How to Navigate in the Disagreement of Experts
Bloomsbury Academic eBooks · 2023
The book focuses on the analogies between the social values grounding liberal democracies and those favoring the growth of science. Pluralism and openness to criticism are necessary both for the development of scientific knowledge and for the creation of a solid ethical basis for democracy. Conformism and dogmatism, on the contrary, are obstacles to the well-functioning of both science and democracy. The book is research into the common reasons explaining the shared commitment to these values. On the one hand, the advancement of science depends on an exponential process of specialization, accompanied by the creation of technical languages that are more and more inaccessible to the large public and even to scientists working in different fields. Such a process is incompatible with populistic regimes and is suitable only with representative forms of democracies. In the latter institutions, choosing the most appropriate means to promote the general interest necessarily depends on the principle of competence. On the other hand, however, the indispensable role of experts as mediators of scientific knowledge threatens the autonomy of choice of the citizens and therefore calls for new ways to increase the level of literacy about science and its philosophical foundations. The book analyzes the sources of this problem and proposes some solutions that avoid technocratic regimes while at same time giving experts their indispensable role in contemporary democracies. For this purpose, three issues need to be clarified. The first involves the relation between politicians and experts. The former carries the ultimate responsibility for adopting a certain policy and should not justify their scientifically informed choices as if they were exclusively dictated by scientists. The second requires an inquiry into some of the causes of the current mistrust in science, among which a growing lack of scientific literacy with the consequent the disinformation created by the social media, and distrust toward the principle of competency. The third is given by the existence of a conflict of opinions between experts and the necessity of finding reliable ways to decide whom to trust.