Individual truth judgments or purposeful, collective sensemaking? Rethinking science education’s response to the post-truth era

Abstract

Science education is likely to respond to the post-truth era by focusing on how science education can help individuals use scientists’ epistemological tools to tell what is true. This strategy, by itself, is inadequate for three reasons. First, science does not actually offer foundational truth, and incautious assertions about scientific truth can make the problems of the post-truth era worse. Second, scientific knowledge offers only part of the solution to personal and policy problems and must be reconstructed in context. Third, people think about and act on science in social context—both as members of their social and cultural groups and with other members of those groups. Taken together, these arguments suggest that we should be focusing on a different question: How can science education help people work together to make appropriate use of science in social context?

Notes

1 Trust in science is complex. In the United States, for instance, although trust in science and scientists overall appears unshaken, a closer look at available data reveals divides along partisan and generational lines (American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2018; Funk et al., 2019) and a gap between trust in the scientific process, which remains high, and trust in scientific institutions, which is softer (Achterburg et al., 2017). Regardless, public trust in science emphatically does not prevent political leaders from dismissing scientific evidence, nor does it prevent the spread of false or misleading stories. Perhaps most important, the perception of science being attacked need not be true to drive policy response. For the purpose of this article, we assume that public (and scientist) perceptions of the post-truth era have some face validity—that they reflect real changes in the cultural status of science, even if those changes are more narrowly confined (to certain issues or certain actors) than the broad accounts of the post-truth era imply.