Today science seems to confront a public crisis of trust. The scientific consensus on climate change and the effectiveness of vaccines are routinely challenged or misrepresented. Tobacco companies, the fossil fuels industry, free market think tanks, and other organizations with economic interests and ideological commitments, counter to scientific findings, have sown doubts about science. We know that scientists sometimes make mistakes, and that scientific findings now once widely believed are wrong. Why, when, and to what extent should we trust science? We will explore answers to these questions of when and why scientific findings are reliable. The trustworthiness of scientific consensus is based on science’s character as a collective enterprise. What is the nature of scientific understanding? Is there one scientific method? We will examine the crucial role of the scientific community’s check on accepted scientific knowledge. The course will defend the role of values in science and set a credo of the rationale of the scientific process.
Recommended Book: Oreskes, Naomi. Why Trust Science? 1 (The University Center for Human Values Series). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition. 2021.
