Why Democracies Need Science

by Harry Collins, Robert Evans

We live in times of increasing public distrust of the main institutions of modern society. Experts, including scientists, are suspected of working to hidden agendas or serving vested interests. The solution is usually seen as more public scrutiny and more control by democratic institutions – experts must be subservient to social and political life.

In this book, Harry Collins and Robert Evans take a radically different view. They argue that, rather than democracies needing to be protected from science, democratic societies need to learn how to value science in this new age of uncertainty. By emphasizing that science is a moral enterprise, guided by values that should matter to all, they show how science can support democracy without destroying it and propose a new institution – The Owls – that can mediate between science and society and improve technological decision-making for the benefit of all.

Genres: Science, Sociology, Politics

200 pages, Paperback

Published March 27, 2017

Reviews

[Geoff · Rating 2 out of 5]

Really written for those with detailed knowledge and interest in “Science and Technology studies” which, as it turns out, is probably not me.

This felt like walking into a room where people were engaged in round four of an argument and had drifted so far from the main point that I didn’t care to stay and listen.

[Jop De · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very timely, relevant and spot on analysis of the role science should play in society. In a convincing way, the authors go beyond the science wars dichotomy of logic positivism and relativism.

Wave one, they argue, drew a naive picture of value free, truth finding science. Wave two showed its weaknesses. Now, wave three makes clear that despite science cannot be value free, it should still aspire to. Just like a judge or a journalist will never be fully objective and should still aspire to be as much as possible.

The role of the owls
So how can science and politics be separated as much as possible? Herefore, Collins and Evans introduce different types of birds. Most scientists, the argue, are like eagles: strong but with only the ability to look straight ahead.

The other type, mostly social scientists and occasionally scientist, or, for instance, science journalist, do have the ability to look 360 degrees and see how science actually works. These are the owls, who, the authors argue, should mediate between scientists and society to enable evidence based policy, taking into account not the truth, the opinions of certain prominent scientists, but the degree of consensus.

I'm wondering how scientists, who often are not fond of social sciences, will respond to this proposition, but it really makes sense.
Must read for anyone involved in science, society and policy.

[Sharad Pandian · Rating 2 out of 5]

They acknowledge: "This is not a worldly-wise book, it is not smartly sophisticated; it is desperately grasping for the last vestiges of naïveté" (17). Clearly.

A summary of sorts they provide near the end:

What this book has to achieve is the establishment of the central role of science in democracy. It has tried to undo, to some extent, the erosion of science’s cultural status that has been a constant motif since the 1960s.219 But we have also tried to answer the practical questions that follow on any re-arrangement of the cultural terrain and not simply go back to the 1950s and earlier. Who decides who is a scientific expert? What do we do when scientific experts disagree? How do we design decision-making institutions that take science into account in a sound way, without creating technocracy? Our solution to this is The Owls. Disappointingly, it is just one more committee but, more interestingly, it is a committee that melds the social scientific understanding that has been generated over the last half-century together with science, so as to solve the social scientific problem that needs to be solved for science and technology-related policymaking: what is the current consensus within the scientific community? This isn’t a scientific problem because it isn’t asking, ‘What is the scientific or technological truth of the matter?’ It is asking, ‘What do scientists and technologists currently believe and how firmly do they believe it?’ After this question has been clearly and publicly answered, the rest is politics. As contributors to the work of The Owls, social scientists will do more than uncover the problem, they will be part of the solution.

The foundation of the entire argument is as thin as air – a preference for democracy and a preference for the values of science with an acknowledgement that there is a strong overlap between the two sets of values. The foundation is a choice without further justification. If this choice is not compelling, then the book will not be compelling. Furthermore, in so far as the choice rests on a certain description of the form of life of science that is at variance with the way much of science is practised, the entire argument is vulnerable to the charge of naïveté. Worse, it is a naïveté that grows out of turning the gaze away from the many brilliant detailed studies of science that have characterized the last half-century of ‘science studies’. What we are grasping for is the possibility that, unlike so many other professional institutions, science can escape from the erosion of its values in the face of the ubiquitous financial and political pressures. It is a naïveté based on a conception of method that separates the day-to-day activities of scientists into two types: those that are ‘accidental’, and those that are formative of the way of being in the world – the ‘formative aspirations’. It is a naïveté based on an argument about two characteristics of these formative aspirations. First, that science’s whole purpose is the search for the truth, which means that, though more and more cases of fraud are uncovered and though there is more and more distortion of science’s activities brought about by the lure of mundane reward, we can say of science, in a way that we cannot say of most other professions, that to allow this kind of distortion is to cease to be doing science. Once we could say this of art and religion too, but it is not so certain that we still can. The search for truth is, however, integral with the very notion of science so those for whom science is, and remains, a vocation are bound to see any other goal as a negation of their existence. Second, whatever we social scientists say, scientists are sure they can, eventually, find the truth of the matter, if their search is long enough and assiduous enough. As long as scientists believe this, then their methodology demands that they preserve their value system. (177-8)

[I Read, Therefore I Blog · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book defends what Collins and Evans call Wave Three of Science Studies, which aimed to preserve the expertise of science and better manage its trade off with democratic accountability most notably through establishing a new institution called The Owls who can mediate between the two groups as some kind of honest broker in a highly theoretical read with noble intentions but which never really convinced me.