Naomi Scheman (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities)
Discussions of trust in science initially focused on trust within scientific communities, as well as on deficit models to explain public distrust. There has recently been salutary attention to why diverse lay publics might rationally mistrust, if not “science,” then the various messengers that deliver scientific findings, and hence on responsibilities of scientists and those who share their institutional spaces (in particular, research university faculty) to ensure the actual and apparent trustworthiness of the institutions within which scientific research is embedded. I will focus on a neglected aspect of this responsibility by arguing that mutually trusting and trustworthy relationships between scientists and diverse lay publics are intrinsically and epistemically important, that is, that such relationships contribute directly to the explanatory aims of science. While trust and trustworthiness among scientists are (correctly) regarded as intrinsic to scientific practice, both because of the necessary dependence of scientists on the work of others as well as because of the destructive effects of research misconduct, trust on the part of lay publics is typically seen as only extrinsically related to scientific practice, as grounding, for example, public support of research or acceptance of research findings. Such trust is typically presumed—by scientists and philosophers of science—not to be intrinsic to the practice of science itself. My aim is to challenge this presumption. Many sciences deal with aspects of the world in which lay publics have an interest, and, unsurprisingly, concerns about public mistrust usually arise in such contexts (notably, biomedical, agricultural, and climate science). In such cases the science in question is about some part of the world that falls within the experience of non-scientists and about which nonscientists have not only interests but also knowledge. Scientific research typically (always?) involves abstraction, either conceptually, in the form of modelling (requiring identifying significant parameters while bracketing others), or materially (extracting the substance to be studied or isolating objects of study from environmental confounders). The results of such abstraction are meant to tell us something interesting, and often useful, about the objects of study as they exist “in the wild”; and it is here that the knowledge of lay publics has an important role to play—a role that is intrinsic to science as explanatory and that can be played only if there exists mutual trust between scientists and those who diversely live with the bodies and diseases, plants and animals, storms, droughts, and floods about which scientific research has something to tell us. It takes—I suggest—as much conceptual and material labor to reintegrate abstracted objects of knowledge back into the wild as it took to abstract them from it, and scientists typically lack the necessary skills. When this labor is given short shrift, or bypassed altogether, public mistrust is not only understandable, it is rationally well-founded, since, however excellent the science, its “aboutness” is undermined by the gap between what scientists directly study and the actual world, in all its messy complexity.
