Divergent Perspectives on Expert Disagreement: Preliminary Evidence from Climate Science, Climate Policy, Astrophysics, and Public Opinion

We report the results of an exploratory study that examines the judgments of climate scientists, climate policy experts, astrophysicists, and non-experts (N = 3367) about the factors that contribute to the creation and persistence of disagreement within climate science and astrophysics and about how one should respond to expert disagreement. We found that, as compared to non-experts, climate experts believe that within climate science (i) there is less disagreement about climate change, (ii) methodological factors play less of a role in generating disagreements, (iii) fewer personal or institutional biases influence climate research, and (iv) there is more agreement about which methods should be used to examine relevant phenomena we also observed that the uniquely American political context predicted experts’ judgments about some of these factors. We also found that, in regard to disagreements concerning cosmic ray physics, and commensurate with the greater inherent uncertainty and data lacunae in their field, astrophysicists working on cosmic rays were generally more willing to acknowledge expert disagreement, more open to the idea that a set of data can have multiple valid interpretations, and generally less quick to dismiss someone articulating a non-standard view as non-expert, than climate scientists were in regard to climate science

Disagreement in science: introduction to the special issue

Introduction to the Synthese Special Issue on Disagreement in Science

Hilary Putnam

An overview of Hilary Putnam's engagement with pragmatis

A New Dark Age? Truth, Trust, and Environmental Science

This review examines the alleged crisis of trust in environmental science and its impact on public opinion, policy decisions in the context of democratic governance, and the interaction between science and society. In an interdisciplinary manner, the review focuses on the following themes: the trustworthiness of environmental science, empirical studies on levels of trust and trust formation; social media, environmental science, and disinformation; trust in environmental governance and democracy; and co-production of knowledge and the production of trust in knowledge. The review explores both the normative issue of trustworthiness and empirical studies on how to build trust. The review does not provide any simple answers to whether trust in science is generally in decline or whether we are returning to a lessenlightened era in public life with decreased appreciation of knowledge and truth. The findings are more nuanced, showing signs of both distrust and trust in environmental science.European Commission Horizon 2020Oslo Institute for Research on the Impact of Science (OSIRIS)Research Council of Norwa

Rethinking Epistemic Relativism

‘Relativism’ is often treated as a dirty word in philosophy. Showing that a view entails relativism is almost always considered tantamount to showing that it is nonsensical. However, relativistic theories are not entirely unappealing – they have features which might be tempting if they weren’t thought to be outweighed by problematic consequences. In this paper I argue that it’s possible to secure the intuitively appealing features of at least one kind of relativism – epistemic relativism – without having to accept any problematic consequences. I do this by defending what I call 'stratified relativism'

Relativism about Science

This is the older version of an article that I updated in 2012 and published in the second edition of the Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Science, so I don\u27t think there will be any problems about the copy right

Trust in Experts: Why and Why Not?

We are faced with a profound crisis of social trust, or so we hear on a daily basis from all those with a public megaphone. We don’t trust our politicians because they repeatedly fail to keep their promises or act in good faith, the media, we think, do not give honest and unbiased reports, and as to the experts, we don’t trust them because they are on the side of the elites and are motivated by sectional interests. Not the same level or variety of trust is at stake in all these cases, but their common denominator is the experience that those who expect trust from the public do not act in the public’s interest and therefore are not worthy of our trust.Remove extra pages from file - A