Science, expertise and trust

I'm working on a lengthy blog post on expertise and COVID-19.  Here's the intro.  The rest is still to come ....  Watch this space.

Are ‘experts’ and scientists fashionable and trusted again?  The high profile role of medical experts and chief medical officers on daily TV, suggests that they are.  ‘It has already forced people back to accepting that expertise matters’ is the view of Professor Tom Nichols, author of The Death of Expertise.  On this reading, COVID-19 may herald a welcome reversal of the ‘post-truth’ turn and an acceptance that facts matter and expertise counts.  

There are, however, many reasons not to embrace such simplistic re-assertions of expert authority.  Many challenging questions about science and this crisis, and expertise more generally, will start (re-) emerging.  They already are.  In the analytical piece which kicked off this blog, we suggested that faith in experts will increase short-term but decrease longer-term.  But we (my co-author and I) didn’t elaborate at that time.

There are bad reasons for the widespread mistrust of experts.  But there are good reasons too.  Our challenge is not to proclaim the need to trust scientists, to ‘follow the science’, and to have faith in the authority of experts.  Rather, it is to acknowledge that the rightful place of science is within, not above, society.  Science is a social practice too, not simply a knowledge revealing one.

Bear with me as I work through the issues as I see them.