Why march for science? Because the value of social trust under attack by Trump is worth fighting
by Paul Rosenberg at Salon
http://www.salon.com/2017/04/22/why-march-for-science-because-the-value-of-social-trust-under-attack-by-trump-is-worth-fighting-for/
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But there’s another fundamental issue involved that doesn’t receive nearly enough attention when people talk about science: the value of social trust, which is the glue that holds everything human together. Although the notion of the isolated scientific genius is a popular one — and accurately captures a particular aspect of the scientific process — modern science is a profoundly social endeavor. “If I have seen further,” Isaac Newton famously wrote in a letter to Robert Hooke, “it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Even the quintessential lone genius of classical physics and mathematics was not an isolated figure at all, however much he might have seemed that way to others.
Three centuries later, it’s inescapable that scientific progress is only possible because the norms of the scientific community ensure high levels of social trust. Scientists routinely rely on the integrity of the work of others in everything they do, to a degree that would be unthinkable, say, in the world of real estate developers, used-car salesmen or politicians. Now, at a time when social trust in general is so badly frayed, it’s a time to recognize and celebrate its fundamental role in making science work for all of us.
To really appreciate what I’m talking about, consider what philosopher Brian Keeley wrote in a 1999 paper, “Of Conspiracy Theories.” The problem with “unwarranted conspiracy theories,” he explained, “is not their unfalsifiability, but rather the increasing degree of skepticism required by such theories as positive evidence for the conspiracy fails to obtain.”
What Keeley is referring to here includes what’s come to be known as conspiracy theory’s “self-sealing” characteristic: if evidence against the conspiracy theory comes from a new source Y, the theory expands to include Y as part of the conspiracy. This self-sealing property is key to how global warming denialists have come to believe that vast majority of the world’s climate scientists are involved in perpetuating a “hoax,” as Donald Trump has called it. “As a result of this process,” Keeley writes, “an initial claim that a small group of people is conspiring gives way to claims of larger and larger conspiracies.”
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