Jasanoff (2005) makes three main arguments in her book, entitled Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States. Among the three arguments, the last one catches my attention with a term “civic epistemologies (CE)”. This term is familiar to me as one of the previous weeks’ reading assignments is called “Civic Epistemologies: Constituting Knowledge and Order in Society” by Miller (2008), who is the professor of this course. I found another article of his, Miller (2005) “New Civic Epistemologies of Quantification: Making Sense of Indicators of Local and Global Sustainability”, which was published three years earlier than the one included in the reading assignment.
Jasanoff (2005) argues that CE concept is necessary and useful for establishing the politics of science and technology in society in contemporary world. She shows her preferences of CE against the old conceptual framework of public understanding of science (PUS). The main difference between PUS and CE is the assumption of human and knowledge. The first one assumes that humans are informed about the knowledge and they must know while the latter makes inquiries on how knowledge comes to be perceived as reliable. In other words, the humans are perceived as knowledgeable agents in CE concept. She points out six dimensions of CE, namely style of knowledge making, public accountability, demonstration, objectivity, expertise, and visibility of expert bodies. She claims that using this criteria, “qualitative” comparison across political culture is possible. In addition, Miller (2005) shows “quantitative” comparison is also possible in CE. He shows how statistical knowledge consumption impacts on CE in his case study of indicators of sustainable development (ISD). Political identities, relationships, and institutions are changing along with changes in CE. Moreover, Miller (2008) shows the important aspect of knowledge creation in political communities which is related to identity, authority, legitimacy, and accountability. He calls for attention to emerging transnational CE and more research is needed.
I think that with the little attention to how knowledge is perceived by humans, CE assumes that humans are knowledgeable agents. I think, humans can be categorized into two, lay persons and experts. Experts are viewed as more knowledgeable than lay persons. In this case, the CE analysis would take only partial account of knowledge variation in different political cultural settings. How should knowledge be informed to lay persons (they are majority in almost all nations) and how they perceive them be studied in CE? Is there any possibility of integrating the two?
References
Jasanoff, S. 2005. Designs on nature: science and democracy in Europe and the United States. Princeton University Press: Princeton, N.J.
Miller, C.A. 2005. New Civic Epistemologies of Quantification: Making Sense of Indicators of Local and Global Sustainability. Science, Technology, & Human Values 30(3):403-432.
Miller, C.A. 2008. Civic Epistemologies: Constituting Knowledge and Order in Political Communities. Sociology Compass 2(6):1896-1919.
Evans and Collins talk about "interactional expertise" which can be possessed by an informed lay-person, and Peter Galison talks about "trading zones" which set conditions for exchange of information between disciplines or types of expertise. Check out Evans and Collins' _Rethinking Expertise_ and Galison's _Image & Logic_.
ReplyDeleteAlso, as you probably already read excerpts from in Clark's class, Stephen Epstein's _Impure Science_ talks about AIDS activists who learned enough medical science to be able to communicate with AIDS researchers and give them suggestions of new ways of testing treatments.