Why Trust Science?

Josh Landy
Is science just one error after another?

Ray Briggs
Or is it the only way to arrive at the truth?

Josh Landy
If it isn’t true, why does it work so well?

Ray Briggs
Welcome to Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. We’re coming to you from the studios of KALW San Francisco Bay Area.

Josh Landy
Continuing conversations that begin at philosophers corner on the Stanford campus where Ray teaches philosophy and I direct the philosophy and literature initiative.

Ray Briggs
Today we’re asking: Why trust science?

Josh Landy
Well, you know, that’s a great question. I’m not sure we should.

Ray Briggs
Really? How can you doubt the method that helps us build bridges and skyscrapers and formulate life saving medicines and understand the cosmos?

Josh Landy
Do we understand the cosmos? Scientists have had a lot of theories, most of them are wrong. I mean, astronomers used to think the sun revolved around the doctors used to think leeches could cure disease.

Ray Briggs
Well yeah, Josh, but they don’t think those things anymore. We prove them wrong with the scientific method.

Josh Landy
Sure, and look what scientists believe now. Don’t you think we might prove those things wrong to someday in the future?

Ray Briggs
Yeah, fine. But we’re guaranteed to reach the truth. Eventually, we just have to keep gathering evidence until we know which theory is right.

Josh Landy
I don’t know gathering evidence isn’t going to be enough. You also have to convince people. And that isn’t always easy. Take Ignaz Semmelweis. He was a doctor in 19th century Vienna, and everyone around him thought that patients were dying because they had like an imbalance of, of humors.

Ray Briggs
Wait, imbalance of what?

Josh Landy
Exactly! And Semmelweis showed that washing your hands between patients was guess what a good way to keep them alive?

Ray Briggs
Well, I guess that disproves the imbalance of humors theory.

Josh Landy
Well you might think so, but his colleagues were not convinced. He just couldn’t persuade them that disease is caused by these, you know, tiny blobs you can’t see. And that’s why science doesn’t always make progress, Ray. You’re always gonna have one or two people who get it, and a whole bunch of people who refuse to face the facts.

Ray Briggs
Well, of course, science isn’t gonna guarantee that everyone will believe the truth. It just guarantees that if people follow its methods, then they’ll arrive at the truth. But that’s already pretty cool. You know, it means that all we have to do is set aside our biases and be objective and use the scientific method.

Josh Landy
But Galileo use the scientific method. And you know, he was wrong about all kinds of things. He thought the tides were caused by the Earth’s rotation. You know, now we know they’re, they’re caused by the moon.

Ray Briggs
Of course, he was wrong about some things. But being wrong is a step on the way to being right scientists adopt theories and then subjected them to rigorous tests. So if your theory fails the test, you stop believing it, and eventually, the only theories left standing are going to be the true ones.

Josh Landy
What does it mean, though, to fail a test? I mean, if your data don’t match your theory, that could just mean your telescopes broken or there’s dust on the lens.

Ray Briggs
Okay, I get that you have intellectual doubts. But when push comes to shove, you trust science just as much as I do. Look at you, talking away into that fancy radio microphone, confident that the radio waves are going to reach thousands of people. What kind of hypocrite are you anyway?

Josh Landy
The kind with a fancy microphone?

Ray Briggs
Okay. But seriously, you have to admit you rely on science all the time.

Josh Landy
All right. Yeah. Fair enough. I do depend on science a lot in my everyday life. Science works, I’ll give you that—it just doesn’t mean that it’s true.

Ray Briggs
I think you do trust science, after all.

Josh Landy
Maybe—but I’m not sure I have good reason to.

Ray Briggs
I give up. I hope our guest can convince you. It’s Ann Thresher from Stanford, co-author of a new book, “The Tangle of Science.”

Josh Landy
Thinking of trying to convince people about science… When it comes to topics like drug use, people don’t always trust the research. They often let their politics get in the way.

Ray Briggs
So we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Holly J. McDede, to investigate how emotions can trump science when it comes to stopping drug users from overdosing. She files this report.

Holly McDede
Dr. Phil isn’t a licensed doctor, but it’s no surprise he has a lot of opinions on how the country should address addiction. He’s not a fan of safe consumption sites where people can use drugs under medical supervision.

Dr. Phil
Talking about, you know, safe places… safe havens… clean needles. Tt can be taken as an implicit endorsement that this is now safer, that it’s okay.

Holly McDede
In this episode, he talked to Maya Szalavitz, the author of “Undoing Drugs.” She says the data shows that syringe exchange programs are effective.

Maia Szalavitz
People who participate in syringe exchange programs, in prescription heroin programs, in Europe are more likely to get into abstinence or other forms of recovery.

Holly McDede
But that argument does not persuade Dr. Phil.

Dr. Phil
What is the exit strategy? And the answer is there isn’t one

Maia Szalavitz
No, that’s not true.

Dr. Phil
It is true. There is not an exit strategy

Maia Szalavitz
There is.

Holly McDede
And of course, Dr. Phil is Dr. Phil—but he’s not the only person who feels that way. Instead of punishing people who use drugs or forcing them to quit, harm reduction focuses on reducing the risks of drug use. Szalavitz says that philosophy saved her life. During the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, while addicted to heroin and cocaine, she met someone who had some advice.

