From something I'm working on . . . .

4.1. “Where is everybody?” 

We adopted a critical stance in § 3 on existing measures of generalized science attitudes. We can think of two possible explanations for the absence of something more supportive of the view that general attitudes toward science are responsible for particular DRS [decision-relevant science] controversies. One is that  there just isn’t any substantial variation in the sorts of attitudes we have been describing, at least in the liberal democratic societies that feature public conflict over science issues. 

If a disposition is relatively uniform across the population, it won’t be possible, psychometrically, to form scales to measure it (Tinsley & Weiss 2000).  Items that admittedly do measure it won’t covary—because they won’t vary.  Accordingly, it will be impossible even to find items that one can be confident are measuring the disposition, much less find multiple ones to combine into a scale.

Is it plausible to think there is this degree of uniformity in “science attitudes” of the sort we identified in the second section? Looking around, we see very little evidence of any meaningful ambivalence toward the authority of science as a way of knowing.  Indeed, we suspect that most people in the US would be hard pressed at this point to even imagine what it would look like to live in a manner that didn’t treat science as authoritative over the kinds of matters to which it claims to speak. To be sure, there are grumblings about the performance of the institutions of science, but people—acting in their own capacity and through their democratically accountable agents—continue to support funding those responsible today for producing science. They do that because they think that the information is valuable for solving their problems: as we said, trust in science for decision making and trust of science institutions are linked.

But the question isn’t strictly how plausible it is that there is a uniformly high level of the various science attitudes we described in § 3.  It is instead how much  more plausible this conclusion is than the only other explanation we can think of for the absence of measures that detect meaningful levels of variance: that scholars of public attitudes toward science just haven’t realized that the “science attitude” measures” they are working with are inadequate, or have been too preoccupied answering related questions to identify better ones. 

We think that explanation is improbable.  There are too many smart and highly productive researchers in this field.

Enrico Fermi’s famous Bayesian “proof” against intelligent forms of extraterrestrial life (Gleiser 2016) applies at least as forcefully to the existence of meaningful forms of variance in dispositional trust in science, institutional trust of science, and acceptance of the authority of science: if sources of variance in these dispositions existed, someone would have found them by now.

Refs

Gleiser, M. The Simple Beauty of the Unexpected: A Natural Philosopher's Quest for Trout and the Meaning of Everything (University Press of New England, 2016).