ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Numbers Don’t Lie: The Making of a Statistical Fact

• In Event: Objectivity Reconsidered

English Abstract

Taking as a point of departure the self-immolation of American environmentalist David Buckel in 2018 and his invocation of “early deaths” caused by fossil fuel pollution, this paper investigates how scientific categories, epidemiological models, and statistical predictions shape public understandings of environmental harm. I focus on two widely cited studies (Caiazzo et al 2013; Dedoussi and Barrett 2014) on combustion emissions to demonstrate how the production of a statistical fact is embedded in socioeconomic conditions that determine whose lives are rendered expendable. I contend that while the studies may be scientifically valid, they nonetheless reproduce ableist, ageist, and racialized assumptions by privileging standardized metrics such as life-years lost, and by abstracting both the populations most affected and the agents responsible for pollution.

Drawing on STS frameworks including Ludwik Fleck’s “thought styles” (1979 [1935]) Thomas Kuhn’s “paradigm shifts” (1962) and Max Liboiron’s decolonial critique of scientific objectivity (2021), I trace how anticipatory logics and probabilistic thinking turn scientific claims into media narratives, where they harden into seemingly established facts. Juxtaposing Buckel’s environmental rhetoric with the structural violence embedded in epidemiological modeling, this paper highlights the epistemic limits of scientific knowledge production and the political life of statistical facts. It calls for a historically attuned understanding of how scientific authority is established and maintained, and how alternative research paradigms might enact accountability to the communities whose lives (and deaths) are quantified, predicted, and often entirely ignored or erased.

Author

• Sofia Varino