A sea of multicolour placards undulate above the protesters' heads. One blares a popular slogan – ‘Trust the Science’ – echoing Greta Thunberg’s now famous speech at the 2019 UN Climate Summit: ‘For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear...’

Still, climate science’s recommendations continue to be met with lacklustre action on both a governmental, corporate and personal level. Might there be healthier, more effective ways to conceptualise and communicate scientific knowledge that could, in turn, be more conducive to action?

Science? Get Real.

In the West, the knowledge produced by scientists has often been treated as a kind of ‘justified true belief’ – a belief becomes knowledge when it is justified by evidence that ‘proves’ that the belief lines up with reality.[1]

In this view, knowledge of the natural world is something we have, that we can collect and build upon as we move towards increasingly accurate understandings. The belief that science can tell us the truth about fundamental reality is known as ‘scientific realism’.[2] Whether in schools or labs, books or documentaries, science has historically been portrayed this way, lending authority and allure – and drawing upon this authority has been central to all kinds of arguments, including those of the climate movement.[3]

There have long been disingenuous challenges to scientific findings, often simply because they don’t suit certain political or economic narratives, as with climate science. However, the more closely one looks at the concept of scientific knowledge, the messier things get. Robust counter-currents – challenges to mainstream ‘scientific realism’ – have also emerged from those who study the mechanisms of the sciences, and from scientists themselves.

One key question concerns exactly how you ‘justify’ a belief as true. ‘Verificationism’, the idea that enough experimental evidence can prove a theory to be ‘true’, is readily visible in portrayals of climate science today. Yet in the early 20th century, many scientists began to move towards the ‘falsificationism’ popularised by philosopher of science Karl Popper. which says that scientists can’t prove theories to be true, they can only prove them to be false.

Early quantum physicists such as Niels Bohr were among the first to propose an even more radical break: that science cannot take us closer to the truth at all. 'Scientific anti-realists' point to the numerous productive paths that science has gone down that are now considered false. Prominent examples include the ‘caloric theory’ that described heat as its own substance and bore useful results, but was ultimately discarded. Then there are scientific ‘paradigm shifts’ (e.g. Einstein overthrowing Newton) where established scientific reference frames are turned on their heads.[4] What’s to say all our current theories aren’t consigned to the same fate? Is it not impossible to really know exactly how well our 'knowledge' lines up with reality, and what will happen to it? After all, no equation tells how close a particular theory is to 'objective truth'.[5]

Scientific Knowledge as Shaped by Culture

Other theorists have increasingly argued that scientific knowledge is not merely shaped by the specifics of the phenomena that scientists study, but also by the particular political, economic and cultural circumstances in which science takes place. In 1931, Russian Marxist historian of science Boris Hessen’s influential essay argued that Isaac Newton’s science was less the result of ‘great men standing on each
others’ shoulders’, and was instead directly shaped by Britain’s colonial maritime and military needs.[6]

Hessen’s work sat well with the fledgling ‘Social Relations of Science’ (SRS) movement, a group of left-leaning, overtly political scientists spread over interwar Europe. Books like J.D. Bernal’s Social Function of Science (1939) argued that science was largely socially steered, shaped by funding, ideology, worldview and more, influencing knowledge production right down to what was considered evidence in the labs. Many of these scientific men and women believed that they had a responsibility to embrace science’s social dimensions and more thoughtfully shape the world of which science is a part, creating more humanitarian knowledge, less guided by military, or capitalistic aims, and then putting that knowledge to better use.

The original SRS movement dissipated, largely under the pressures of the Cold War, yet their ideas have resurfaced repeatedly.[7] Such perspectives continue to turn in academic circles, alongside anti-realism, as well as feminist and post-colonial readings, which identify and denounce Western science’s colonial characteristics – rigid reductionism, categorisation, and materialistic tendencies.

Reframing Knowledge

How do we reconcile these ideas with climate science? Suppose that science cannot tell us objective truth, or that the particulars of scientific knowledge are largely influenced by social factors, how do we maintain confidence in scientific ideas and avoid sliding into the realm of relativism and conspiracy?

Perhaps we concentrate on what science is good at. Another school of thought: instrumentalism, focuses on a theory’s usefulness, rather than its proximity to truth. Even if we can never truly know whether scientific theories match up with reality, they can still produce useful knowledge within a given context – we can’t deny that science is good at making (often increasingly accurate) predictions.[8] From satellite navigation to ozone layer repair, much scientific knowledge clearly ‘works’ well. Even if scientists abandon claims to objective truth, strong evidence and accurate prediction can still lend credibility to ‘less absolute’ forms of knowledge and so help us establish ‘degrees of confidence’.

Questioning scientific knowledge is a vital part of science, but we must do it wisely. Alternate theories can and should be proposed, and evidence questioned, but we should acknowledge that a proposed theory is lacking in a certain context if it cannot account for or predict phenomena in ways that another theory can. Instrumentalism also melds well with more social understandings of science, recognising that knowledge can be steered and shaped by the culture it comes from (and that a theory’s utility is always social) while recognising that we still don’t have complete freedom to make whatever we want
of the natural world. Where there is a significant body of supporting evidence, including a wealth of accurate predictions, it’s still wise to pay attention.

It’s not impossible to imagine that scientists may one day rethink aspects of science that are relevant to our understanding of climate science. Still, today we understand that what we currently call ‘anthropogenic greenhouse gases’ seem to be driving what we currently call the ‘greenhouse effect’, with a whole host of replicable experiments, models and accurate predictions suggesting that we’d be wise to maintain a high degree of confidence. Remaining open to potential shifts in theory, within the current context, our evidence and understanding suitably encourages us to act in ways that are useful and beneficial. Alternate climate theories have more holes, desperately lack the same predictive power, sport nefarious backers with obvious motives, and suggest we maintain systems that are harmful in other ways, so we’d be mindful to invest far less confidence in them.

How Should We Talk About Scientific Knowledge?

Some will argue that relinquishing claims to objective truth will only reduce science’s authority further. Yet authoritative realist portrayals of ‘truthful’ science have long fed a ‘diffusionist’, top-down model of science communication (‘I have something important to tell you and you have to listen’) and also widely alienated audiences.[9]

Communicating a utility-based view of science as a living mass of models and theories would certainly help students understand why they’re taught one thing one year, only to be told the next that it wasn’t ‘true’ – they were all ideas of varying usefulness, for use in different contexts. Where some might argue that philosophical framing has no place in science education, students are already left to disentangle the confusing, largely implicit ‘realist’ framing that currently underlies science education. Instead, we could better present engagement in knowledge as something inviting and contestable, that we all take part in and shape together – with a focus on the critical thinking needed to compare the usefulness of competing ideas.

Adopting a more nuanced view of knowledge, not as something absolute that we have but something contextual that we do together would surely be more fruitful. While preserving confidence in climate science and preventing a total slip into relativism, it opens the door to other useful ways of coming to know, and shifts the focus to action: how should we make knowledge and what should we decide to do with it?