Trust and the Feminist Politics of Science

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.

Daniel Hicks (University of California, Davis)
Feminist philosophers of science continue to draw on ideas about trust and trustworthiness developed by feminist ethicist Annette Baier more than thirty years ago (Baier 1986). Why does Baier remain popular among feminist philosophers? In this paper, I suggest that Baier's account of trust supports a characteristic kind of feminist critique of science. This feature of Baier's account means that it is also relevant, as a descriptive theory, to contemporary empirical work on conservative attacks on environmental science.

Maya Goldenberg (University of Guelph)
Public controversies over scientific claims such as the safety and efficacy of vaccines are commonly understood as wars over scientific evidence (Largent et al. 2016). Against the huge body of literature supporting the scientific consensus view, opponents pick out selective, and often disreputable, counter-evidence. The response to public resistance is then to separate “fact” from “fiction” and to either bemoan scientific illiteracy among the general publics (Mooney and Kirshenbaum 2009) or fret over a destructive cultural embracing of anti-intellectualism (Jacoby 2008) and the resulting “death of expertise” (Nichols 2017). Policy elites worry over this troubling public acceptance of irrationalism and non-expert points of view insofar as the “death of expertise” can harm the misled publics and threaten democracy (Nichols 2017). The problem as currently formulated lies squarely with the publics, while science and its institutions require little or no scrutiny. At most, one hears the tepid criticism that scientists could be better communicators. Philosophical scholarship on trust and expertise in relation to science lend novel consideration regarding this state of affairs. Revisiting the concept of trust, specifically the “goodwill” component of Baier’s (1991) account of epistemic trustworthiness, and Hardwig’s (1985) “moral legitimacy” of experts as a pre-requisite for rational epistemic dependence, invites thinking about how scientific institutions have contributed to this breakdown in the public trust. STS scholarship strongly advances the position that trust is endemic to science—it supports knowledge creation, including the management of dissent, as well as consensus building. Moreover, without trust, science cannot achieve its aim of developing universal knowledge, that is, knowledge that should be acceptable for all people regardless of social location (Scheman 2011). To actually operationalize truth across social locations requires the trust of numerous stakeholders, including members of the publics. STS has thereby invited a more nuanced discussion of expertise vis-a-vis the publics. With these considerations in place, I will make the argument that public resistance to scientific claims are symptoms of poor public trust in the scientific consensus and the institutions that underwrite the epistemic and moral legitimacy of the consensus statement. Paying attention to the epistemic and social aims of science—especially applied sciences that impact human, animal, or environmental health and wellbeing—reveals lines of responsibility on the part of scientific institutions to earn and maintain public trust. Public mistrust is thereby reframed as a problem of scientific governance rather than a problem with the publics.

Ben Almassi (Governors State University)
While he is among the most prominent, Bruno Latour is not the only contemporary scholar to reflect on his earlier contributions to science studies with some retrospective regret and prospective resolve regarding his complicity in science denialism, climate skepticism, and other manufactroversies. Given the ascendency of merchants of doubt, should those with Latour put criticism aside and join the scientists they study in circling the wagons, or is there a productive role still for science-studies scholarship to question and challenge scientists and scientific institutions? Here I argue for the latter, looking to post-positivist feminist philosophy — and in particular, the sort of standpoint empiricism described by Kristen Intemann and exemplified by Sandra Harding and Alison Wylie, among others — as a blueprint. “Given political and conceptual commitments that make corrosive hyper-relativism as uncongenial as unreflective objectivism,” Wylie explains, “feminists have been exploring positions between, or ‘beyond,’ these polarized alternatives.” So characterized, a feminist philosopher of science who grounds her analysis in a detailed understanding of scientific practice is not thereby science’s simple champion nor its antagonist. So how might this kind of relationship be meaningfully described: is she a kind of loyal opposition to science, or perhaps its gadfly? While both of these notions offer useful approaches to science studies, in my estimation neither quite captures the interdependency and interestedness of feminist philosophers of science and their objects of inquiry. I suggest that we may be better served by a notion of trustworthy science criticism, built on analyses of trust and trustworthiness developed by Annette Baier and Karen Jones, among others, and attendant to the dynamics of interdependency in trust relationships.

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.