Why Trust Science?

by Naomi Oreskes

  101. See note 89.

  102. Ibid., p. 79.

  103. Smithson, “Social Theories of Ignorance,” in Proctor and Schiebinger, Agnotology. See also Giddens, Consequences of Modernity.

  104. Oreskes et al., “Viewpoint,” p. 20.

  105. Oreskes, “Why We Should Trust Scientists.”

  106. Jon Krosnick, this volume, questions this assumption; I return to it in the discussion section.

  107. Longino, Fate of Knowledge, pp. 106–7.

  108. Yearley et al., “Perspectives on Global Warming.”

  109. On the idea of partisanal and non-partisanal knowledge, see Staley, “Partisanal Knowledge: On Hayek and Heretics in Climate Science and Discourse.”

  110. Oppenheimer, Jamieson, Oreskes, et al., Discerning Experts.

  111. Laland et al., “The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis”; Laland et al., “Does Evolutionary Theory Need a Rethink?”

  112. Laland, “What Use Is an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis?”

  113. Part of the issue involves the question of whether evolutionary theory is in crisis, and therefore EES is a new paradigm, or not. Kevin Laland says that it is not; philosopher John Dupre says it is. See for example: Coyne, “Another Philosopher Proclaims a Nonexistent ‘Crisis’ in Evolutionary Biology.”

  114. Oreskes, The Rejection of Continental Drift.

  115. Neumann, “Can We Survive Technology?” Saxon, “William B. Shockley, 79, Creator of Transistor and Theory on Race.”

  116. Redd, “Werner von Braun: Rocket Pioneer.”

  117. Laura Stark notes that it is often assumed that professional experience and knowledge translates into “rare abilities to judge the quality, veracity, or ethics of knowledge outside of research settings.” She does not explicitly state that this assumption is incorrect, but ample evidence from the history of science and her own work on Institutional Review Boards supports the conclusion that it is. See Stark, Behind Closed Doors, p. 31.

  118. On lay expertise, see, for example, Epstein, Impure Science.

  119. Mohan, Science and Technology in Colonial India.

  120. Goonailake, “Mining Civilizational Knowledge.”

  121. Ellis et al., “Inpatient General Medicine Is Evidence Based”; Ernst, “The Efficacy of Herbal Medicine—an Overview.”

  122. Goonatilake, “Mining Civilizational Knowledge.”

  123. Scott, “Science for the West.”

  124. Semali and Kincheloe, What Is Indigenous Knowledge?; Schiebinger and Swan, Colonial Botany. An excellent discussion of the general issue of how to understand indigenous knowledge as science, both in general and in the specific case of Cree hunting practices, is found in Scott, “Science for the West.” For a problematization of the issue, see Agrawal, “Dismantling the Divide between Indigenous and Scientific Knowledge.”

  125. Walker, “Navigating Oceans and Cultures.”

  126. Conis, “Jenny McCarthy’s New War on Science”; Campbell, “The Great Global Warming Hustle.”

  127. Madsen et al., “A Population-Based Study of Measles, Mumps, and Rubella Vaccination and Autism”; Taylor et al., “Vaccines Are Not Associated with Autism: An Evidence-Based Meta-Analysis of Case-Control and Cohort Studies.” See also discussion in Mnookin, Panic Virus.

  128. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern; Latour, Politics of Nature; Shapin and Schaefer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump.

  129. Pearce et al., “Beyond Counting Climate Consensus”; Oreskes and Cook, Response to Pearce (In Press); Rice, “Beyond Climate Consensus.”

  130. The author of Positively False: Exposing the Myths around HIV and AIDS, Joan Shenton, became skeptical of modern medicine and Big Pharma after suffering severe iatragenic illness. From there she went on to denying the link between HIV and AIDS, and from there to become a climate change skeptic/denier. I have met Joan and once enjoyed a nice dinner with her at a conference. I do not doubt her experience of iatragenic illness, but I reject the slippery slope fallacy that has led her to suspect and reject science writ large.

  131. “Pope Claims GMOs Could Have ‘Ruinous Impact’ on Environment.”

