Under this second heading one might ask about non-scientists and how they understand and interpret science. This would include, but not be limited to, the impact of science on, and the images of science projected by, popular culture, popular literature, and popular news media.
Some scholars note that scientific thought is often popularly perceived as monolithic. Phrases such as “scientists have found …” or “science reveals …” generate the notion, among reading non-scientists, that there is a body of scientists, and a conceptual construct called ‘science,’ which speak uniformly.
The popular notion of science rarely includes serious yet conflicting hypotheses, or attention to truly open questions which are the object of investigation. Liam Scheff writes:
When an official from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) throws out an edict (“Get vaccinated for bird flu!”), or the World Health Organization (WHO) makes one of its famously failed predictions (“One in 5 American citizens will have AIDS by 1990!”), it’s front-page news around the globe. We’re not allowed to think; we’re just supposed to swallow. And when scientific claims do turn out to be false, we don’t get angry. “Better safe than sorry,” we tell ourselves. “Anyway, we all know that a bird-flu pandemic awaits us.”
If science were monolithic, then when a prediction fails, or when one hypothesis is substituted for another, then the public would be left to assume that science has changed its mind, and to assume further that science is to be trusted in these matters. Given the popular understanding of science as univocal, the public does so assume.
On the one hand, there is science as understood both by scientists themselves and by philosophers of science. On the other hand, there is this popular understanding of science. Between them, there is a great gap. Thus when the results of scientific inquiry, or the words of a scientist, are reported to the public, they are misunderstood.
The notion, for example, of competing theories which equally map known data points is not part of the common understanding of science. While the public wishes to know which theory is true, the philosopher sees two theories as two different ways of characterizing a set a data.
The popular press seeks a simple declaration which it can report, and runs roughshod over the process by which a theory is constructed. Liam Scheff, noting how the natural sciences are reduced to the assertion of simple propositions in the popular press, writes:
But what if there was good evidence that these things weren’t true? Would Fox and CNN report it? What if serious, established researchers had strongly disparate views on an issue? Should they be allowed to debate each other on the nightly news?
The popular media do not see the natural sciences as addressing a long list of open questions. They wish to present sciences as a set of “proven” or “accepted” propositions - and even at that, they sidestep any discussion about the meaning of ‘proven’ or ‘accepted.’
Matters which are largely accepted - e.g., that a water molecule contains two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom - are matters which are, in and of themselves, of little interest to science. More interesting are the questions which are truly open - e.g., how a certain molecule, injected into a cell, seems to know where inside the cell it belongs.
Because the popular press wants to reports results and not investigations - assertions and not questions - it furthers the illusion that the natural sciences are monolithic. It is telling that the few questions found about scientific topics in popular reports are either rhetorical questions, or questions about mundane possible future practical applications, and not questions about the matters themselves. Liam Scheff continues:
The major media work hard to create the illusion that science is uniform: a single-minded group of hard-working researchers, joined hand in hand, in a race against the clock, seeking the chemical cures that will save humanity from obesity, cancer, AIDS, death, and all of the other ravages of nature that must be conquered.
Scientists themselves, along with philosophers of science, are more prone to pose questions than those who report about science. Often, the questions which engage researchers are questions which won’t have a clear and simple answer any time soon, if ever. But such questions aren’t satisfying to readers, or writers, of popular news outlets.
Simple and sensational propositions feed the common taste. Understood within most methodologies of science, a prediction is an opportunity to test a hypothesis or a theory. But in the popular media, these predictions are understood not as tests, but as simple assertions. One scholar, Charles St. Onge, writes:
Consider predictions about future events. No one has been to the future, so it cannot be observed scientifically. But based on past events that have been observed, we can apply scientific models to predict what might happen in the future. Such predictions are always tentative. The further into the future we try to predict, the less accurate our predictions can become. This is especially true as we account for a lot of variables, as weather and climate forecasters must do.
Eventually, the effects of the popular reports about science begin to work in the other direction, and affect science itself. Governments, universities, and the foundations which grant funding to scientists begin to have a stake, not in the quality of the questions posed, and not in the quality of the analysis about the data, but rather in the bold assertions which they are able to make in the press.
Having once entered into the business of producing results in the form of simple propositions for the media, instead of reflecting on theory construction, scientists and those who fund them find that they have territory to protect. This shifts the scientists from exploring to defending. Or, as Charles St. Onge phrases it,
Because of this reluctance to give up a model or theory, it is possible for almost everyone in the scientific community to be wrong about a certain idea. The late Michael Crichton, famous doctor and science fiction writer, pointed this out in a lecture at the California Institute of Technology. He reminded his audience that science, unlike politics, is not about consensus; science is about getting things right.
It is bad enough when the popular media distort science for the public; it is even worse when these distortions begin to steer the investigations of science itself.
