Abstract
This chapter argues that some disagreement between experts may be manufactured and suggests a distinction between “genuine” and “counterfeit” scientific controversies. This chapter reasons that policy-makers need to know which disagreements are to be taken seriously and that counterfeit controversies can impede policy decisions. It suggests one way for Science and Technology Studies to contribute to policy-making is to develop a consistent and reliable way to distinguish genuine from counterfeit scientific controversies and proposes four sociologically derived demarcation criteria.
This chapter is based on ideas developed between 2006 and 2010. An earlier version was presented to SEESHOP in 2008 and has been publicly available as a Cardiff School of Social Science working paper. I’m indebted to Harry Collins and Rob Evans, to SEESHOP participants, and to members of the Knowledge Expertise Science (KES) group at the Cardiff School of Social Sciences.
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Notes
- 1.
The term “science policy” (or “science in policy”) is adopted from Harvey Brooks (1964, 76) and refers to “matters that are basically political or administrative but are significantly dependent upon technical factors—such as the nuclear test ban, disarmament policy, or the use of science in international relations.”
- 2.
Similar criteria-based approaches to make potentially policy-relevant distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate contributions have been advanced by Collins and Weinel (2011) and, more recently, by Collins et al. (2017). The former paper proposes a range of criteria to help non-experts to distinguish between genuine and fake experts, while the latter proposes criteria to distinguish between mainstream and fringe approaches to physics.
- 3.
No attempt was made to explain why Thabo Mbeki questioned the safety of AZT. I consider this question beyond the reach of sociological investigation as a considerable “forensic effort” would be needed to find out what was going on in Thabo Mbeki’s head. Some researchers have, however, tried to tackle the question. For me, the best explanation to date was provided by James Myburgh (2007, 2009), whose forensic investigation of the so-called Virodene affair showed that while the government was publicly doubting the safety of AZT as well as the causal relationship between HIV and AIDS, it spent millions of Rand until 2002 trying to prove that Virodene was working and was not just an industrial solvent as the Medicines Control Council suggested after an initial investigation in 1998. If Myburgh is correct, it can be argued that Mbeki and his helpers in government manufactured a scientific controversy to gain time allowing them to develop an African alternative to Western AIDS drugs. Other explanations are summarized in the works of Nattrass (2007), Coovadia and Coovadia (2008) and Whiteside (2008).
- 4.
The problem for science policy-makers to choose between conflicting expert opinions is specific instance of the problem that Goldman (2001, 90) calls “novice/2-expert problem.” In his interesting discussion of this problem, Goldman (p. 93) suggests five sources of evidence that might help novices or lay persons to find out which of the disagreeing expert opinions to believe: (1) arguments presented by the contending experts to support their own views and critique their rivals’ views; (2) agreement from additional putative experts on one side or other of the subject in question; (3) appraisals by ‘meta-experts’ of the experts’ expertise; (4) evidence of the experts’ interests and biases vis-a-vis the question at issue; and (5) evidence of the experts’ past “track-record.” Goldman’s assessment of the usefulness of these sources to lay persons is not gloomy but also not overly optimistic. Part of the problem is that Goldman seems to be too ambitious. In contrast, I limit the task for lay persons to assess whether a scientific controversy they are presented with is “genuine” or “counterfeit.” I do not claim that the criteria I’m going to propose can possibly tell a lay person which side of an argument to believe when they are confronted with a “genuine scientific controversy.”
- 5.
I’m grateful to Rob Evans for making this point.
- 6.
Fleck’s early ideas about styles of thoughts were later popularized by Kuhn (1962) under the heading “paradigm shifts.” I prefer to refer to Fleck rather than to Kuhn, since Fleck’s ideas preceded those of Kuhn by about 30 years.
- 7.
Collins and Evans (2007, 128) put this in the following rule, which they call the “family resemblance rule”: “Except where specific new findings demand a break, the intentional stance of a science must be to maintain continuity as far as possible with the existing science.”
- 8.
Lack of conceptual continuity may have to do with content—let us imagine it has to do with magic—or method—let us say the claim is based on the discovery of some ancient manuscript or on divination—or both.
- 9.
Accordingly, reading scientific literature in isolation—acquiring primary source knowledge without any further social immersion into the relevant epistemic community—does not afford the acquisition of tacit knowledge. For more extensive, empirically informed expositions of this argument, see Weinel (2007) and Priaulx and Weinel (2014).
- 10.
The report, incidentally, was published in response to Mbeki’s speech in October 1999. A South African scientist, who asked to remain anonymous, told me in 2008 that Mbeki consulted a small group of scientists from the Medical University of South Africa two or three months before making the speech, but the contact was brief and he only sustained contact with those scientists of the group who supported the claim that AZT was too toxic to be used. The low intensity and short duration of these contacts, however, would not have enabled Mbeki to develop an appropriate level of interactional expertise.
- 11.
Weinel (2011) and others (Geffen 2010; Myburgh 2009; Nattrass 2007) show that Mbeki’s initial exposure to AIDS denialist literature have come from people without deep expertise on the issue. One was a lawyer who persistently misrepresents established scientific literature through selective quoting. Another one was Ziggy Visser who, together with his wife, claimed to have discovered a cure for HIV/AIDS, a compound called Virodene, in 1997.
- 12.
There are, of course, cultures in which the content of dreams is not regarded as “baseless,” but is taken very seriously. While this might be so, it is clear that “dreaming” is not an acceptable base for causal claim in a scientific form-of-life as it clashes with the formative intentions of the scientific culture. Scientists in modern societies might get ideas from dreams, but they must not invoke dreams as a justification for certain belief.
- 13.
Of course, one problem that lends complexity to this issue is that both “consensus” and “scientific community” are inextricably intertwined and co-produced. The scientific community forming around the issue of AIDS would look very different if the argument that AIDS is a disease caused by certain lifestyle choices had won the day in the mid-1980s.
- 14.
The Studies of Expertise and Experience (SEE) approach suggests that the difficulty for outsiders wanting to make a judgement about whether the existence of certain claims really represents genuine disagreement within the expert community is that the “locus of legitimate interpretation” rests within an expert community (Collins and Evans 2007; Collins et al. 2016). The difficulty for outsiders to make such judgements arises out of the necessity to understand what is going on inside the expert community.
- 15.
The rough calculation goes like this: the South African government estimated that in the late 1990s about 70,000 babies were infected through MTCT. It is assumed here that this number remains constant. At this point in time, no drug-based MTCT prevention programme was in place in the public sector. Such a programme, if the results of the drug trials are extrapolated, has the potential to reduce the transmission rate by about 50 per cent. Given all this, over the course of three years 105,000 babies could have been saved from getting infected with HIV, had there been a countrywide PMTCT programme in place from 1999 onwards. See also Chigwedere et al. (2008) and Nattrass (2008) for estimates concerning the overall implications of bad policy-making around HIV/AIDS that characterized South Africa between 1999 and 2005.
- 16.
In principle, the four criteria aid a process in technical appraisals that Andy Stirling (2008) has called “closing down”—that is, they aim to limit debate. The four criteria exclude arguments from the technical phase that are considered to be inappropriate. However, whether subsequent deliberations in a technical phase are done in “opening-up” or “closing-down” mode is left open in the normative SEE approach, which is more concerned with actors and not so much with procedures.
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Weinel, M. (2019). Recognizing Counterfeit Scientific Controversies in Science Policy Contexts: A Criteria-Based Approach. In: Caudill, D.S., Conley, S.N., Gorman, M.E., Weinel, M. (eds) The Third Wave in Science and Technology Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14335-0_4
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