great degree. To the extent that we can make those areas of agreement clear—and explain how they relate to scientific work—we might be able to overcome the feelings of skepticism and distrust that often prevail, particularly distrust that is rooted in the perception of a clash of values.

  So let me be clear about my values.

  I wish to prevent avoidable human suffering and to protect the beauty and diversity of life on Earth. I wish to preserve the joy of winter sports, the majesty of coral reefs, and the wonder of giant sequoia trees. I love thunderstorms, but I do not want them to become more dangerous. I do not want flooding and hailstorms and hurricanes to destroy communities and kill innocent people. I do want to make sure that all of our children and grandchildren and generations to come, both in the United States and around the globe, have the same opportunity to live well and prosper that I have had. I don’t want us all to become poorer, as we spend increasing sums of money repairing the damage of climate change, damage that could have been prevented at far lower cost.32 I don’t believe it is fair for the profits of a few corporations to become the losses of us all. I believe that government is necessary, but I have no desire to expand it unnecessarily.

  I also believe, as Pope Francis has stressed, that Earth is our common home and to disregard climate change is to disregard both nature and justice. As the Pope reminds us, his namesake was canonized because he “communed with all creation [and] felt called to care for all that exists.”33 Some would see such feelings of communion with Creation as at odds with cold-hearted scientific rationality, but in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was a commonplace among European naturalists that scientific investigations were a means to come closer to God. In this, they were following the words in the Wisdom of Solomon, 13:5, which tells us that “through the greatness and the beauty of creatures one comes to know by analogy their maker.” Or, as Haydn put it in his great oratorio of the late eighteenth century, the heavens are telling the glory of God—whatever we conceive that glory to be.

  I also believe that history proves what John Donne wrote nearly four hundred years ago, that “any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.” I believe that I am my brother’s keeper, and so are you. Is there not a reason, after all, that in Genesis the story that follows immediately on the heels of the Fall is the story of Cain and Abel?

  The Old Testament—the foundation of the world’s three great monotheistic religions—begins with Creation and so do the organizing myths and stories of most human societies. Whether we call it biodiversity or Creation or the Dreamtime or Mother Earth, climate change threatens it. Everything we know—from science, from history, from literature, from ethics—tells us that caring for our fellow citizen and caring for the environment are the same thing. The dichotomy of man versus environment, or jobs versus environment, or prosperity versus environment, is a dangerous fiction constructed to justify greed. It cynically warrants destruction in the name of the false prophet of progress.

  That is what I believe.

  FIGURE 2. Joel Pett Editorial Cartoon used with the permission of Joel P
ett and the Cartoonist Group. All rights reserved.

  If we fail to act on our scientific knowledge and it turns out to be right, people will suffer and the world will be diminished. The evidence for this is overwhelming.34 On the other hand, if we act on the available scientific conclusions and they turn out to be wrong, well, then, as the cartoonist says, we will have created a better world for nothing.

  COMMENTS

  Chapter 3

  THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF FROZEN PEAS

  Innocence, Violence, and Everyday Trust in Twentieth-Century Science

  Susan Lindee

  Public anger, mistrust, and political retribution against members of the scientific community for what they believe or what they do are not new. What is new today is what I would call “scale.” Scientific knowledge of direct and pressing practical importance is now being systematically rejected by some who stand at the pinnacle of global power, at a moment when the stakes are high for the survival of the planet. The scale of the problem of skepticism, doubt, and mistrust has escalated and taken new forms.1

  It is at the level of scale that I wish to focus in comments here. I want to draw your attention “down” to a more intimate scale and to suggest that everyday technologies make visible the imbrication of science in quotidian life, and that they generate an ambient trust that should be generally recognized and nurtured.2 I also propose that we have spent far too long not noticing or emphasizing this.3 We have not drawn on everyday trust as a resource in public campaigns to restore trust in science more generally.4 In their kitchens, up close, many people trust science implicitly, because it “works.”

  I realize that invoking the idea that “science works” is an unsatisfying theoretical response. As Oreskes’s nuanced discussion of philosophy of science suggests, a proper, satisfying solution should operate closer to the rational realms of thought, presumably made manifest in a social and intellectual system that can evoke particular forms of consensus and therefore philosophical and scientific legitimacy. I agree, I agree, this is how things should be. We should trust science because it is the best we can do, and because it operates by relatively open and reliable social rules of evidence (intersubjective reason!) that have proven to be generally trustworthy, if not perfect, over the long haul, in many different ways. The efficacy and power of these ways of making knowledge is easy to see and for many of us requires no special pleading, no remarkable claims about moral order, no philosophical buttressing.

  But in the populist spirit of our times, I suggest that instead we try to work our way up, from the toaster. The philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright has intermittently used the apparently simple and transparent technology of the everyday toaster to explore questions about causation.5 Pressing a lever on a toaster, she notes, causes the bread to drop in to the toaster and begin to brown. This is a widely known phenomenon—perhaps you made toast yourself recently. But Cartwright suggests that assigning a cause to this browning involves accepting two “unrelated” causes—the lever itself, and the connection forged by its action to the electrical current that causes the heat. A toaster, Cartwright proposes, provides a way of thinking about and disaggregating causes. Following in her footsteps, so to speak, I want to propose in turn that the toaster and its everyday kin (frozen peas, iPhones, recycling bins, and even manufactured “wood look” bookshelves …) also provide ways of thinking about trust and knowledge. I propose that everyday technology, widely trusted and even loved, can and should be re-scienced, made more intellectual—here in a country with such a long tradition of anti-intellectualism.6 I propose this because I suspect that making more visible the deep presence of knowledge in everyday life could be another strategy to challenge public views of science as untrustworthy: In practice, whether people admit it, recognize it, and can articulate it, or not, everyday trust in science is ubiquitous, central to the taken-for-granted worlds of Twitter, refrigeration, air travel, and pharmaceuticals.7