  132. Zycher, “Shut Up, She Explained.”

  133. My own work is the obvious reference here (Oreskes and Conway, Merchants of Doubt, and Supran and Oreskes, Assessing ExxonMobil’s Climate Change Communications), but also the detailed documentation of industry obfuscation compiled by journalists, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and other NGOs: Banerjee, Song, and Hasemyer, “Exxon: The Road Not Taken”; Union of Concerned Scientists, “Exxon Mobil Report: Smoke Mirrors and Hot Air”; “Exxon Climate Denial Funding 1998–2014”; and The Royal Society, “Royal Society and Exxon Mobil.”

  134. Supran and Oreskes, Assessing ExxonMobil’s Climate Change Communications.

  135. Proctor and Schiebinger, Agnotology; Proctor, Golden Holocaust; Michaels, Doubt Is Their Product; Markowitz and Rosner, Deceit and Denial; Nestle, Soda Politics.

  136. When this manuscript was in draft form, a reviewer raised the issue of classified scientific research, as well as unpublished work done inside industry. I take up the question of classified research in my forthcoming work, Science on a Mission: American Oceanography from the Cold War to Climate Change. I argue there that the secrecy that classification entailed did in fact have serious adverse consequences for oceanography. That said, a key element in classified research that might be used to defend it as science is that much of it was in fact peer reviewed, albeit in classified journals. It may not have been public knowledge, but it was vetted by communities of experts and subject to critical interrogation. (For example, classified work in acoustics was not simply submitted to the US Navy, it was vetted by researchers in other institutions who had security clearances. This was, in my view, an imperfect system of vetting, but it was a system.) It meets the standard that I am advocating here. In contrast, a good deal of “in-house” industry research consists of reports that are not subject to open vetting. Indeed, this same reviewer noted that much tobacco industry science was “unpublished, of course,” but “that does not mean it was not scientific research.” That is a very interesting claim, but I would argue that if research is not published, then any vetting process is necessarily internal, and therefore not open. It would also be subject to the very conflicts of interest to which I am objecting. And consider this: when I worked in the mining industry, I wrote reports for my company on scientific topics, but they were not published. They do not appear on my CV. I am willing to say that those reports contained elements of scientific research, but they were not, in fact, science, because they were not subject to open vetting. And, perhaps justly, you will not find them in any science citation index or google scholar search.

  137. Proctor and Schiebinger, Agnotology; Proctor, Golden Holocaust; Markowitz and Rosner, Deceit and Denial; Nestle, Unsavory Truth; Oreskes and Conway, Merchants of Doubt.

  138. HADGirl, “10 Evil Vintage Cigarette Ads Promising Better Health.” See also Brandt, Cigarette Century.

  139. Oreskes and Conway, Merchants of Doubt; Michaels, Doubt Is Their Product.

  Chapter 2. Science Awry

  1. Wang, “ ‘Post-Truth’ Named 2016 Word of the Year by Oxford Dictionaries.”

  2. Colbert, “Post-Truth” Is Just a Rip-Off of “Truthiness.”

  3. Jasanoff, States of Knowledge; Latour, Science in Action; see also Latour, One More Turn after the Social Turn.

  Like any term that has come into widespread use, co-production is sometimes used in diverse ways—see http://scitechpopo.blogspot.com/2011/02/explaining-co-production.html. Jasanoff’s student Clark Miller concludes that the key concept is that “the proposition that the ways in which we know and represent the world (both nature and society) are inseparable from the ways in which we choose to live in it” (Jasanoff, States of Knowledge, p. 2). On some level, this is an inarguable claim—no one can escape the world in which he or she lives. My concern is with the implication that all specific scientific knowledge claims are themselves co-
produced. This would seem to imply that society at large plays an equal role in establishing them as do domain experts, and that there is no prospect, even in principle, of expert adjudication that stands apart from social context. While it seems to me inarguable that in practice experts can never stand wholly apart, it seems to me also inarguable that there are practices and ideals that expert groups follow in order to try to adjudicate knowledge claims on the basis of empirical adequacy, and in a manner that strives to be more rather than less independent of economic, religious, or other concerns. Objectivity, for example, is a regulative ideal that plays an important role in scientific evaluation of evidence. This does not mean it ever is, or could be, entirely achieved, but a community that holds onto it as a regulative ideal will likely produce different epistemic outcomes than one that does not.

