Science miscommunication

Making scientific information widely available to the public can play an important role in efforts to address local and global crises - for example, by influencing public deliberation and democratic decision-making and countering disinformation. However, public science communication faces significant challenges, ranging from the fragmentation of the public sphere to misinterpretation and mistrust in science. Recent philosophical research on science communication has investigated a range of factors that may contribute to these challenges, offering several intervention strategies and norms for improving communicative practice. However, although this literature is surely an important contribution to interdisciplinary research on science communication, it has a tendency to employ a simple ‘content sharing’ model of communicative exchanges, which largely idealises away the impact that asymmetries in expertise and common ground can have on interpretation. Although simplified models can be suitable for certain purposes, we argue that a content sharing model is often inappropriate for investigating how laypersons gain knowledge as a result of scientific testimony. We propose an alternative model, drawing inspiration from recent literature on idealisation in scientific modelling and argue that our approach will often be a better choice to underpin research in this domain.