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Evaluating Complex Collaborative Expertise: The Case of Climate Change

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Abstract

Science advisory committees exercise complex collaborative expertise. Not only do committee members collaborate, they do so across disciplines, producing expert reports that make synthetic multidisciplinary arguments. When reports are controversial, critics target both report content and committee process. Such controversies call for the assessment of expert arguments, but the multidisciplinary character of the debate outstrips the usual methods developed by informal logicians for assessing appeals to expert authority. This article proposes a multi-dimensional contextualist framework for critical assessment and tests it with a case study of the controversies over reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The case study shows (1) how the critical contextualist framework can illuminate the controversy and guide evaluation of the various arguments and counterarguments; (2) how cases of this sort open up avenues for fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration between argumentation theorists and other fields; and (3) where further work is required in argumentation theory.

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Notes

  1. 1999 email from N. Leary to IPCC authors, quoted in Edwards and Schneider (2001, 234f). Cf. also the interview with an anonymous lead author, who states that “this is meant to be not a review of the literature but an assessment of the science” (quoted in Lahsen 1999, 127). The importance of expert judgment based on assessment of the literature has been reiterated in the IPCC response to a critical study of the IPCC by the InterAcademy Council (IAC 2010): see the section on the treatment of uncertainty (IPCC 2010, Appendix 4).

  2. However, the WSJ published only part of their response and removed the names of thirty-nine IPCC scientists—including all the chapter 8 lead authors—who cosigned the letter with Ben Santer, the team leader (Santer et al. 1996; for the full response, see American Meteorological Society (AMS) 1996).

  3. For a recent confirmatory review sponsored by the National Research Council, see Office of News and Public Information 2010; one can also find various joint statements of national academies of science around the world (e.g., G8+5 2009).

  4. I consider this a reasonable assumption for US academies, in view of the transactional design of committee process (see Rehg 2009a, Chap. 8). Naturally, poor execution might undermine transactional merits, but given the history of repeated confirmations of IPCC claims by different independent reviews, I think the burden of proof lies with critics, who would have to provide evidence of a systematic bias in academy committees. My sense is that if there is a general bias, then it tends to be conservative, supporting more cautious mainstream views. But that kind of bias, if identified, would undercut the skeptical critique, strengthening the judgment that committee conclusions enjoy wide public merits in the climate science community.

  5. For a literature survey, see Oreskes (2007); what matters for the idea of public merits is not the somewhat controversial consensus claim that Oreskes makes, but the simple fact that she found not a single challenge to anthropogenic warming in a survey of a thousand peer-reviewed journal articles between 1993 and 2003. An analysis of public merits might start with WikiPedia (2010), which lists over 80 materially or topically relevant scientific bodies that concur with the 2001 IPCC report, without any such body dissenting; this article provides links to at least some of the relevant statements and sites.

  6. See also Gelbspan (2004); on the biasing effect of the norm of balance, see esp. Boykoff and Boykoff (2004). A later study indicates that the use of balance is diminishing in climate science reporting (Boykoff 2007).

  7. According to Mercier and Sperber (2011), the psychological literature shows that confirmation bias is endemic to individual reasoning, but can be countered by dialogical engagement with opposing views; thus the signs of bias listed here reflect the assumption that trustworthy expertise reveals itself above all in performance and arguments that reflect engagement with opponents.

  8. For politically influential scientists speaking outside their expertise, and thus failing the first criterion, see Lahsen (1999, 2008); Oreskes and Conway (2010). Fred Singer has a background in climate science but fails to meet the third criterion, in light of his track record (see Oreskes and Conway 2010, 82ff, 126ff, 143–145, 190ff) and inveterate rhetoric (see the description of the IPCC in his preface to Singer 2008).

  9. In fact, the second approach, though focused on transactional merits, requires some familiarity with content in order to test for bias.

  10. For online engagement, see RealClimate (2011). Note that the IPCC has accepted IAC recommendations for estimating uncertainty (IPCC 2010, 5); however, the expression of uncertainty is politically charged, inasmuch as policymakers are reluctant to act on overly nuanced statements.

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Acknowledgments

For feedback on earlier versions of this paper, I thank participants in the Cultural Studies of Science Workshop at Rice University, and two anonymous referees for Argumentation; for relevant material I thank Benjamin de Foy.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Saint Louis University, St. Louis, MO, USA

    William Rehg

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Rehg, W. Evaluating Complex Collaborative Expertise: The Case of Climate Change. Argumentation 25, 385–400 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-011-9223-x

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