the philosopher's role in science communication

Melissa Jacquart: STS scholars are trained in a very specific approach to thinking about science, and so are philosophers. But these different skill sets and different lenses for looking at similar issues that can really help then to giving different insights.

Angela Potochnik: Typically, I say, "Well, scientists do science, philosophers of science study the practice of science," but of course the latter is true of STS as well. What springs to mind for me is this textbook that I coauthored with Cory Wright and Matteo Colombo a few years ago, our experiment in trying to give what you might call a philosophical introduction to science rather than an introduction to philosophy of science. Throughout the book, you're not asked to buy into philosophy of science as a discipline or the importance of doing it. It is philosophical in its approach, but all of that is kept in the background and it's just about science as a form of inquiry and set of practices. That came to mind as an attempt on what it would look like to teach the practices and patterns of science predicated on all of the work that philosophers of science have done rather than focusing on that as a topic itself.

Angela Potochnik: This really is motivating a whole lot of the work that I have done in philosophy of biology since my dissertation—that is, dealing with scientists who see themselves as having very different commitments, methodological and otherwise, from other biologists. I don't necessarily care about convincing scientists that values influence their work more than they recognize. I care about a downstream implication of that: the recognition that you can have legitimate work that has a different starting point from your own work. Because if there are these early decision points that are made with particular aims in mind, then you find yourself at different end points. Science is stronger when scientists appreciate that variety.

This also picks up on something I was trying to say about the complexities of public understanding of COVID-19: you can hear things that sound incompatible, but there's a story to tell about how we got to those claims based on certain decision points and how in fact they are compatible claims on related but distinct questions.

Melissa Jacquart: I think the earliest and hardest challenge is learning each other's vocabulary and context. Philosophers use a lot of words in very different ways than scientists do. I think part of what you have to figure out early on is, when you say “confirmation,” what that means to you is very different than what it means maybe to a scientist. Or if you're talking about “hypothesis testing”: there's a sizable philosophy literature that comes along with that phrase, but the scientist just might be using the word very casually. I think one of the hardest things is getting on the same page and understanding each other's language and vocabulary. And also understanding that what you think is interesting is probably going to be different than that of the scientists you're working with. But I think that's also the fun part about working with scientists , that is, figuring out where you have these kinds of differences, because that's often where the really interesting philosophy lives.

Angela Potochnik: Part of the work too, is in figuring out what each party brings to the table, and so how to meaningfully collaborate. This brings to mind conversations I remember having around how philosophers can give good talks for scientists and vice versa as well. Things go wrong when we each starts to try to mimic the other, rather than doing a careful job of figuring out what we actually bring to the table with our disciplinary backgrounds, and making those complement one another.

Melissa Jacquart: Especially early on, and definitely as a graduate student, you're very preoccupied with ideas like, "I need to be an expert in the science if I want to go talk to the scientist. I need to know everything about it.” There is also this worry that the scientist will think, "What's this philosopher doing here? They don't know what they're talking about." But in some ways, I now think the fact that you might not know quite as much about the science leads to really interesting questions. I have some peers that I've really admired for their humbleness or willingness to be vulnerable in saying, "I don't know what that means.” Often that's where some of the really interesting discussions come from.

Melissa Jacquart: Speaking to the comment that I just made, that's one of the places where I think I've really learned the most. I appreciate other peoples’ willingness to just ask a question when they don’t know something. This feels different from some academic contexts because, for academics, so much is tied up to knowing things , since that is often what you're evaluated on. In some of my public engagement with science activities, it's just people genuinely being curious. They don't care if they know or if they don't know something, and so they're more willing to ask these questions.

Angela Potochnik: I don't think that all valid philosophy of science is work that scientists have to care about, but if you are engaging with scientists about a bit of work than probably it should be. I had a crushing early experience. I sat in on Joan Roughgarden's lab meetings towards the end of my time in grad school at Stanford. It was really valuable in all of these ways, and then the day came where they read a paper draft of mine, and I was so excited about it. When it came time to respond to the draft, they all sort of shrugged: "It's fine. It’s just, we don't care about this topic. We've moved on from this." It was so devastating. If I'm going to engage with scientists about some bit of philosophy of science, I better make sure that there's something at stake for them too.

