Trust in Science: from Politicization to Crisis

What is (wrong with) the politicization of science?

Torsten Wilholt

Not every form and manner in which science can be politicized is necessarily harmful, but some certainly are. This talk analyzes two distinct, harmful forms of politicization.
 
I distinguish between production and authority politicization. Epistemic production politicization occurs when political powers directly interfere with scientific research to steer it toward certain results or, more commonly, to prevent the generation of politically inconvenient knowledge. I will argue that the main reason why epistemic production politicization always constitutes a direct institutional failure is best explained on the basis of democratic theory: it undermines democratic legitimacy. Even a democratically legitimate government does not have the right to poison the well from which it draws its legitimacy. Democratic decisions are only legitimate if they are based on a democratic process in which citizens can assert their values and interests. And this ability of the citizens presupposes knowledge. The crucial harm is not the mere existence of restrictions, but the suppression of knowledge that is essential for public debate on ongoing political issues.
 
In contrast, epistemic authority politicization is a more diffuse, systemic phenomenon. It occurs when scientific issues become entangled in salient socio-political identity conflicts, such that acceptance of facts becomes a marker of political allegiance. The most familiar example is climate change denial, where acceptance of evidence correlates strongly with political affiliation. Unlike epistemic production politicization, this form is often not orchestrated by a single actor but emerges from the interplay of many factors: from the dynamics of social media, from the strategic communication of populists, from our own psychological tendencies towards identity protection. It erodes warranted trust by causing the public to selectively judge scientific facts based on group loyalties.
 
Combating production politicization requires institutional defenses: demanding scientific autonomy, protecting whistleblowers, and resisting censorship. Addressing authority politicization, however, presents a more complex institutional challenge. It calls for scientific communication strategies that clearly delineate the roles of science and politics—providing facts and scenarios without short-circuiting democratic deliberation by presenting political choices as scientifically predetermined. By clearly delineating these two forms of harmful politicization, this talk aims to provides a framework for institutions to safeguard the indispensable, yet vulnerable, role of independent science in a democratic society.

Climate Tipping Points: scientific disagreement and public trust in the face of uncertain evidence

Mathias Frisch

In October 2024 forty-four climate scientists submitted an “Open Letter by Climate Scientists to the Nordic Council of Ministers” warning that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is increasingly at risk of passing a tipping point with potentially devastating consequences especially for Nordic countries. The threat posed by an AMOC collapse is large enough, according to the letter’s signatories, that it justifies communicating what at this point in time still is deeply uncertain evidence concerning the possibility of an AMOC collapse and that this evidence ought to inform climate policy decisions. Yet as climate tipping points have received a growing amount of public attention, research on tipping points remains one of the most controversial areas of climate science. While many climate scientists would agree with the signatories of the of the open letter argue that tipping point risks, such as an AMOC collapse, ought to be communicated to policy-makers (and perhaps even with a sense of urgency), others warn that dramatic proclamations about an AMOC collapse are too speculative, risk undermining trust in climate science more broadly, and divert attention from more “immediate dangers posed by increased greenhouse gas emissions” (Kopp 2024)

In this talk I will argue that the debate concerning tipping points revolves only partly around epistemic disagreements about the evidential situation. To a significant extent climate scientists agree on the evidential status of research on climate tipping points. Those invoking potential climate tipping points in climate policy discussions largely agree with their opponents on the deep uncertainties characterizing our understanding of these tipping points, but disagree on the implications for policy advice. Rather the disagreement concerns appropriate evidential standards for policy purposes and the legitimacy of appealing to deeply uncertain knowledge (and, in particular, uncertain knowledge concerning what appear to be low-likelihood events) in policy advice:  may (or even should) evidence thresholds be lowered in face of dramatic consequences? Can policy-relevant knowledge be captured non-probabilistically? Whether models projecting the behavior of a climate tipping point are “good enough” for policy advice, I will argue, depends in subtle ways on how the models and the evidence derived from them is interpreted and on what the decision framework is within which the evidence concerning tipping points is evaluated. Finally, under what conditions can deeply uncertain knowledge be trustworthy and what communicative effects are to be expected, when scientists publicly warn of uncertain threats?

As I will argue, we can understand the disagreement concerning tipping points as at least partly a normative disagreement about which decision framework is appropriate in the face of catastrophic risks, a concomitant disagreement about how properly to interpret and communicate the evidence provided by tipping point research. This, I will further argue, implies that the disagreement among climate scientists cannot be settled on purely scientific grounds and ought to be negotiated in ways that centrally involve the input from stakeholders and policymakers. 

Torsten Wilholt is a philosopher of science. Most of his recent work focusses on the conditions under which scientific knowledge is generated today, in particular on the epistemological repercussions of these conditions. He is a founding member of Leibniz Center for Science and Society and codirector of SOCRATES. 

From 2015 to 2024, he was chairperson of the DFG-funded Research Training Group (Graduiertenkolleg) “Integrating Ethics and Epistemology of Scientific Research”. Wilholt studied at Göttingen and Berlin and received both his PhD and his Habilitation in Philosophy at Bielefeld University. He has been a visiting scholar at Columbia University and a Humboldt Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto. He joined the faculty at Hannover as Professor of Philosophy and History of the Natural Sciences in 2011.

Mathias Frisch is Professor of Philosophy and codirector of SOCRATES. His main area of research is philosophy of science, ranging from the role of causation and the nature of laws in physics to philosophical issues arising in connection with the climate crisis, such as the treatment of deep uncertainties, and other social and ethical issues.

Frisch obtained his Ph.D. from the University of California in Berkeley in 1998 with a dissertation on the role of models in scientific explanation. Before his arrival at Leibniz University Hannover, he worked at the University of Maryland (from 2003 to 2016). Prior to that he was an assistant professor at Northwestern University from 1998 from 2003.

He is the author of two books: Inconsistency, Asymmetry, and Non-Locality: A Philosophical Investigation of Classical Electrodynamics (Oxford University Press 2005) and Causal Reasoning in Physics (Cambridge University Press 2014).