SCIENCE AND THE LAY PUBLIC: EPISTEMIC OBSTACLES AND POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS

The plan for the dissertation is as follows. I begin, in Chapters 1 and 2, with the obstacles to lay knowledge of science. Chapter 1 addresses the question: should you defer to individual experts? The argument of that chapter answers: generally speaking, no. I introduce the notion of a complexity-based defeater. Some questions are so complex that testimony answering those questions comes with defeaters baked-in, so to speak. And while you might think that the speaker’s being an expert defeats that complexity-based defeater, leaving you justified in accepting the expert’s testimony, I argue that the norms of scientific inquiry tell us that this is not so. Chapter 2 looks at another obstacle. Contemporary scientific topics often come with huge literatures. Motivating this chapter is the pre-theoretic sense that when I learn of such literatures, I get an uneasy feeling about any belief I have relevant beliefs I have. I start to think ‘maybe there’s more to it than I thought…’ That chapter unpacks that sense and argues that learning of a large literature related to some proposition provides you with higher-order evidence that any evidence you have is insufficient to justify believing that proposition. It does so because the existence of large literatures signals that the relevant experts are unsatisfied with the existing evidence. And if the existing evidence – which contains your evidence – is not good enough for the relevant experts, then it’s probably not good enough to justify belief. Chapters 3 and 4 investigate the moral and political importance of a scientifically informed (or uninformed) public. Chapter 3 argues that the existence of expert disagreement relevant to policy-relevant scientific questions can nullify the duty to vote. Many philosophers who discuss the duty to vote assume, either implicitly or explicitly, that one ought to vote well, and they often understand voting to well to come with epistemic requirements, e.g. that one must be justified in holding the beliefs on which they base their vote. I argue that expert disagreement prevents us from satisfying those epistemic requirements – it prevents us from having justified beliefs. So, if the duty to vote is really a duty to vote well, then expert disagreement can make discharging that duty impossible, thereby nullifying it. Chapter 4 argues for an epistemic condition on morally permissible vaccine mandates. It draws on the notion of public reason to show that people subject to such a mandate must have a certain (somewhat complicated) epistemic relationship to empirical propositions pertaining to the vaccine’s safety and effectiveness as well as the dangerousness of the disease. Specifically, people subject to the mandate must be in position to rationally be sufficiently confident that the vaccine is sufficiently safe and effective and the disease is sufficiently dangerous. What I try to show in that chapter is that this condition is feasible to satisfy, but it’s not as easy to do so as one may think. I do so by highlighting some obstacles to laypeople being able to be rationally confident in such empirical propositions, such as the complexity of the relevant evidence, the difficulties of rationally deferring to the experts, and the organization of the evidential environment. Finally, the coda addresses the question: how do we – specifically, we laypeople – know the Earth’s not flat? Let me cancel the implicature here and now. I’m not trying to suggest that we don’t know the Earth’s not flat. As I said, I’m probably farther along on the skepticism side of the spectrum, but I’m not a skeptic. I think we laypeople know some science, and that includes that the Earth is not flat. But I think we actually have to tell a pretty complicated story to explain how we have that knowledge. That complicated story will draw, sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly, on themes that develop over the course of the dissertation.