  4. On the relation between trust and social and cultural identity, see Wynne, May the Sheep Safely Graze?

  5. Latour, Woolgar, and Salk, Laboratory Life, p. 285. One reviewer queries what Latour means by this. Of course, we would have to ask him, but I take this to mean that scientific claims are performances, to be accepted or rejected by their audiences.

  6. Latour, “Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” Of course, the gist of most of Latour’s writing is to problematize the distinction between matters of fact and matters of concern. More recently, Latour has acknowledged the cultural failure of climate scientists; see Latour, Facing Gaia and Down to Earth.

  7. Latour, Woolgar, and Salk, Laboratory Life, p. 285. One reviewer queries what Latour means by this. Of course, we would have to ask him, but I take this to mean that scientific claims are performances, to be accepted or rejected by their audiences.

  8. Leiserowitz and Smith, “Knowledge of Climate Change across Global Warming’s Six Americas.”

  9. James, “Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth,” p. 222.

  10. James, pp. 222–23.

  11. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution; Bloor, The Enigma of the Aerofoil.

  12. Structural realists would argue that our prior theories, if they seemed to work, cannot have been wholly incorrect, but must have encapsulated some truth about the natural world, such as some element of its physical or mathematical structure. That is to say, there is some kind of continuity, either in form or structure even if not in content, between the old theory and the one that replaced it. See https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/structural-realism/.

  13. On the role of the media, see also Ladher, Nutrition Science in the Media. On the misuse of statistics in nutrition, see Schoenfeld and Ioannides, “Is Everything We Eat Associated with Cancer?”. On the adverse impact of industry disinformation see Lustig, Fat Chance and Nestle, Soda Politics.

  14. Oreskes et al., “Viewpoint: Why Disclosure Matters.” I believe one solution to corruption is fairly simple: evidence suggests many cases can be avoided through appropriate forms of self-awareness and disclosure, and those that are not avoided must be sanctioned. In many areas of science, there are few and generally only weak sanctions for violations of research integrity. For example, scientists are rarely sanctioned for failing to disclose external funding sources.

  15. Cohen, Revolution in Science.

  16. Oreskes, The Rejection of Continental Drift, introduction.

  17. Laudan, “A Confutation of Convergent Realism.” For qualifications, see Musgrave, “The Ultimate Argument for Scientific Realism.” For another argument for convergent realism, see Hardin and Rosenberg, “In Defense of Convergent Realism.” For a detailed summary and analysis of the arguments surrounding scientific realism, see Psillos, Scientific Realism.

  18. Oreskes, The Rejection of Continental Drift.

  19. In his popular book Facing Up, Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg claimed that there are “truths that once discovered will form a permanent part of human knowledge.” Weinberg, Facing Up, p. 201. One charitable view of this claim is to say that yes, there may be some such truths; the problem is that we have no way of knowing which ones they are! But I think the problem is deeper than this: because scientists typically do not study their own history, and because old knowledge can often be translated into the language of the new, scientists often are not aware or do not recognize the actual loss of knowledge over time. They assume that new work adds to and builds on the old—that science is cumulative—rather than seeing the ways in which old knowledge has been discarded or inadvertently lost. They do not recognize the two frontiers of knowledge: that which we are about to discover, and that which was discovered long ago and we are about to forget.

  20. This reminds me of a well-known joke about an old man who was asked, “Have you lived in Vermont your whole life?” to which he replies, “Not yet.”

  21. This paragraph is taken from Oreskes, The Rejection of Continental Drift, p. 3.

  22. See, for example, Feldman, “Climate Scientists Defend IPCC Peer Review as Most Rigorous in History.”

  23. This account is drawn, with her permission, from the Masters thesis of my former student, Katharine Saunders Bateman, “Sex in Education: A Case Study of the Establishment of Scientific Authority in the Service of a Social Agenda.”

