Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-gb8f7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T12:21:39.422Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Democracy, Public Policy, and Lay Assessments of Scientific Testimony1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 January 2012

Elizabeth Anderson
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Responsible public policy making in a technological society must rely on complex scientific reasoning. Given that ordinary citizens cannot directly assess such reasoning, does this call the democratic legitimacy of technical public policies in question? It does not, provided citizens can make reliable second-order assessments of the consensus of trustworthy scientific experts. I develop criteria for lay assessment of scientific testimony and demonstrate, in the case of claims about anthropogenic global warming, that applying such criteria is easy for anyone of ordinary education with access to the Web. However, surveys show a gap between the scientific consensus and public opinion on global warming in the U.S. I explore some causes of this gap and argue that democratic reforms of our culture of political discourse may be able to address it.

Type
Research Article
Information
Episteme , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , June 2011 , pp. 144 - 164
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Anderegg, William, Prall, James, Harold, Jacob, and Schneider, Stephen. 2010. “Expert Credibility on Climate Change.” PNAS 107(27): 12107–9. http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1003187107CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anderson, Elizabeth. 1995. “Knowledge, Human Interests, and Objectivity in Feminist Epistemology.” Philosophical Topics 23: 27–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anderson, Elizabeth. 2002. “Situated Knowledge and the Interplay of Value Judgments and Evidence in Scientific Inquiry.” In Gärdenfors, P., Wolenski, J., and Kijania-Placek, K. (eds.), In the Scope of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, vol. 2, pp. 497–517. Dordrecht: Kluwer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anderson, Elizabeth. 2004a. “Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science.” In Zalta, E. (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Summer 2004 ed. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2004/entries/feminism-epistemology/Google Scholar
Anderson, Elizabeth. 2004b. “Uses of Value Judgments in Science: A General Argument, with Lessons from a Case Study of Feminist Research on Divorce.” Hypatia 19(1): 1–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anderson, Elizabeth. 2006. “The Epistemology of Democracy.” Episteme 3(1–2): 8–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Antilla, Liisa. 2005. “Climate of Scepticism: US Newspaper Coverage of the Science of Climate Change.” Global Environmental Change Part A 15(4): 338–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bishop, Bill and Cushing, Robert. 2008. The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.Google Scholar
Boykoff, Maxwell and Jules, Boykoff. 2004. “Balance as Bias: Global Warming and the US Prestige Press.” Global Environmental Change 14: 125–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Braman, Donald, Kahan, Dan, and Grimmelmann, James. 2005. “Modeling Facts, Culture, and Cognition in the Gun Debate.” Social Justice Research 18(3): 283–304. http://ssrn.com/abstract=1000449CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brumfiel, Geoff. 2006. “Academy Affirms Hockey-Stick Graph.” Nature 441: 1032–3.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cabrera, Silvina and Cavatorto, Sabrima. 2009. “A Europe-Wide Deliberative Polling Experiment.” Italian Political Science 3. http://europolis-project.eu/file_download/27/IPS03-A_Europewide_Deliberative_Polling_Experiment.pdfGoogle Scholar
Coady, C. A. J. 1992. Testimony: A Philosophical Study. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Cohen, Geoffrey et al. 2007. “Bridging the Partisan Divide: Self-Afrmation Reduces Ideological Closed-Mindedness and Inflexibility in Negotiation.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 93(3): 415–30.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cole, Elizabeth and Abigail, Stewart. 2001. “Invidious Comparisons: Imagining a Psychology of Race and Gender Beyond Differences.” Political Psychology 22(2): 293–308.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Committee on Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years, National Research Council. 2006. Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11676.htmlGoogle Scholar
Dewey, John. 1927/1981. “The Public and Its Problems.” In The Later Works, 1925–1953, Vol. 2, pp. 235–372. Boydston, J. (ed.). Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.Google Scholar
Dewey, John. 1939/1988. “Creative Democracy: The Task before Us.” In The Later Works, 1925–1953, Vol. 14, pp. 224–30. Boydston, J. (ed.). Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University PressGoogle Scholar
Dispensa, Jaclyn Marisa and Robert, J. Brulle. 2003. “Media's Social Construction of Environmental Issues: Focus on Global Warming – A Comparative Study.” International Journal of Sociology and Public Policy 23(10): 74–105.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Doran, Peter and Maggie, Zimmerman. 2009. “Examining the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change.” Eos 90(3): 21–2. http://tigger.uic.edu/∼pdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdfGoogle Scholar
Dunlap, Riley. 2008. “Climate-Change Views: Republican-Democratic Gaps Expand.” http://www.gallup.com/poll/107569/ClimateChange-Views-Republican Democratic-Gaps-Expand.aspxGoogle Scholar
Estlund, David. 2008. Democratic Authority: A Philosophical Framework. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Fishkin, James. 1991. Democracy and Deliberation: New Directions for Democratic Reform. New Haven, CT: Yale University PressGoogle Scholar
Fishkin, James. 1995. The Voice of the People: Public Opinion and Democracy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Fishkin, James and Robert, Luskin. 2005. “Experimenting with a Democratic Ideal: Deliberative Polling and Public Opinion.” Acta Politica 40: 284–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Green, Kenneth, Hayward, Steven, and Hassett, Kevin. 2007. “Climate Change: Caps vs. Taxes.” In Environmental Policy Outlook (American Enterprise Institute), no. 2. http://www.aei.org/docLib/20070601_EPOg.pdfGoogle Scholar
Grice, Paul. 1975. “Logic and Conversation.” In Cole, P. and Morgan, J. (eds.), Syntax and Semantics, 3: Speech Acts, pp. 41–58. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Habermas, Jürgen. 2006. “Political Communication in Media Society: Does Democracy Still Enjoy an Epistemic Dimension? The Impact of Normative Theory on Empirical Research.” Communication Theory 16: 411–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hobbes, Thomas. 1651/1994. Leviathan. Curley, E. (ed.). Indianapolis: Hackett.Google Scholar
Inhofe, James. 2008/2009. More Than 700 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims; Scientists Continue to Debunk “Consensus” in 2008 & 2009. Minority Staff Report, U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Files.View&FileStore_id=83947f5d-d84a-4a84-ad5d-6e2d71db52d9Google Scholar
Jones, P. D. and Mann, M. E.. 2004. “Climate over Past Millennia.” Reviews of Geophysics 42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kahan, Dan. 2010. “Fixing the Communications Failure.” Nature 463: 296–7.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kahan, Dan and Donald, Braman. 2006. “Cultural Cognition and Public Policy.” Yale Law & Policy Review 24(1): 149–72. http://ssrn.com/abstract=746508Google Scholar
Kahan, Dan, Braman, Donald, and James, Grimmelmann. 2005. “Modeling Cultural Cognition.” Social Justice Research 18(3). http://ssrn.com/abstract=1000449Google Scholar
Kahan, Dan, Jenkins-Smith, Hank, and Donald, Braman. 2006. “Cultural Cognition of Scientific Consensus.” Cultural Cognition Project Working Paper No. 77. http://ssrn.com/abstract=1549444Google Scholar
Kitcher, Philip. 1990. “The Cognitive Division of Labor.” Journal of Philosophy 87: 5–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Krosnick, Jon. 2010a. “The Climate Majority.” The New York Times 9 June 2010: A25. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/09/opinion/09krosnick.htmlGoogle Scholar
Krosnick, Jon. 2010b. “Global Warming Poll.” Stanford University. http://woods.stanford.edu/docs/surveys/Global-Warming-Survey-Selected-Results-June2010.pdfGoogle Scholar
Lacey, Hugh. 1999. Is Science Value Free? Values and Scientific Understanding. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Leiserowitz, Anthony, Maibach, Edward, and Connie, Roser-Renouf. 2010. Global Warming's Six Americas, January 2010. Yale University and George Mason University. New Haven, CT: Yale Project on Climate Change. http://environment.yale.edu/uploads/SixAmericasJan2010.pdfGoogle Scholar
Longino, Helen. 1990. Science as Social Knowledge. Princeton: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Malka, Ariel et al. 2009. “Featuring Skeptics in News Media Stories About Global Warming Reduces Public Beliefs in the Seriousness of Global Warming.” Working paper. Stanford University. http://woods.stanford.edu/docs/surveys/Global-Warming-Skeptics-Technical-Detail.pdfGoogle Scholar
Mann, Michael, Bradley, Raymond, and Malcolm, Hughes. 1998. “Global-Scale Temperature Patterns and Climate Forcing over the Past Six Centuries.” Nature 392: 779–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mann, Michael, Bradley, Raymond, and Malcolm, Hughes. 1999. “Northern Hemisphere Millennial Temperature Reconstruction.” Geophysical Research Letters 26(6): 759–62. http://www.meteo.psu.edu/∼mann/shared/research/old/mbh99.htmlCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mayo, Ruth, Schul, Yaacov, and Eugene, Burnstein. 2004. “‘I Am Not Guilty’ vs ‘I Am Innocent’: Successful Negation May Depend on the Schema Used for Its Encoding.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 40(4): 433–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McIntyre, Stephen and Ross, McKitrick. 2003. “Corrections to the Mann et. al. (1998) Proxy Data Base and Northern Hemispheric Average Temperature Series.” Energy and Environment 14(6): 751–71. http://www.uoguelph.ca/∼rmckitri/research/MM03.pdfCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mutz, Diana. 2006. “How the Mass Media Divide Us.” In Divola, P. and Brady, D. (eds.), Red and Blue Nation? Characteristics and Causes of America's Polarized Politics, pp. 223–48. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.Google Scholar
Mutz, Diana. 2007. “Effects of ‘In-Your-Face’ Television Discourse on Perceptions of a Legitimate Opposition.” American Political Science Review 101(4): 621–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Newport, Frank. 2010. “Americans’ Global Warming Concerns Continue to Drop.” http://www.gallup.com/poll/126560/Americans-Global-Warming-Concerns-Continue-Drop.aspxGoogle Scholar
Nyhan, Brendan and Jason, Reifler. 2010. “When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions.” Political Behavior 32(2): 303–30. http://www-personal.umich.edu/∼bnyhan/nyhan-reifler.pdfCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oreskes, Naomi. 2004. “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change.” Science 306(5702): 1686.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Oreskes, Naomi and Conway, Erik M.. 2010. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. New York: Bloomsbury Press.Google Scholar
Skurnik, Ian, Yoon, Carolyn, and Norbert, Schwarz. 2005. “How Warnings About False Claims Become Recommendations.” Journal of Consumer Research 31(4): 713–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Solomon, Miriam. 2001. Social Empiricism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sunstein, Cass. 2007. Republic.com 2.0. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Sunstein, Cass. 2009. Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wylie, Alison. 1992. “The Interplay of Evidential Constraints and Political Interests: Recent Archaeological Research on Gender.” American Antiquity 57: 15–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar