Why we need to be studying the ethics of science communication

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41 papers at the intersection of expertise, civic controversies, and communication.

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Lippmann and Dewey both confronted the problem of how to get the nation’s highly successful science to have impact in the public sphere.  Dewey’s solution to the problem is well known: an underspecified form of communication which would transform the Great Society beyond the understanding of any individual into the Great Community where policies could be wisely chosen. Lippmann was more uncompromisingly pessimistic, doubting the ability of anyone–including himself–to master the range of knowledge necessary to make fully informed decisions. Nevertheless, there is a legitimate role for even uninformed publics to participate in civic deliberations:  they act as adjudicators of debates in which the contending experts demonstrate their reasonability.

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Debates over scientists’ appropriate contributions to policy-making are prominent in a variety of natural resources fields. The issue is often presented as one of “responsible advocacy.” But this framing locks us into a paradox: Scientists who advocate aim to be effective in the policy arena, but by advocating lose their credibility. In this preliminary review of the issue, I argue that we can avoid the paradox by acknowledging a wider range of speech acts structuring scientists’ obligations in the policy process. Scientists can advocate–but they can also report, give their assessments, make recommendations, and especially, offer good advice.

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Lay audiences cannot fully understand climate science without becoming scientists themselves; therefore, they have to trust what scientists say. Although there is no “crisis of trust” currently, there are reasons to be concerned that public trust may be fragile, unequally distributed, and variable. Studies of communication over the past fifty years have revealed characteristics like likeability or likeness which render speakers trustworthy. Unfortunately, these characteristics are unlikely to be effective in the context of climate controversies, where audiences are using their slow, “central processing”/critical reasoning capacities.  In fact, emphasizing such characteristics may backfire if it is seen as manipulative. Scientists instead need to earn trust by giving audiences good reasons to trust them. Most of these reasons require scientists to make themselves vulnerable–conspicuously open to sanctions of various kinds if what they say turns out not to be accurate.

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This study investigates how sustainability and its inherent values figure into farmers’ discourse, i.e., how farmers and members of farming communities talk about sustainability. We conducted qualitative interviews of various individuals in a single Iowa community to determine whether the visions guiding their land management choices resembled at all the ideals of a sustain- able agriculture. Using Kenneth Burke’s concepts of identifica- tion and division, we rhetorically analyzed the interview tran- scripts. We found animosity towards much green terminology but widespread commitment to environmental preservation, especially when aligned with economic interests. We highlight rhetorical strategies for promoting sustainable practices.

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Work in Argumentation Studies (AS) and Studies in Expertise and Experience (SEE) has been proceeding on converging trajectories, moving from resistance to expert authority to a cautious acceptance of its legitimacy. The two projects are therefore also converging on the need to account for how, in the course of complex and confused civic deliberations, nonexpert citizens can figure out which statements from purported experts deserve their trust. Both projects recognize that nonexperts cannot assess expertise directly; instead, the nonexpert must judge whether to trust the expert. But how is this social judgment accomplished? A normative pragmatic approach from AS can complement and extend the work from SEE on this question, showing that the expert’s putting forward of his view and ‘‘bonding’’ it with his reputation for expertise works to force or ‘‘blackmail’’ his audience of citizens into heeding what he says. Appeals to authority thus produce the visibility and accountability we want for expert views in civic deliberations.

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The “critical questions” for testing appeals to authority proposed by Walton and many textbooks are all right. But why? That seems a good question for argumentation theorists to ask. I propose a general account of the appeal to epistemic authority drawn from principal-agent theory, from which the critical questions can be derived.

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What do four eminent experts in sustainable agriculture think of their roles in policy-making? And what communication strategies do they understand they have to fulfill those roles?

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We compare spatial metaphors for argumentation used by theorists with those used by practitioners as represented in discourse collected in four diverse corpora. Theorists and practitioners share a few metaphors — most notably, POINT and BASE. Their use of other spatial metaphors, however, suggest substantial diffe- rences in interests and focus. Theorists’ metaphors are concerned with relationships among an argument’s parts (e.g., the way a premise SUPPORTS a conclusion, or a conclusion FOLLOWS from a premise). Practitioners’ metaphors by contrast express the relationships of speakers to their arguments and each other (e.g., a speaker takes a POSITION, or SUPPORTS the position of another). These differences in focus suggest that theorists and practitioners do have much to learn through dialogue with each other.

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