Heidi Grasswick (Middlebury College)
When commentators lament the apparent lack of public trust in science, they often do so in exactly those very general terms, referring to “the” public and to “science” in the singular, as though there is a single attitude of trust across the board that is considered desirable. Of course, such generalizations are often meant to be shorthand for a more complex terrain of various publics and various sciences. But it is nonetheless a damaging use of rhetoric, in that it encourages analysts to ignore the variation that exists both across the concerns of differently situated citizens, and across different scientific practices themselves. It can also be heard as a rallying cry for a (relatively) high degree of trust that “ought” to be granted all to those knowledge production practices that warrant the term “scientific”. Such a defense of “scientism” is itself problematic, as numerous philosophers of science and STS scholars have argued. One of the fundamental contributions of feminist epistemologies has been to investigate epistemic issues situationally. Feminists have argued that all knowing is perspectival and limited by one’s social location (Haraway, 1988; Harding, 1991). Thus, if there are normative demands that inquirers should live up to, including whether and when they should trust communities of experts to know for them, those demands must take account of what is reasonable and available for knowers in their particular situations (Scheman, 2001). Such a situational approach underwrites and motivates the pluralist analysis of relations of trust between variously situated lay persons and various communities of experts that I develop in this paper. Though some theorists take trust to be a synonym for reliance, others, including feminist trust theorists such as Baier and Jones (Baier, 1986; Jones, 1996), have emphasized that there is a moral, relational, and attitudinal component to trust. I adapt their work on interpersonal trust to explain how laypersons have relationships of epistemic trust with knowledge-generating institutions and communities (Frost-Arnold, 2014). In so doing, I also expand the classic analysis of trust in testimony as requiring conditions of speaker sincerity and competence. In the case of institutions and communities with whom we have perhaps loosely defined yet longstanding histories, sincerity needs to be broadened to become a “sincerity-care” condition, by which the expert community cares for the nonexpert’s epistemic interests in a broad sense, and the competency requirement must involve multiple epistemic competencies that would justify designating epistemic labor to a particular community of inquirers, such as scientific research teams. Finally, I complicate relations of scientific trust by investigating how our networks of trust relations include an array of institutions such as those of government, the media, industry and education that are also involved in knowledge production, circulation, and assessment, and can impact our trust relations with scientific institutions. I conclude by suggesting that the most serious concern is not so much individual incidents of failures of trust, but rather the tendency of both trust and distrust to “travel”, allowing problems in trust relationships between some lay communities and scientific communities to spread to other public-science relationships.
