Ruth Cronje opens the black box of scientific facts

Scientific information the public receives, from any source, is typically expressed in the form of ‘black boxed’ facts. For example, scientists tell the public: ‘antibiotics won’t work against viruses’, ‘smoking increases your risk of cancer and heart disease’, and ‘human activity is contributing to global warming’.

Facts like these typically take the form of declarative sentences that express scientific authority. However, such facts usually fail to include the rational reasons why scientists themselves have come to believe these claims, or provide rational reasons why the pubic should believe them too. The sole authority such facts offer the public is scientists’ expertise – the public is expected just to take scientists’ word for it.

Rhetorically, then, the public is given no basis to distinguish between scientific information and faith-based claims (other than that scientists make the one kind and religious leaders the other). If scientific information is consistently tricked out in the same clothes that faith-based claims wear, offering no basis for belief but trust in expert authority, why should scientists expect the public to differentiate between science and religion when it comes to issues like whether to teach creationism in science classrooms?

Scientific communication must include information that helps the public differentiate scientific claims from faith-based ones. This is why communicating scientific information as ‘just the facts’ is insufficient to ensure true public engagement in science.
 
The nature of science

What makes science ‘scientific’ are specific, principled inquiry procedures – intended to control bias, confounders, and error – that scientists agree to follow to produce knowledge (1). Consider the ‘fact’ that ‘antioxidants help to prevent cancer’. How do scientists know what effect antioxidants have on the development of cancer cells?

What makes them think they have successfully isolated the mechanisms of antioxidants from the many other complex chemicals that function in cells? What evidence do they have that leads them to conclude that antioxidants have a cancer-preventing effect? What care was taken in the collection of that evidence to ensure it isn’t the product of bias or error? Can the public really be said to understand the claim ‘antioxidants help to prevent cancer’ if they aren’t aware of and understand, at least in broad outlines, the skeptical, dynamic procedures that give scientists logical reason to believe their own and other scientists’ claims?  

Public engagement with science, then, should be defined not as enlisting public awareness, understanding, and agreement with scientific fact; rather, public engagement must mean promoting the public awareness, understanding, and acceptance of the procedures scientists require to justify calling a claim ‘scientific’. 

Implications for public engagement

What would such an approach to public engagement in science mean to scientists and science communicators? First and foremost, it would mean radically altering the entrenched practice of communicating scientific knowledge with a ‘just the facts’ strategy that doesn’t explicitly summarise the reasons to regard that fact as ‘scientific’. The first step, then, to genuine public engagement with science will be to commit to the promotion of public understanding of the processes and procedures that make scientific information scientific.

Once that broad-based commitment is in place, it is a matter of seizing those moments when the public needs scientific information – when making decisions abouthealthcare, nutrition, and technology, for example – and ensuring that the facts they receive are accompanied by process information.

For example, many people watch the weather forecast every day. In addition to announcing that day’s forecast, the meteorologist could include a short daily segment that explains to this captive audience, in manageable conceptual chunks, the methods by which weather data are collected and integrated to form predictive models. True, meteorological models are enormously complicated, but many people watch the weather every day, giving on-air meteorologists 365 days a year to chip away at building public understanding of the scientific procedures of meteorology.

Instead of pretending inaccurate forecasts don’t happen, meteorologists could retroactively analyse such discrepancies and discuss how they constitute new data that will be integrated into existing models to build ever-greater predictive power. In the process of getting the weather forecast, the public will also develop appreciation for the difficulty of accurately predicting a multifactorial system like the weather and more realistic expectations of the accuracy of forecasts. As an added dividend, they’ll be grounded in the basic principles of predictive modeling and better prepared to understand the risks of global warming.

Scientists believe, justifiably, that their methods for investigating the natural world are superior to forms of inquiry that rely on faith or unquestioned assumptions. Why not let the public in on this too?

References

(1) R. Cronje (2008) Going public with the scientific process. Science 319:1483-4

Ruth Cronje is at the Scientific and Technical Writing Programme at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire