Science, STS and Populism: Why Democracies Need Science Studies

• In Event: Future of Politics and Politics of the Future - I

Abstract

When Kellyanne Conway coined the phrase ‘alternative fact’ to dismiss controversy about the size of the crowd that attended President Trump’s inauguration she did two things. First – and presumably intentionally – she told citizens that they could not trust the so-called experts who claimed the evidence, which included photographs, showed that there was a larger crowd at President Obama’s inauguration. Second – and presumably unintentionally – she posed a challenge to science studies scholars: how to respond to a claim that what appears to be the evidence of our own eyes, namely the photographs, cannot be believed?

In this paper, we explore the responses to the challenge and assess the extent to which they resonate with or undermine the social constructivist accounts of science in particular and expertise in general. We argue that there is some clear overlap between the two positions, though deny that this equates to causal influence. More importantly, however, we argue that the idea of ‘alternative facts’ does not negate value of constructivist analysis of science. It does, however, require some new ways of demonstrating that relevance. We conclude the paper by arguing that one way in which this can be done is by foregrounding the values that make scientific communities ‘scientific’ and showing how these values provide moral, not epistemic, reasons for preferring knowledge made in this way over knowledge made in other ways.

Authors

• Rob Evans, Cardiff University

• Harry Collins, Cardiff University