IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2022 - 31

perspectives through peer review. So, a scientist's
gender or political orientation might wind up being
just as important scientifically as her attention to
detail, sense of curiosity, mathematical sophistication,
and so on. Thus, for example, Herman Muller's
socialist convictions led him to be especially sensitive
to the ways in which the purported evidence
in favor of eugenics could not be imputed to purely
genetic factors given prevailing social conditions.
Even if Oreskes is right that in cases of science
gone awry, there are red flags for contemporary
observers to notice, actually finding out about those
red flags in real time might be difficult for non-experts.
To be fair, Oreskes titled her book Why Trust
Science? not How to Trust Science. Still, it is important
for her defense of science that non-experts be
able to identify bona fide experts with some degree
of confidence. This is related to what early 20th-century
philosophers of science called the " demarcation
problem " : how to distinguish science from
superstition, pseudo-science, metaphysical speculation,
and the like. According to Oreskes, what makes
scientists scientists is not any particular thing they
do as individuals, but instead their membership in a
scientific community. Non-scientists can tell who is a
scientist by looking for signs of community membership
like tenure at a research institution, prizes and
awards, journal publications, and so forth. But all of
these signs of expertise are bestowed by other scientists,
and so the question of how we can tell who is a
scientist and who is not recurs, suggesting a degree
of circularity.
For Oreskes, the way out of this circularity is to
insist that " the social markers of expertise are evident
to non-experts. " So, for example, we can look
at a putative expert's institutional affiliation and " it
is (or should be) easy to distinguish a research institution-like
Princeton University or the Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory-from policy-driven
think tanks, such as the American Enterprise or
Discovery Institutes. The fact that journalists often
fail to make such distinctions has more to do with
deadlines than with epistemology. " The final sentence
suggests that things are perhaps not as easy
for non-experts as she makes out, since many of us
rely on journalistic accounts to find out what the
experts are saying and such accounts may elide or
omit crucial details even if the journalists responsible
for them could and ought to be more careful.
Furthermore, a distressing number of people have
been taken in by wholly fraudulent online diploma
mills, so the familiarity with the landscape of higher
education necessary to determine whether an institution
is a reputable college or university might not
be as widespread as Oreskes hopes.
In any case, even sophisticated laypeople who
can confidently distinguish between a scientist and
a quack still face urgent policy decisions that hinge
on scientific findings we may not fully trust. What are
we to do when we are unsure whether the consensus
of the scientific community is correct? For example,
do we believe the scientific consensus about
the reality of and mechanisms underlying climate
change? Oreskes suggests that we should think of
the problem as an instance of Pascal's wager, asking
ourselves how the risks of rejecting the science if it
turns out to be true compare to the risks of accepting
it if it turns out to be wrong.
oreskes writes thAt " it would be absurd for me
to expect that articulating the reasons for trust in
science would alter the positions of climate change
deniers. What is not absurd is the hope that for some
readers, this book will answer legitimate questions,
even if those questions have at times been raised by
people with a political agenda with which I strongly
disagree. " Such readers will find that Oreskes' writing
is admirably clear and easy to follow.

Jacob Ossar has taught ethics to engineering/
science students at the Stevens Institute of
Technology, Hoboken, NJ, USA. Ossar has a PhD in
philosophy from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore,
MD, USA.
 Direct questions and comments about this article
to Jacob Ossar, an independent scholar, Brookline,
MA 02446 USA; jacob.ossar@gmail.com.
March 2022
31
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