Does Science Know Best?
I started collecting data for my dissertation, which has got me thinking again about the ways we tend to create hierarchies for ways of knowing and understanding the world. We sometimes hear the phrase “science knows best” (often in response to misinformation), but is that always true? Don’t get me wrong. I love science very much. I love how it can help us understand the world better. It can teach us a lot about what it means to be human. But loving science means also taking a good long hard look at some of the problems with its culture, and I’ll work on complicating that phrase “science knows best” in this week’s post.
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Does Science Know Best?
Let’s talk today about something we call the “special authority of science” in the social science world. It is this belief that scientific ways of knowing are better than other ways of knowing. These other ways of knowing might be lived experience or Indigenous ways of knowing, which are very connected to place.
It’s tricky because we often think in terms of “science knows best” in terms of combating pseudoscience or mis- or disinformation. And there are a lot of other things going on there, but when we hold up science as the best way of knowing, over people’s lived experiences or over traditions that take care of and connect place, we lose out on a lot of other ways of being and understanding the world. We exclude and diminish the contributions of people that are not white, not cis, not heteronormative, not able-bodied, not neurotypical, (or any of the other dominant body types in the science world).
I think of my hairdresser, who has ways of knowing and knowledges and intelligences that I do not have, and I deeply deeply felt during the lockdown as I tried to do my own hair. She knows a lot about things that I don’t know, and yet in the hierarchies we have, we often think of a scientist as being a more elite job than hers. We do this in the arts as well. We have “highbrow” arts like opera or ballet and “lowbrow” arts like burlesque or clowning. And I think we should call bullshit on this.
We need to criticize those moments when we place some way of understanding the world as more or less elite. This isn’t to say that everything is relative and every claim has equal value. There will definitely be times when scientific measurements might be more appropriate (say if we want to measure a physical force) and other times when knowing about lived experience might be important (say if we wanted to understand the experience of a particular group). But inviting plurality and multivocality into our struggle to better understand the world and our place in it would help things, especially when we are thinking about inclusion and belonging in the STEM fields.
I’ve done lots of interviews with graduate students in science technology, engineering, and math. And what seems to be emerging from the data is that early-career scientists with one or more marginalized identities are best able to see the ways in which academic cultures are hostile AND are best able to seek out, create, and imagine “pockets of belonging” (which sometimes happen in science communication spaces). And these pockets might give us clues to how we might make more of the culture of science a place of belonging and how we might humanize and liberate these spaces.
I help scientists remember their humanity without sacrificing their love for science. Book a workshop with me.
