Notebook: The social character of scientific knowledge

“It’s still difficult to conclusively say what really happened with many things, scientifically”
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Many of us want to know how the SARS-CoV-2 virus originated. To do that, right now we need to unravel its evolution from its bat coronavirus ancestor by sequencing the genomes of animals and viruses near the outbreak site and we need to effect China’s cooperation to check whether SARS-CoV-2 could have ‘leaked’ from a lab. Where the virus came from was once singularly important because the answer could have pointed the way to avoiding similar outbreaks in future. But today, there is good reason for this question to take the back seat.

We don’t know where or how the virus originated. If it did in a lab, we would have to re-examine how we regulate research facilities and their safeguards and the manner of political oversight that won’t curtail research freedom. If the virus is au naturel, we would have to institute and/or expand pathogen surveillance, eliminate wildlife trafficking, and improve social security measures to ensure populations can withstand outbreaks without becoming distressed. But even as these possibilities aren’t equally likely (according to scientists I trust), the origin of SARS-CoV-2 is less important than it once was because the COVID-19 pandemic caused us to implement all these outcomes to varying degrees.

SARS-CoV-2 isn’t special of course: it’s still difficult to conclusively say what really happened with many things, scientifically. In 1977, a telescope in the U.S. recorded a signal from outer space that remains strange to this day. We don’t have a physical explanation for the “spooky” result of an experiment Anton Zeilinger and co. conducted in 1998. We lack a complete understanding of how general anaesthesia works its magic on the brain. Not even their makers fully know how powerful AI models work the way they do. No existing theory of nature can say what happens in intervals shorter than 10^(-43) seconds.

In fact, not knowing is ubiquitous. To quote philosopher Nicholas Rescher, “no one can say in advance what questions natural science can and cannot answer.” But science communication has taught me not all of us can know everything unless we invest considerable, perhaps even impossible, resources. Years ago, the philosopher Daniel Sarewitz wrote an article that changed my relationship with science. He argued that while we may know about the Higgs boson particle and that it gives other elementary particles their masses, we can’t truly know any of this until we learn the complicated mathematics required to make sense of it. Until then, we just have faith in the physicists who know. This relationship goes for most technical information in our lives.

Science journalists like me communicate science by providing for scientists’ claims, to quote Rescher, “the backing of a rationale that renders [their] correctness evident”, but I still demand a considerable amount of faith from readers. At some point faith also becomes trust but trust still isn’t understanding. (This said, the system of sanctions should they err provides a reasonable backstop for trust in scientists’ and journalists’ work.) The general idea here is that you pick someone you trust and you believe what they say to be true. Let’s call this the social character of scientific knowledge.

When people encounter a weighty concept scientists aren’t able to explain fully, the social character becomes more apparent than it normally is. Some people trust impassioned scientists unwilling to consider extra-scientific possibilities. Some lean towards authority figures who don’t trust science to provide the answer. Historically, people have turned to faith in the face of the unknown. The problems arise when we don’t know, or choose to overlook, where science ends and faith/trust begins. Then we fixate on answers that may never matter at the expense of answers that are already useful.

mukunth.v@thehindu.co.in