I’ve been haunted by Ed Yong’s description of science from the Atlantic article “Why Coronavirus is So Confusing,” which I shared a few days ago:
“This is how science actually works. It’s less the parade of decisive blockbuster discoveries that the press often portrays, and more a slow, erratic stumble toward ever less uncertainty. “Our understanding oscillates at first, but converges on an answer,” says Natalie Dean, a statistician at the University of Florida. “That’s the normal scientific process, but it looks jarring to people who aren’t used to it.”
The problem with this line, I now realize, is that it’s a good description of how “frontier science” becomes “consensus science” except for the fact that the oscillations sometimes settle around multiple competing perspectives (nowadays we might call them “basins of attraction,” using complex systems terminology).
The term “frontier science” is used by sociologists of science to distinguish between science conducted in a novel area, one in which basic assumptions have not yet crystallized into a generally accepted paradigm, from the kind of “puzzle-solving” that constitutes what Thomas Kuhn had called “normal” science. (Kuhn distinguished between “normal” and “revolutionary” science, but the latter term seems overdrawn for most contexts.) Imre Lakatos’ term research programs has become a common one for divergent perspectives within a field, but in genuinely frontier fields it seems more fruitful to focus on the ways in which consensus is attempted, contested, and shaped.
The science around how to deal with a global pandemic like the current one is an interdisciplinary field encompassing virologists and epidemiologists, medical and public health experts, as well as economists, population and systems modelers, statisticians, social psychologists, ethicists, and public policy specialists of various kinds. That science has been largely theoretical until now, and with all the unknowns and “wild cards” surrounding any single viral outbreak, I suspect it’s premature to expect any single consensus to consolidate very quickly.
To the extent that there is a consensus — around testing, contact tracing, social distancing, and so on — represented by the World Health Organization, the CDC, and related organizations, there are likely to be “secondary consenses” forming around dissenting opinions (such as Stanford’s Michael Levitt, who argues against any lockdowns). All of that is separate, if not completely independent, from the many conspiracy theories circulating in the public domain.
This situation can be compared to the science of climate change, which in the public domain (at least) has had the appearance of being a deeply contested science. The difference is that the minority, so-called “climate skeptic” camp have mostly not been working climatologists; rather, it’s been a largely manufactured, think-tank and media generated rivalry of views. There are similarities, however, in that the debate over climate change action has always involved economists, politicians, and the various political interest groups they have been able to corral into the issue.
In this sense, I wonder if we need to define science more expansively. There is the science of coronavirus (or climate change), which can become consensus science. And there is the science of pandemic response (or climate change mitigation and adaptation), which will always be contested and somewhat multiple, with any oscillations contributing not so much to a convergence around a single consensus as towards a convergence around two or more rival consensuses (basins of attraction). Depending on your sociopolitical views, you will find one or another of them more convincing.
The implication is that appealing to the science of coronavirus (or of climate change), as if it were singular, will never suffice. One has to specify which science, and which level of science (specialist-disciplinary versus multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary), is being appealed to. The more encompassing the implications of a phenomenon, the more encompassing one’s response to it must be.
Thoughts welcome.
