Max Weber’s ‘Inconvenient Facts’ and Contemporary Studies of Public Science Communication

ABSTRACT

In his text ‘Wissenschaft als Beruf’, Max Weber associates the understanding of science as a vocation with the scientist’s ability to present the audience with ‘inconvenient facts’. He argues that this presentation provides a ‘full understanding of the facts’ and overcomes any personal value judgment. This overcoming refers to Weber’s understanding of scientific objectivity. I propose to interpret this understanding in the context of contemporary studies of public science communication. I pose the question, ‘Should scientists objectively present inconvenient facts to the public or should they neglect objectivity in science-society communication?’ I will start by legitimizing this question in the context of contemporary discussions on public science communication. To answer this question I will then use Heather Douglas’s observations addressing irreducible complexity of objectivity as a conceptual framework. I will briefly describe, with some modifications, this idea in relation to Weber’s representation of ‘inconvenient facts’. I then will continue by referencing discussions concerning scientist’s norms in public science communication and relate them to the formulations of objectivity above. In conclusion, I will offer an explanation of why the objectivity in Weber’s interpretation remains relevant to regulate contemporary public science communication.

KEYWORDS:

• Experts and non-experts
• objectivity
• distributed cognition
• uncertainty

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author

Notes

1. Moreover, the scientist conducting a scientific experiment has power over the objects of experience. Bruno Latour cites Isabelle Stengers: ‘an experiment is the invention of a power to grant things the power to grant the experimenter the power to speak in their names’ (Latour 2004, 107–108).

2. Such strategies are characteristic to the post-truth situation (Bucchi 2017).

3. This allows one to avoid Ian Hacking’s accusation of the redundancy of researchers’ appeal to the concept of objectivity, as a result of which the ground level talking of real scientific problems is often displaced by a second hand story of abstract terms (Hacking 2015).

4. One can draw an analogy of this kind of objectivity with Edwin Hutchins’s description of the distributed cognition implemented in the navigation of a naval ship. In his work Cognition in the Wild, Hutchins notes that various devices are used in determining the ship position, and it is the correlation of their results that allows considering the obtained data reliable. ‘The diversity of the many sources of navigation information and the many methods for generating constraints on the ship’s position produces an important system property: the fact that positions are determined by combining information from multiple, sometimes independent, sources of information permits the navigation team to check the consistency of the multiple representations with each other’. (Hutchins 1995, 35).

5. This practice is described by ‘first-order (or deficit) models of science-public relations’ (Irwin 2014, 160).

6. Barriers to achieving replicability include the lack of interest on the part of financial backers to support confirmatory studies, and the lack of editors’ desire to publish results of repeated experiments see: (Schmidt 2009; Romero 2017). These researchers suggest that to obtain a reliable judgment of reality interaction with the latter should have a collaborative character.

Additional information

Funding

The research was supported by the Russian Science Foundation under Grant number 19-18-00210 ‘Political Ontology of Digitalization: Study of Institutional Bases for Digital Forms of Governability.’

Notes on contributors

Lada Shipovalova

Lada Shipovalova is a DSc in Philosophy, Professor, Head of the Department of Philosophy of Science and Technology at the Saint Petersburg University. She works mainly on topics in the history and philosophy of science, with a focus on social and historical dimensions of scientific knowledge. She is a board member of Russian Society for History and Philosophy of Science.