Science still has expertise; what it’s lost is authority

In the years since the pandemic and the political turmoil surrounding the American scientific establishment, much time has been spent discussing why science has lost influence on public policy in the United States. A time when scientific advice about vaccination, nutrition, and environmental regulation was more readily heeded seems a distant memory. Scientific expertise has been decoupled from a sense of authority and standing to dictate policy on matters ranging from public health to climate change. The explanations for this separation include the rise of technologies like the internet and artificial intelligence, mistakes made by scientists and scientific institutions, and weaponization of anti-science ideas by political actors. But what if there’s a larger historical trend that suggests the disconnect between expertise and authority was inevitable? A new idea in philosophy called the “unicontext” suggests that the advance of technology, along with basic human desires, has been leading to this point for the past century.