Erin Nash (Durham University)
I develop the 'Probability Argument', which highlights the consequences, in democratic societies, of non-experts having distorted perceptions of the probabilities that empirical hypotheses are correct. In contrast to both the 'deficit' and 'cultural cognition' models of science communication, my model accounts for a number of considerations that have been overlooked in the literature, such as the impact of the communication of misinformation, the place of higher-order evidence (i.e. evidence about putative experts, and the processes they have used to arrive at their first-order claims), and the role that intermediaries play in the communication of both first- and higher-order evidence.