  Science is not just in the laboratory. It is everywhere and it is widely trusted and believed, I suspect sometimes by those who do not know that they are trusting science. We live in a physical world made of science and knowledge—we can’t get out of it, even if we move to a rural enclave with organic goats and tomato gardens, or if we live on a cluster of palm-fringed islands in the Pacific, in a place once routinely subjected to nuclear tests. The Marshall Islands are already today inundated with rising seawaters, and those rising waters, too, are scientific in more than one way.8 Every day we move through systems built from scientific knowledge. We depend deeply on science that works and we traditionally do not think about this fact. We often casually “naturalize” the technological world derived from knowledge systems, in practice severing things like frozen peas from the systems of laboratory knowledge that make them possible. But the systems of knowledge implicated in frozen peas are vast, almost astonishing: Modern geological sciences in the oil and gas industry, the chemical development of plastics, scientific agriculture and the genetic modification of crops, chemical understandings of the freezing process, even the social sciences of marketing and persuasion. Frozen peas are saturated with reliable truth.

  Many beloved and highly trusted technologies of everyday life are the direct result of legitimate and trustworthy scientific research. This simple fact is socially obscured and relentlessly disappeared in the boundary work around what counts as science and what counts as technology. While the terms are useful enough, their contemporary usage obscures important relationships between knowledge and practice—relationships that could be leveraged today to bring home to the general public the degree to which science is generally, almost universally trusted, even loved.

  Why is the everyday presence of science in everyday life so often illegible, invisible, unremarked—or even understood as irrelevant to the question of whether scientists and science as an enterprise can be trusted?

  Naturally I have a historical explanation. It hinges on the highly policed distinction between science and technology, and on why that distinction has been so important to the scientific community.

  The sharp and exaggerated differences that are commonly recognized between science and technology are a historical invention, fostered during the Cold War to distance elite, pure, science from technologies of war. They have a much deeper history, but the (contaminating?) mobilization of science in World Wars I and II became a profound turning point. World War I was “the chemists’ war,” transformed by the German chemist and later Nobelist Fritz Haber’s development of chemical weapons, and by the subsequent involvement of all forces in the use of a weapons technology later seen as illegitimate or even immoral. World War II was “the physicists’ war,” which ended with an application of “pure physics” that destroyed two Japanese cities, and led to arms races and arms-control efforts focused on a technology later seen as illegitimate and even immoral. For the scientific community in the United States and elsewhere, these technological achievements came to be seen as a profound threat to the legitimacy of science.

  Critics of scientists’ roles in both these wars included many leading scientists themselves, who expressed anguish about the roles of technical knowledge in state violence and about the actions of scientists themselves. After 1918 German chemists, blamed for the first use of chemical weapons, were excluded from scientific meetings and symposia for almost a decade.9 Meanwhile with the rise of fascism in the 1930s, the international scientific community began a sustained philosophical construction of free scientific inquiry as a guarantee of healthy democracy, a uniquely pure endeavor.10 Scientists’ moral character was presented as proof that scientific inquiry could be trusted—thus locating trust in the religious or spiritual qualities of individuals. As Shapin has suggested, this was a proposal already obsolete: The rise of a modern professionalized scientific workforce after the 1880s, and the materialism implicit in Darwinian evolution by natural selection and other scientific ideas, had already coalesced to undermine the idea that science was a reliable path to t
he will and purposes of God, or that the scientist therefore occupied a moral position (because of this divine path-making labor).

  By middle of the twentieth-century, earnest attention to the nature of science and its human dimensions was the focus of a compelling debate that can almost be seen as a reenchantment project (of science, not nature). Popular texts, such as Jacob Bronowski’s Science and Human Values (1956), catalogued scientific virtue and construed the scientist as a uniquely moral actor—who was emphatically not responsible for the violence of modern warfare (or the atomic bomb). Scientists issued programmatic statements, like Vannevar Bush’s Science, the Endless Frontier, that expressed a view of science as benevolent, central to the welfare of mankind, and linked to the robust health of a functioning democracy. Meanwhile lavish defense funding for virtually every conceivable form of science—physical, biological, social—provoked fears that scientists were becoming intellectual slaves of the security state. How to safeguard an endeavor in which security clearance procedures could lead to lost jobs? The rhetoric around the purity of science became almost shrill.

  And in these soaring narratives, technology occupied a distinctly different moral space—both less intellectual and less inherently moral—less pure. Technology was tangled up with social life and politics, messy, violent, dependent, and undeserving of the special status of science. Technology produced ruined cities and irradiated people. Science was doing something else.

  The discipline of the history of science itself emerged as a respectable academic discipline—with faculty appointments at multiple universities—during this midcentury moment of the promotion of science’s massive and unbridgeable distance from impure technology. Many historians of science in the 1950s took it as their mission to reinforce public faith in pure science as a bulwark against fascism and communism. In the 1950s historians told scholarly stories about autonomy and purity, even as all around them at their home institutions the living scientific community wrestled with lack of autonomy, new forms of nationalism, and a security state that enforced political conformity in draconian ways. Historians in this early efflorescence of the field engaged in intense boundary work, avoiding attention to (mere) technology, pseudoscience, or folk knowledge of any kind. For example the idea that alchemy was not science led to its complete erasure for decades from the life of the remarkable natural philosopher Isaac Newton—who himself as things turned out cared quite a bit about alchemy (in 1975, Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs brilliantly demonstrated the importance of alchemy to Newton’s thought).