Dialogue defined

Dialogue is our current mantra. Scientists, government, civil society and members of the public need to get together and discuss the scientific issues of the day.  This issue of SPA provides various examples of the genre, and underpins them with an analysis of exactly what dialogue is and how it works.

Helen Haste scotches any suspicion that dialogue is simply continued intellectual exchange by a more polite name. (An example of this sort of exchange is the SPATalk, in which Jan Creamer and Simon Festing debate whether medical research needs animals.)

Dialogue, according to Haste, is actually a ground-clearing process which enables each party to understand where the others are coming from. One of its most powerful tools is surprise: surprise at others’ knowledge or lack of it, the facts they consider relevant, the values they associate with the facts, and the frameworks their facts fit into. Surprise is a signal that we differ on the things that others take for granted.

‘I once stood in a spectacularly rich fossil field with a palaeontologist,’ explains Haste. ‘He was beside himself with joy; all I could ‘see’ was a pile of rubble. Similarly, he could make little sense of the work I was then doing on young people’s moral reasoning.  After these experiences I still couldn’t ‘see’ the fossils and he could not analyse moral text, but both of us could appreciate that there was more than one ‘story’ in the data.

Dialogue is about understanding those differences so that we can share knowledge which has the same meaning for all parties. Once that is done, participants can pursue routes to agreement, which they may or may not reach.

A majority of the members of the NanoJury were able to agree on ten recommendations of the twenty they offered at the end of their recently-completed exercise. The independent citizens’ jury debated nanotechnology for five weeks, after being presented with information from a wide range of different witnesses.

The Jury impressed co-organiser Mark Welland, who says the experiment enabled him to look at his own science in a new light. He has, he writes, been ‘hugely impressed by the jurors’ ability to grasp such a difficult subject and make perfectly reasonable recommendations. We “engaged” with the public and the public showed that they had a real voice.’

The recently-reported Foresight project on brain science, addiction and drugs included the biggest public consultation of any so far. As David King writes, the message from the public was that decisions on drugs should be personal, not dictated by government. The same project found that – within limits – the public prefer eccentricity over drug-induced ‘normal’ behaviour.

The kind of world we want for our children is preoccupying Lord May as he steps down from the Presidency of the Royal Society. Climate change and loss of biodiversity are, he writes, today’s critical scientific issues. And, he says, ‘while scientists can sound the alarm about these crises, achieving action relies on policy makers and politicians understanding and heeding the warnings.’

Wendy Barnaby, Editor