Maia Szalavitz
She told me, you know, I shouldn’t share but if I had to share, I should, you know, clean the works twice with bleach and then twice with water. And she probably saved my life.

Holly McDede
In San Francisco, people stocked bleach and corner stores, bars and tacquerias. Advocates also distributed clean needles without permission from the government.

Rachel McLean
The whole history of harm reduction in the United States, and really internationally, is first things are done illegally and underground, and then the sky doesn’t fall.

Holly McDede
That’s Rachel McLean. Back in the 1990s. She worked as an outreach worker in San Francisco when the city was seeing a wave of heroin overdoses. She was part of the push to distribute Narcan, the medication used to reverse overdoses. McLean still remembers the first time learning about a save.

Rachel McLean
We would call it a save when you give somebody Naloxone, and then they use it to like reverse somebody else’s overdose. I can’t even describe it. It was just such an incredible feeling of being like, we’re doing it—like, this is working, you know. We are giving people who use drugs the tool to save each other’s lives.

Holly McDede
The results were promising.

Joshua Bamberger
We gave out thousands of doses and many lives were saved.

Holly McDede
Joshua Bamberger, a professor of medicine at UCSF, was the only physician prescribing Naloxone in San Francisco for many years. And the death toll from heroin overdoses plummeted from a peak of 155 in the mid 90s to 10 in 2010. Flash forward to today, fentanyl is killing people in record numbers.

Joshua Bamberger
Just when the drug dealers come up with a new drug, we need to come up with a new response. I think it’s our job as physicians to give people the tools so they don’t come to greater harm from their addiction or illness. “First do no harm—primum non nocere.”

Holly McDede
Still, despite the overwhelming evidence that safe consumption saves lives, many political leaders are not persuaded. In 2022 California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed a measure to create a pilot program for safe consumption sites, saying they could have unintended consequences.

Joshua Bamberger
The Law and Order stance that many politicians have learned is a successful position to be in to get elected is not the stance that science supports.

Holly McDede
Bamberger says harm reduction is only controversial when it comes to substance use perhaps because of our own fear of losing control. So some people might think, well, what’s going to get me to do something? And the answer might be consequences. But those threats don’t work for people living with addiction.

Joshua Bamberger
I think that there’s a lot of cultural misappropriation by taking more middle class values and projecting it onto drug users and assuming that that’s going to fit.

Holly McDede
And instead of TV pseudo doctors, we could look to real doctors who study addiction and their results. Since opening safe consumption sites in New York, hundreds of overdoses have been reversed. For Philosophy Talk, I’m Holly J. McDede.

Josh Landy
Thanks for that great report. Holly. I’m Josh Landy, with me is my Stanford colleague Ray Briggs, and today we’re asking why trust science.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Ann Thresher. She’s a science ethicist at the new Doerr School for Sustainability at Stanford University, and co author of “The Tangle of Science: Reliability Beyond Method, Rigor, and Objectivity.” Ann, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Ann Thresher
Thanks for having me.

Josh Landy
So Ann, you’ve written books and articles on the philosophy of science, but what first got you interested in all that?

Ann Thresher
So I’ve always been interested in science ever since I was a little kid. My parents are both scientists. And I have these vivid memories of being a kid and doing experiments at home with my parents. And then I remember my dad who was a genetic biologist, he ended up stealing some of my pet fish. When I was a kid, I used to breed guppies. I heard being really upset when I was about eight years old, because he not because he took my fish away, but because he wouldn’t give them back after they were glowing in the dark, something like government regulations and labs. So I’ve always been interested in these topics and why science can help us figure out how the world works.

Ray Briggs
That’s so cool. I remember getting these science by mail kits as as a kid, where you got like a little experiment that you could do building a circuit or something you had a scientist to correspond with about your experiment, and my scientist like me had really bad vision. So I felt an immediate intellectual connection. We were both the same. But earlier, I was trying to persuade Josh that you can trust science, but he wouldn’t listen to me. So can you convince him? Why should we trust science?

Ann Thresher
Yeah, so I think you mentioned something that I think is really important. Hear. So the conversation was really based around truth that science is true. But you mentioned the word reliability that we can rely on science. And I think that’s really the key to understanding why we should trust science. It’s not because it’s true. As Josh pointed out, it’s often wrong about lots of things. But what it does do is get us at reliable results, we can trust it to do the things we ask it to do.

Josh Landy
So what’s it what is reliability come to that mean? Basically, if I just know if I do the same thing, I’ll get the same result. So if you know, around the country, right now, probably 10,000 kids are making a volcano out of baking powder and vinegar. And we know you can combine those two things, you get a chemical reaction, is that what we mean by reliability?

Ann Thresher
Yeah, it really is sort of reliability in the everyday sense, right? You can rely on your car to get you to work in the morning, but you can’t rely on it to make your scrambled eggs, right, like reliability, typically interesting because it gets at these questions of liquor liable, for what, in what context. And so when kids are making these volcanoes they’re relying on you know, if I mix these two compounds together and put it in a particular container, I get these results. And it’s not guaranteed that every time there’s all sorts of confounding factors that can come in. But, you know, if you do the same thing over and over again, science tells you that you’ll get the same sorts of results out. And that’s really why it works.

Ray Briggs
So that’s kind of an interesting answer, because like a baking soda volcano is not even the kind of thing that can be true or false. And usually, I think about like trusting scientific theories or trusting scientific predictions, should I be shifting my focus to other stuff besides items that can be true or false?

Ann Thresher
Yeah, I think that’s exactly why we shouldn’t be thinking about science. So when we put the emphasis on science being a true thing, not only do we run into the problems of like, well, it’s not always true. But scientists composed of a lot more things than just theories and measures and hypotheses that can be true or false. It’s also experiments and data, and methodologies and models, all these things that don’t actually take truth values, but are just important to the way science works. And we need them to be working and doing the things we expect if we want science to do the things we want it to do.

Josh Landy
But what if they aren’t? So I mean, obviously, there’s a replication crisis right now and in the field of psychology, for example. So while there are experiments there, but somehow they not all of them panned out. So can I just say, well, there’s experiments and there’s datasets, and there’s models, and they’re reliable and so we can rely on science?

Ann Thresher
Well things can be more or less reliable, right? So plenty of things that we thought were reliable, ended up being not all that good in the long term. But there was a reason we thought they were reliable in the first place, right? These data sets these experiments. They looked good at the time, but part of what science is is going through and double checking the reliability of things and built making them more reliable or realizing actually, they didn’t do what we thought we did in the first place.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about trust in science with Ann Thresher from Stanford University.

Ray Briggs
How do you rely on science in your everyday life? Has science ever failed you? How do you decide which experts to trust?

Josh Landy
Trusting and verifying—along with your comments and questions, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Freezepop
When I clone a human being, it will be a member of my band.

Josh Landy
Do you trust science enough to let a human clone a play in your band? I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and we’re asking why trust science with Ann Thresher from Stanford University, co-author of “The Tangle of Science.”

Josh Landy
Got questions about today’s topic? Email us comments@philosophytalk.org, or comment on our website. And while you’re there, you can also become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes.

Ray Briggs
So Ann, you’ve told us that we should trust science because it’s reliable. But you don’t seem to think that science delivers up a lot of true theories or more true theories than false ones. So why should I rely on something that has a bunch of false theories at its foundation?

Ann Thresher
Yes, this is a really good question. And I think I think the answer is quite counterintuitive. And the reason science is reliable is partially because it’s full of false theories. It is right. But like, when you think about the way science actually works in the real world, so I have a physics background and sort of physics examples, but the one that always strikes me is Newtonian mechanics. Right? That’s what you were taught in high school. Like everyone sort of gets some sort of grounding in Newtonian mechanics, you know, F=MA, but that’s false.

Josh Landy
You’re giving me bad flashbacks.

Ann Thresher
Like throwing bowls in classes and measuring things, yeah?

Josh Landy
It’s, I mean, It’s obviously incomplete a theory, right? I mean Einsteinian physics… But is it totally false?

Ann Thresher
It’s false, right? So it is a very objects it’s posits right just turn out to not exist. It’s not the kind of thing like what Newton was working with weren’t real things in the real world. It’s not that it got a sort of expanded by General Relativity, it got replaced by General Relativity, and general relativity is probably going to be replaced in the long run to we know it’s not compatible with quantum mechanics. But that doesn’t stop us from using Newtonian mechanics to good effect.

Ray Briggs
So one thing I could think is like, okay, Newtonian mechanics, like lots of false parts, but at least what it predicts about physical objects, that part of it is true. So the part that matters is true. And then there’s some other false stuff. But like, we should really just pay attention to predictions and get those right.

Ann Thresher
Let’s say the predictions are certainly very important. But like, it doesn’t change the fact that it’s still telling you false things. And but this is where the reliability comes in. Because it is giving you something that does seem to work in the real world. And so when you look at something like building bridges, for example, right, you when you ask engineers to do the science and figure out how to make bridges, you shouldn’t ask them to use general relativity, just because it’s the truer theory, right? Because it’s close to reality. You’re asked them to use Newtonian mechanics, because it’s, it is false, but it’s useful. It’s usefully false.

Josh Landy
But this is the question I always have, you know, for, for folks who think that science somehow works, but not by being true. Why? I didn’t see him seems like it’s a miracle or very weird fluke, that it just so happens that the things that scientists claim about, for example, mechanics and astronomy allow us to land a rocket on a comet, right? Or, or, you know, the things we know about. Conduction and TriCity allow us to build an iPhone. But is it just a weird coincidence? What Why shouldn’t I say, well, that works? Probably because people are getting something right?

Ann Thresher
Not at all. So there’s two sort of ways to answer this. The first is that like reliability and truth aren’t entirely separate, you hope that if you’ve got someone’s reliable, like getting at something about the real world, it’s working right? And you’re turning mechanics, maybe false. But it’s not completely off base, it’s getting close, something is actually happening in the real world. And the second thing is that science is designed to build better reliable systems. Like, I think part of the problem with focusing our conversation on truth is that we’re not really modeling what science is actually doing. What science is actually doing is trying to get better results. And truth sure comes in at some point, but the entire structures of science are about making more and more reliable systems. So when scientists go into the lab, and they’re, you know, thinking about building bridges and stuff, right, they’re wondering, Well, okay, why is Newtonian mechanics good for this job? And that’s a particularly important aspect of it. When you ask for the swings, reliable? That’s a secondary question. Reliable, full what?

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I was about to ask about this. So so if I have a reliable bridge, it’s one that doesn’t fall down. If I have a reliable procedure for synthesizing a chemical, it’s one that makes the chemical every time but but like, is there something reliability that those have in common with every other reliable thing? What is the core concept here?

Ann Thresher
Yeah, so the important thing here, I think, is context. Science works in contexts when theories are used by engineers or, you know, bridges versus orbiting satellites, right, one group tends to use generativity, they’ll use no can’t do 20 mechanics, but like each of them is working with a particular context that tells you what theory you should be using, which one’s going to be the most reliable. And so a lot of what scientists are doing when they’re building theories and models and experiments, the stuff is they’re building an understanding of what context the stuff they’re doing works in. The way I like to think about is this, like sort of this dense network of pieces that you sort of scientists are pulling in to support particular products and results of science.

Ray Briggs
So can I have an example of like a dense network?

Ann Thresher
Yeah, so let’s take space shuttles is a good example of this. So I want to build a space shuttle began to space. And there’s lots and lots of science that goes into that every field for meteorology to predict the weather on your launch to rocket fuel science, like figuring out chemical components, so forth. But let’s look at a particular subset. Let’s talk about welding. So I need to put my space shuttle together. And I’m building a specialty from scratch and I need to I need to weld the outside to make it you know, able to withstand the pressures of space and heat of launch that sort of thing. And so, now I as a scientist need to figure out what to do. And so you’re trying to figure out what welding techniques to use. And there’s so many pieces that come into that that you sort of you building this tangled network of pieces that can together. So I need to know, for example, well, here’s a supporting piece. Has this type of welding been used for large scale materials before? Right? Is it used in trucks? Right? Have I done the right experiments to show that it can hold under the heat of launch? Have I do I had the right theories of my material science to show that these particular materials will weld together with these particular structures. And you know, you can just keep pulling in from all over science and you’re sort of building this thing within Can I rely on this piece of welding to get my or to hold when I launch my shuttle. And so there’s all these pieces, you’re frantically weaving together. And it’s important that all the pieces are there.

Ray Briggs
So in order to do the welding, I have to rely on material science and physics, and maybe some astronomy, so I know what the conditions are like and fit in space, and maybe some chemistry. And the more things I’m relying on, the more reliable it is.

Ann Thresher
Yeah, sort of. So there are different ways we can sort of think about reliability, when it comes to this, what I’ve read was the tangle, right, so every piece has this tangle woven into it. And so I like to use the analogy of a nest. So think of the piece your transport is an egg, and you’re trying to weave something here that will hold up your egg and carefully support it. And so the better woven Your nest is, the more assured you can be that your egg is going to be fine. So there are different ways your nest can be better or worse. Right? So one way you can be sure that you’re getting some reliable is if these things have been used in other places in science in similar contexts before, right? How far can you reach out to pull in these things if the welding case, right, I’m reaching into say, like fundamental physics and chemistry and but also like, you know, the welding techniques of this particular welder, right, like his background experience, all these little bits and pieces that come in. And so the further afield I’m reaching, the more of those I’m pulling in, the more likely it is what I’m doing is going to work.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about trust in science with Ann Thresher from the School of Sustainability at Stanford University. And we’ve got a email from Daniel that came through on our website. Daniel says, is part of the problem that natural science cannot include human life. And that nature as a domain of objective study, by definition excludes anything affected by optional human design. In the spectacular progress of the rigorous sciences, are some surprise that science explains so little about human beings.

Ann Thresher
I’m not sure it doesn’t explain that much about human beings. I mean, human beings are definitely very complicated. And part of the reason for that is that we’re just intelligent beings, loose strange emotions. And like, complexity is the way that we interact with one another. But it’s certainly the case that science tells a lot about how we work as a species. And in terms of interpersonal relationships and our the way we interact with nature, we’re not separate from nature, we’re continuous with it, we’re still a part of this system.

Josh Landy
Okay, but okay, I want to get back to what we were talking about a moment ago, we’re talking about what you call the tangle of science. That’s the title of the book. And how one of the reasons we can rely on science is because in many of these cases, many of the successful cases where people are putting together information that they get from different areas and different practices and models and data sets and, and sort of methodologies. But I still want to kind of be the voice of truth is important to you, you said, Look, well, you know, we we have to do this test to see whether this kind of welding holds up under the conditions we need to hold. So if I do those tests, why shouldn’t we say, I’ve got some knowledge, now I run the tests run them really well? Well, now I know whether or not this kind of world can hold up in space. And that’s how I can be so confident that it’s gonna work.

Ann Thresher
I don’t think that’s the wrong thing to think. So I try not to suggest that reliability completely replaces truth. They’re clearly related in some way, shape, or form, right? So I think you do know that, under these particular circumstances, this kind of welding will hold up, or maybe no is a little too strong, right? There’s always confounding factors and things that come in and sort of change the way this welding works unforeseen first circumstances, but like, by and large, I think you can know and that’s part of the wonderful thing about reliability is you can know that you can rely on it. Right? And so we can sort of circumvent truth to a certain extent when we replace with reliability talk, but we’re not getting rid of it completely. It’s still a part of the way that we talk about the world and how we know things science gives us knowledge, even if it’s knowledge, it’s now rests on but it just seems to work in these contexts rather than it’s an absolute truth and a fundamental fact.

Josh Landy
Right, because even even the statement, I you know, it’s going to work. If I do this, this will happen if I put baking soda and vinegar kit together, it’s gonna be a chemical reaction. Even that is a is a knowledge claim. I can know that. I can rely on that.

Ann Thresher
Yep, absolutely.

Ray Briggs
So I’m kind of like wandering about how I should think of the purpose of science. So So one picture of the purpose of science, which seems at odds with what you’re saying is that science is mostly how As the purpose of describing the universe, like, I want to know what’s true, and I want to go out and look at things and observe them, and then just like, understand their nature. And another kind of really different idea is that science is really about engineering, I want to make stuff that works for my human aims. And so I kind of want those both to be true. And I’m not sure how to stick them together. And I see how your theory gets me sciences, great for engineering. And I don’t see how it gets me sciences great for looking at the universe and describing it when I don’t even have anything I want to do with it. Like I want to, I want to know where the universe came from, not so that I can build a thing, but just because I’m curious, how do I get that second thing?

Ann Thresher
Yeah, good. So I’ve been talking a lot about engineering here, because it’s like a nice practical use for science. But like, I don’t want to make the claim or suggest that this stuff. And the reliability claims are just for practical, pragmatic, we’re gonna build some stuff and invent new technologies and build radio mics that can transmit things and so forth. Reliability also includes things like, can I reliably know how old the universe is? Can I reliably know what an electron is? Can I reliably tell you? How ecosystems like function and evolve and change over time? So reliability isn’t just about like, what can I do? pragmatically? And practically, it’s also about like, How reliable is my knowledge of the fundamental nature of the universe?

Josh Landy
So it’s not it’s not just that my beliefs helped me builds bridges? Yeah, it’s that my ability to build bridges helps me trust my beliefs.

Ann Thresher
Yeah. Right. So, you know, we talked about figuring out fun. Well, you know, think about the James Webb Telescope right now, which is telling us so much incredible stuff about your early galaxies, and so forth. And why can I trust my knowledge of that? Well, because of all this cool stuff to do with like, how engineering works, and how light works, and these theories of general relativity and quantum mechanics and like, all this cool stuff that is, like, all parts of science that reliably work together to give me cool information about the universe.

Ray Briggs
So this is amazing. But I have an annoying philosophy question now. Which is, okay, so I rely on my theory of physics to trust that I can build a telescope that works. And I rely on my telescope to tell me that my theory of physics is true. Isn’t this kind of circular? Like, why should I trust this whole system?

Ann Thresher
Yeah good, like so to a certain extent, maybe a little bit because like you all sort of like sign a loop in which are some of these things. But one of the nice things about science in comparison things like theology or folklore, right, is that theology and folklore often wrapped in on themselves, they’re self justifying, in ways that can be a little frustrating if you’re trying to figure out how the world actually working? Where’s one of the nice things about science is that it really is reaching out into like, empirical data about the real world, right? So why am I using my physics to get my telescopes working with telescopes? My physics working with both those things are also also reaching out into other data and other experiments. This is why it’s important that science is this broad ranging thing that’s pulling from lots of buried and diverse and rich sets of objects to justify its results, right. You don’t want science that only draws from one particular data point or that only has like one supporting factor for that you want lots and lots of supporting factors in this tangle be very dense.

Ray Briggs
So yeah, this is also giving me some questions about the things you’re contrasting with science. So there are lots of things that I don’t think of as science but that do figure in this network of understanding the world. So there was a couple of years back this like extremely clever hairdresser who figured out how the wife of Marcus are really a styled her hair, such that you could get the shape that is depicted in sculptures of her Flavia. So she she. And so the hairdresser showed that if you sewed people’s hairstyles together, you could get them to do this gravity defying stuff that was not really achievable in other ways. And it seems like the hairdresser needed to draw on her practical knowledge of hairstyling, which was reliable and maybe draws on things like physics and chemistry to know how hair dyes work and how hair shapes work. So is hairstyling science?

Ann Thresher
To a certain extent? Yeah, I think it’s kind of continuous with what science is doing. In many ways this reliability conversation is, it’s not just a thing that science does. It’s about the way that we interact the world and figure out new things all the time. So historians are doing these sorts of things. And hairdressers are doing these kinds of things. Every time we try and figure out new methodologies and new ways of looking in dealing with the world. Science is just a little bit different than the scientific method. And these kinds of things are designed to make it easier and better. And we really like like scientists are basically professional reliability machines, right? They’ve gotten really good at taking all these observations and figuring out how to make them really reliable, and what it makes means to be reliable.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about trust in science with Ann Thresher from Stanford University.

Ray Briggs
Is there a science denier in your life? How can you change their mind? Are there things the scientific community could do to win the public’s trust?

Josh Landy
Just say no to denial—plus commentary from Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher, when Philosophy Talk continues

They Might Be Giants
Science is real, science is real.

Josh Landy
You may not trust it, but you certainly can’t deny it: science is real. I’m Josh Landy and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. Our guest is Ann Thresher from Stanford University. And we’re asking why trust science?

Josh Landy
So Ann, since COVID it seems like there are more science deniers than ever before out there. So what would you say, to convince a denier to have more trust in science?

Ann Thresher
Well, I think a lot of it comes down to why science denialism sort of increased over COVID. And you know, things like climate change denial, and that sort of thing. And there’s obviously a very complicated set of reasons for why people might mistrust science or try to undermine it. But one of the big things that happened over COVID, and we’ll remember this with those early chaotic months, when there was conflicting information coming out different recommendations, you know, we’re all leaving our groceries outside for three days, no one was touching the mail for a while, you know, only spend time outdoors, wash your hands for 20 seconds, 30 seconds for a minute, right? Like, we just had this overwhelming amount of recommendations coming out of science. And it turned out a lot of them weren’t right. You know, we don’t leave our groceries outside anymore. We think that COVID is not surface contact disease anymore. And so you can sort of see why people have this idea that science is about truth. So I suppose to your true things, they’re going to be taken aback when it turns out science is telling them bunch of wrong stuff that it gets changed. And so out of this, I think comes this idea that science, if this is wrong, what else is science getting wrong? Like? Why should I believe anything that science tells me about vaccines or other things if they were wrong at the beginning. And so I think if we shift to the idea of we communicate more, the idea that science is about reliability, rather than absolute truths, it makes it a lot easier to show someone that what was happening at the beginning of the pandemic was that just science doing its normal, everyday job, it was trying to figure what the most reliable thing I could tell you was, and we didn’t know much about COVID-19 at the time, but we had similar diseases. And so we’re like, the most reliable thing you can do to avoid getting it is to wash your hands to not touch your groceries to avoid being in contact with people.

Josh Landy
I think I’m still confused about the reliability versus truth dichotomy. Because, you know, why couldn’t I say to somebody, we’re doing the best we can to figure out what’s going on, right? So exactly how it’s transmitted, and what you can do to prevent the spread. And this is our best guess for now. But of course, you know, as we get more data in, we’re revise our hypotheses. That’s the scientific way. And that seems still to be in the language of truth, or at least have, you know, best guess, or something like that best estimate, based on the data we have now, why dispense with the notion of truth? Why not just say, Look, we’re we’re aiming at knowledge. And we already have some knowledge, but you know, this will evolve and we’ll, we’ll we’ll do the best we can in a given moment. Why don’t we have to get rid of that notion that scientists are actually doing their best to get knowledge?

Ann Thresher
Again, I don’t think that knowledge necessarily means we have to look at truth as a thing. I mean, I know people, philosophers, people talk about knowledge as a justified true belief. And also that truth tends to come in very hard on the knowledge thing. But I think I can know something. If it’s something I can rely on, I can know that my car will get me to work in the morning.

Ray Briggs
Wait, I’m a little worried. So I would have thought that in order for me to know something, maybe it’s not enough for it to be like a justified true belief. Or maybe I don’t need a justification. But doesn’t it have to be true if I if I rely on the understanding that my my car will get me to work, and it won’t get me to work? Then I made a mistake, even if even if I don’t get harmed by the mistake. So even if I was relying on my car, but then at the last minute, my friend said, Do you want to carpool? Like I was I was wrong to rely on it. I didn’t know it because it wasn’t true.

Ann Thresher
Yeah, look, I mean, this gets into really deep conversations about reliable ism and like the way that we think about knowledge as it relates to truth and counterfactual worlds and all these other complicated concepts. That I’m not sure helps right now when it comes to science denialism sort of question. So I think the shorthand for this is that look, truth and reliability are certainly as I said, not unrelated but The problem is that when we emphasize truth when we say that science is trying to get at true facts, but COVID-19 was just confused at the beginning. Well, I think science deniers tend to latch on to those kinds of pieces of language. Right? They’re talking about, well, it wasn’t true, it isn’t true. And we’re still updating our knowledge about COVID-19. And recommendations, the way vaccines work and how they protect us. And so when we couch everything in the language of truth, when we try and push the narrative that science is all about doing true things, you open yourself up to those kinds of criticisms.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, that’s, that’s helpful. And I kind of want to ask about a related thing, which is the how people perceive science and authority. So I think of truth is kind of connected to authority. And maybe ways that I’m a little bit suspicious of like this idea that somebody is going to tell me what to do. And I won’t have to think about it ever again for myself. And if if the person tells me one thing, and then changes their mind, because the evidence changed, then I stopped trusting them because they didn’t tell me what to do. And I had to worry. Is that a factor? And how do I sort of understand and respond to that?

Ann Thresher
I do worry about the sort of the way we communicate what science is in our culture. You know, when we talk about scientists, as authorities in something we, you know, people in high school, you’re, you’re told that science tells you facts about the world that teach you how the world works. And that’s what makes science different. To a certain extent, we’re setting people up to then be really surprised when it turns out science is making a bunch of false predictions or making wrong statements. And so I think you’re right, there’s something that we’re like people believe in the authority of science and scientists, and then really taken aback when it turns out, this wasn’t what was actually happening, that scientists make mistakes that science is an evolving and changing procedures. We disagree with each other, disagree with each other. And so this, I think, comes into places like climate change denial, right? Like one of the strongest things that climate change deniers do is they point at false models and say, Look, you told us a climate change look like this. You had these models, you told us this was true. But like, now, you’ve changed your mind. This is a completely different model now. And like that, you’re just lying to us. Now, as you talk about these models, like why should we believe that this model is going to be true? You know, and so you end up these things that looks to people who think that science is an authority? That looks like a good argument.

Ray Briggs
I sort of wonder also, if like reconceiving like ordinary people’s relationship to science is, is a part of this. So like, I do think the hairdresser who studied Flavio’s hairstyles was kind of doing science and, like, didn’t have the social cachet of a person who wears a white coat, but did like inquiry and everybody, everybody kind of tries to get reliable information in their everyday life. Like, what if science was not a thing that happened over there? What was happening over here?

Ann Thresher
Yeah, I really liked that idea. I liked the idea that like by shifting as well as reliability idea, like everyone’s trying to do, and figure out reliable things in their life, right, you’re trying to reliably put on a radio show, you’re trying to reliably know that you can pick your kids up from school at a certain time. Because without this, like, you know, there’s always like things we’re doing in everyday lives. And we’re taking all this information from all around us that like helps us figure out what’s more or less reliable.

Josh Landy
I’m worried about this, I gotta get this. It’s just sounds potentially like a close cousin of the person who does their own research, quote, unquote, I do my own research. And you know, I’m not one of those fancy white coat wearing scientists. But I do my own research. And those scientists get it wrong all the time. And it takes some of this horse medicine. And I don’t know how we get out of that other than by saying, Yeah, science is fallible, and science evolves. But it’s using the best available data and the scientific method to get the best possible guess as to what is actually going on?

Ann Thresher
Yeah, I mean, I certainly don’t think that. So I certainly think that we can talk about better and worse, scientific methods and methodologies and tangles and networks, right, this is part of the wonderful thing about science is it’s really good at making these strong connections, these strong tangles. And so when we talk, we really like take horse medicine for COVID. In this thing, you can look at the evidence they have supporting that and you can see that it’s weak, you can see that they’re, you know, drawing from the same three sources over and over again, that there’s one paper that everything is hinging on, right and good science doesn’t look that way. And so we can start to distinguish you know, horse medicine for COVID treatments from the the hairdresser who figured out the hairstyles, right, she was looking at a broad range of things pulling all this external evidence, right? She She’s doing good science in ways that other people clearly are not and so we can recognize a continuum.

Ray Briggs
This also makes me kind of like, like doing your own research is a really strange idea because nobody really does all of their own research. You have to rely on other people. or to have done relevant research. And I think the idea of tangles is really helpful for that. I can’t make the whole tangle there’s not enough energy and not enough time in my day.

Ann Thresher
Yeah, it’s nice because like, you know, when you start really thinking about the way that science supports a piece of product, you’re not just doing your own work, you’re relying on everyone else. And you’re asking, Well, why should I believe this particular product? Why should I allow this piece into my tangle? Well, now I can look at what that person’s doing. What they’ve brought in and like really excites is increasingly dense network of pieces stretch further and further out, like everything’s, at some point, sort of inter woven into this in some way, shape, or form. But at some point, you also just be like, Look, I think you’ve done something reliable. Everyone’s relying on you. It’s worked for other people to rely on this piece, I can rely on it as well.

Josh Landy
And arguably, the fact that scientists disagree, that’s not a bug, that’s a feature, because things get really tested.

Ann Thresher
It’s good, because it means that you get stronger tangles.

Ray Briggs
So I have kind of one last question. We’ve been having this great discussion about like tangles in authority, but when I’ve got like a COVID denier or relative, I not gonna have enough time to get them to listen to a whole long argument. Is there one idea or one piece of information that you could leave your listeners with? That’s a simple summation of why we should rely on science?

Ann Thresher
Yeah, I mean, I think the difficult to hear answer is there’s almost nothing you can do in like, 30 seconds to convince someone that they should trust science, there really aren’t against it. But I think the general gist is, look, science just works. And you already rely on it in so many other areas of your life, right? It does seem like it’s doing really good things for you. So if someone has picked one area with suddenly that like science just isn’t rely on this context, helping them see that like, this is a dense network that science isn’t about truth. It’s about reliability. And if you can rely on in one place, you can look and figure out why you should rely on it in these other cases like COVID smile or climate change denial.

Josh Landy
That makes great sense to me. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Ann Thresher
Thank you for having me.

Josh Landy
Our guest has been an Ann Thresher, a science ethicist at the new Doerr School for Sustainability at Stanford University, and co-author of “The tangle of Science: Reliability Beyond Method, Rigor, and Objectivity.” So Ray, what’re you thinking now?

Ray Briggs
Oh, our discussion has got me thinking about how much we have to trust each other in trying to figure out what is true and what will work. And scientists have to trust each other even when they disagree and have real rivalries, and then the public has to figure out what to trust that scientists produce. And so I’m just really impressed with what a social endeavor science is. It’s a tangle, not just of hypotheses, but of human activities.

Josh Landy
That make sense. And you know, even the scientists are disagreeing about some things are agreeing about an awful lot else. We’re gonna put links to everything we’ve mentioned today on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can also become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes.

Ray Briggs
And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, we’d love to hear from you. Send it to us at comments@philosophytalk.org and we might feature it on the blog.

Josh Landy
Now… a man you can always trust to talk at top speed: it’s Ian Shoales, the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales… One of the cruel facts of life is that what we know keeps changing– science, knowledge, social skills. I mean did it used to be common practice for people to open all the windows at a party and scream? I feel left out, when all I want to do is be seen, you know? It all keeps changing. We take our adderal and mutter, s’all good. Well, no, it’s not. It’s changing. Everything changes, all the time, over time, and knowing doesn’t help. We are not entirely sure that time itself is even a thing. I think it used to be, but then Einstein broke the watch. Time, if you will, is just what’s left after something happens. We know that now. Time is a way to measure events without looking at them directly, which as Heisenberg showed us only changes the nature of the event. And suddenly you have a dead cat in a box, as Schrodinger showed us, or a cat sitting in a cardboard box looking pleased with itself, as cat owners can attest happens at least once during the duration of any cat ownership. That’s anecdotal, true, but the truth lies in your heart, if you listen. That’s just science. We can’t pretend that science is not affected by culture. Culture determines what we want to measure for one thing. And what kind of tools you’ll need, top of the line, if you’re asking the appropriations committee. Not to mention money for laboratories, and enough helium to float a million birthday balloons into space, if your measuring tool is a hadron collider. Ancient Greek physicists didn’t worry about helium shortages. They didn’t have telescopes. They had to use their own brains to figure out what this is, and get it wrong. Except for monads, of course, the subatomic building blocks that lead directly to god. Got that right, in the 17th century. Not like today’s quanta. Although, a consensus right now among people who consent to this sort of thing is that there might not even have been a beginning to all this, it all just is and was and ever more shall be, everything and nothing and god and even things that never happened, all at once, whatever once is, OR the Big Bang happened, and is still happening, expanding until we start contracting again, leading to a shrinkage and multiverses, and starting over again, this time with flying cars and rocket belts, knock on wood, in the blink of a microblink, over eras, and eons, sometime in the future which will be as yesterday. So even atheism may be just another way for god to make himself known? Science is supposed to keep us abreast regarding what’s what, reality wise, but it is falling down on the job, frankly. Again I suppose that’s part of the unchanging general principle, that everything changes. Horse and buggies give way to internal combustion. Guns make way for lasers, digital gives way to quantum computing, and before you know it, time machines, or its cousin, movies about time travel that we can stream for just pennies. Will we still have movies? Or will it all be just teevee now? Yes. Until they put the 3D chips in our brain. But they might just SAY they’re going to put 3D chips in our brains, and it’s just a trick to make us take another Covid booster. Don’t trust doctors! Except in drug commercials. Ask your doctor if nublervik is right for you. Ask your doctor for a complete list of potentially lethal side effects for a drug you probably don’t need. No, ask Twitter! And when it comes to supplements, ask the guy stocking the shelves in the nutritional aisle at Safeway. Experience, ability? Fooey. These are just more data points in the vast ever changing field we call the vast ever changing field. The point being we can depend on science for advice like don’t pet rattlesnakes, don’t gargle with battery acid, don’t drive faster than light in a Hyundai. We know these things to be if not true, certainly words of wisdom, the kind of advice that used to show up in Reader’s Digest, back when we had Reader’s Digest, and magazines, and now just show up on social media, so people can either agree enthusiastically or call you a libtard. So thank you science. Now bring back monads, okay? A lot more fun than quanta. Especially on 21st Century earth, which seems to get flatter every day. Ask your doctor if gravity is right for you. I gotta go.

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of Kal W San Francisco Bay area and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2023.

Ray Briggs
Our executive producer is Ben Trefny. The Senior Producer is Devon Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is our Director of Research.

Josh Landy
Thanks also to Jamie Lee, Elizabeth Chiu, Emily Huang, Merle Kessler, and Angela Johnston.

Ray Briggs
Support for philosophy top comes from various groups at Stanford University, and from the Partners at our online Community of Thinkers.

Josh Landy
And from the members of KALW local public radio San Francisco, where our program originates.

Ray Briggs
The views expressed (or mis-expressed) on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders

Josh Landy
Not even when they’re true and reasonable! The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes. I’m Josh Landy

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.

Stephen Colbert
Vaxadrin—the only weight loss pill recommended by Dr. Stephen T. Colbert, DFA. I am not a medical doctor. I have an honorary doctorate in Fine Arts, which is why my genius won’t be recognized until long after my patients are dead.