To generalize from this to engaging with the public about science: you can't just assume people want to better understand the science that you care about or the philosophy of science that you care about. Nor can you just tell them that these are things they should care about. Rather, everything needs to be couched in real concerns or interests that people already have and how those might relate to the science. This fits back with my answer to what's distinctive about science communication during COVID-19. We are in this scenario now where people have immediate concerns such that they are actually looking to the science and what we can say from the science. That interest is all conditioned on how the science relates to their existing projects, not just an abstract interest in ideas about science.

Angela Potochnik: Our Center for Public Engagement with Science started three years ago. I have learned since then how long it really takes to create such a thing! I started out saying it was a “pretend” center; now I say it's a “baby” center. It's becoming more real every day. We have a hodgepodge of projects at the moment, but I think that there is a pretty clear logic to them: projects that span research about public engagement with science, direct outreach activities, and then also student training in public engagement.

Increasingly, the student training, especially graduate student training, is taking up a lot of our attention, which is, I think, a very good thing. We have adopted a deeply interdisciplinary approach, pursuing a variety of projects that broadly contribute to science outreach, how the public engages with science, and also theorizing what public engagement with science is and how it works.

Melissa Jacquart: We're also developing an interdisciplinary graduate course in public engagement with science, where we bring science grad students and humanities grad students that are interested in sciences together. We teach them some of the background related to doing public engagement with science and then we put them into interdisciplinary groups to develop outreach activities as a group. That's one of the things that we've been working on.

It is important to appreciate that there are other disciplines that have been doing forms of public engagement for years and years and years. So how do we tap into what they've already been doing, and how can we learn what they're already doing? What can we learn from people who have been doing science of science communication? What can we learn from people in STS? What can we learn from people who've been doing science education in libraries and things like that?

Angela Potochnik: That's another interesting thing about the Center work, coming at it from a philosophy of science background. Philosophy of science, and philosophy in general, aspires to such generality and lack of situatedness in many respects. It's really interesting to be doing work that explicitly takes on board being spatially situated in a local community instead of in an international academic community.

Melissa Jacquart: That was one of the things that was really striking to me about coming here and starting to work with Angela: the power of really getting to know your own city and knowing what's important to your community locally, especially because so much is often focused on the international philosophy of science community. It's a really interesting and striking contrast, what it means to gain credibility and for people to know your name in a local setting and to develop relationships in that context. It's a whole new different relationship that you have to learn how to navigate and how to build. We have these standard norms when it comes to building academic relationships, but community relationships are very different.

Angela Potochnik: It seems like there's never been as much popular interest as there is right now on what we don't know and why we don't know. The role of scientific modeling and scientific knowledge versus misinformation is another theme that seems well represented in broad treatments of academic themes, scientific and philosophical, related to the epidemic. It is really interesting as someone who cares about public engagement, to see the rapid pace of communication development and update. For example, the “flatten the curve” idea progressed day-to-day from a highly abstract notion, to Carl Bergstrom's little graphic that he thinks may effectively communicate the notion, to a widely shared component of our understanding of COVID-19.

Melissa Jacquart: One of the interesting things I've found is instead of being a producer of scicomm I've been more of a consumer. So it's been interesting from that perspective: to look at some of the other philosophers of science in the field and see how they've been framing things. That's been really interesting.

Angela Potochnik: I'm also bowled over by the awesomeness of Ed Yong as a science writer (with The Atlantic). I think I have maybe had this implicit assumption that individuals don't matter so much in the direction of public opinion, that it’s more about widely shared ideas, but I’m not convinced some individual voices clearly matter. We have these cases of one individual putting a point a certain way, or choosing to emphasize one thing versus another, that ends up amplifying into something much more significant, including what we might frame as social change.