  24. Showalter and Showalter, “Victorian Women and Menstruation,” p. 86.

  25. Further proof that old ideas never entirely die: Evidently president Donald Trump believes something similar to this: that each human being is somewhat like a non-rechargeable battery, containing a finite amount of energy. This apparently is why he chooses not to exercise. See Rettner, “Trump Thinks That Exercising Too Much Uses Up the Body’s ‘Finite’ Energy.”

  26. The idea of “energeticism” became significant in late nineteenth-century biology, see, for example, William Coleman’s classic work, Biology in the Nineteenth Century.

  27. Bateman, “Sex in Education: A Case Study of the Establishment of Scientific Authority in the Service of a Social Agenda,” p. 8.

  28. Clarke, Sex in Education; or, a Fair Chance for Girls, p. 37.

  29. Bateman, “Sex in Education: A Case Study of the Establishment of Scientific Authority in the Service of a Social Agenda,” p. 9.

  30. Ibid., p. 3.

  31. In fairness, educators at the time did also warn against excessive sexual activity in men, particularly onanism. See Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain. But men could control their sexual activity through discipline; women could not control their reproductive systems.

  32. Bateman, “Sex in Education: A Case Study of the Establishment of Scientific Authority in the Service of a Social Agenda,” p. 4.

  33. Clarke, Sex in Education; or, a Fair Chance for Girls, p. 140. Here we see as well the influence of Darwinian thinking.

  34. Paul, “Eugenic Anxieties, Social Realities, and Political Choices,” pp. 676–77; Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, p. 111.

  35. Bateman, “Sex in Education: A Case Study of the Establishment of Scientific Authority in the Service of a Social Agenda,” p. 16.

  36. Clarke, Sex in Education; or, a Fair Chance for Girls.

  37. Bateman, “Sex in Education: A Case Study of the Establishment of Scientific Authority in the Service of a Social Agenda,” p. 20.

  38. Ibid., p. 23.

  39. Ibid., p. 25.

  40. Hall, Adolescence, p. 589. In 1874 the State Board of Health of Massachusetts did a survey of 160 physicians and school administrators, which was published in Popular Science Monthly, as well as in Clarke’s 1874 sequel to Sex in Education, called The Building of the Brain. They asked respondents to answer, “based on personal observation,” the question, “Is one sex more liable than the other to suffer from health from attendance in school?” One hundred and nine respondents said females were more liable than males, 1 said males more than females, 31 said equally liable, and 4 said neither. One hundred and twenty said puberty increases this liability. It is unclear how respondents were selected. See Bateman, “Sex in Education: A Case Study of the Establishment of Scientific Authority in the Serv
ice of a Social Agenda,” p. 18. This was also sometimes cited as support for the Limited Energy Therapy, but note that this study provided no empirical evidence; it was essentially an opinion poll. This is one reason that I am personally dubious of expert elicitation as a form of evidence in contemporary science.

  41. As Dorothy E. Roberts argued in her recent Tanner Lectures at Harvard, we can easily imagine similar claims being resurrected today, or in the future, in new genetic packages. Roberts, The Ethics of Biosocial Science | The New Biosocial and the Future of Ethical Science.

  42. This discussion is drawn from my first book, Oreskes, The Rejection of Continental Drift.

  43. Ibid., p. 65; Gould, Ever since Darwin, p. 161.

  44. Oreskes, The Rejection of Continental Drift, p. 120.

  45. Ibid., p. 126.

  46. Ibid., p. 156.

  47. Laudan, From Mineralogy to Geology.

  48. Oreskes, The Rejection of Continental Drift, p. 136.

  49. Ibid.

  50. Hallam, Great Geological Controversies.

  51. Chamberlin, “Investigation versus Propagandism.”

  52. Oreskes, The Rejection of Continental Drift, p. 139.

  53. Ibid., p. 151.

  54. Ibid., p. 227.

  55. Ibid., chs. 5–6.