Caring about Science

You will be surprised to learn, especially during the era of Covid-19 and the anti-mask movement and among those who distrust science, that the vast majority of Americans trust science. Yet despite overwhelming public confidence in science, many in our current government have subscribed to wild ideas about the coronavirus, climate change, and public health (please support the Union of Concerned Scientists, see their website).

Here's the big question: how do we have a science in the public interest? Let's take, for example, the many ways that corporate America has manipulated science, not in the public interest, but in the interest of profit and greed (watch this harrowing account, Frontline, PBS). Pharmaceutical companies are a good example (see David Healy's very important book Pharmageddon).  They have deceived the public about the safety and efficacy of their products.

We must care about science while at the same time our science must be cautious: we must be open to fallibility. Science often gets in wrong.  That's why we go back to the lab over and over again.  We must especially care about philosophy of science. We can have disagreements about what is (ontology) and how we know it (epistemology); but we must care about having a conversation about the nature of reality and our human capacity to KNOW. See our blog post on critical social work and science.

In our social and psychological worlds, science must confront maximally open systems, where at any given moment different actions and understandings change the course of an event. This is what makes prediction almost impossible in the human sciences. And for humans we are doubly determined: social and natural. We are determined by both natural and social worlds. In a caring social science, these kinds of determinations are carefully observed and accounted for.

We must care about curiosity and scientific discovery. We must value discovery in order to avoid a complacent acceptance of current understandings. When science works in the public interest and when science provides us with strong explanatory accounts to understand the nature of life and society lives are improved and communities are strengthened.

We believe that a caring science is one committed to relevance as much as it is committed to rigor. Too often, in academia, we talk to one another, in academic journals and at conferences, in private conversations, often about the rigor of methods. We sacrifice rigor for relevance. We look to see the number of times we've been cited (see Seven Deadly Sins of Psychology: A Manifesto for Reforming the Culture of Scientific Practice, Princeton, University Press, for an expose of these metrics). Pierre Bourdieu called this the scholastic fallacy. See our blog post on academic privilege and the gap between research and practice.


“The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error.”
― Bertolt Brecht, Life of Galileo

On the Blog - Modes of Caring - Science