Keywords: Covid-19; Sustainability; Risk; Uncertainty

Author Federica Russo on the article: 

History is replete with major crises including pandemics, natural catastrophes, civil and international conflicts, and technological disasters. These are often inevitable, especially when they are the cascading consequences across the social, economic, and environmental systems that we human beings create and sustain. Global systems are increasingly interconnected, and this became very visible during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic, more precisely, has exemplified a new category of risk, identified as global systemic risks. For these global, systemic risks, well-established practices of knowledge generation, policy advice, and risk management no longer suffice.

It is thus not an understatement that that COVID-19 has made urgent that science learns how to better deal with the irreducible uncertainty that comes with these global systemic risks as well as with the social responsibility of science towards the public good. So, how to handle these uncertainties? To answer this question, the paper proposes that we need to deeply re-think science, and specifically science for the public good. A science for the public good needs to be accompanied by an epistemology – a worldview, if you wish – that supports it through its systems of practices, policies, communication, and policy interventions.

We identify three broad principles for such epistemology:

1. New theoretical and experimental approaches to address irreducible uncer- tainty in decision-making. This means that inter- and trans-disciplinary spaces at the science-society interface have to be developed in a way that allows for the development of new ways of doing research that embrace uncertainty and complexity. As we cannot reduce or eliminate uncertainty and complexity: we have to learn to handle them.

2. Alternative investigative pathways that enable scientists to contribute to the public discourse and to shape the science-society interface. For this principle, two aspects are of particular relevance. First, there is an important that role scientific institutions can play: they should better educate science communicators to deal with the most modern and fast communication channels. Ideas and results are disseminated with unprecedent rapidity, and we need to avoid phenomena of mis- and dis-information as much as possible. Second, it is undeniable that social media can help a great deal with fast communication, but also add a thick layer of complexity to these dynamics, including challenging and questioning scientific authority.

3. Diverse voices for equity, diversity, and inclusion in the scientific process and to increase quality and effectiveness of scientific knowledge. Science is far from being the temple of immutable truths. It is instead a a historically situated and constantly evolving process. In its situatedness, science had done lots of good to humanity, but has also contributed to form and crystalize a systemic injustice. This can and must be changed. We cannot think of simply changing science and scientists in a top-down, simplistic manner. It is impossible, and likely to be counterproductive. Instead, we need to think of science in the context of citizenship and include and empower those who inhabit the local spaces in the generation, dissemination, and evaluation of scientific knowledge, and to make each scientific space inherently more inclusive and diverse. For so doing, we need to re-connect ethics and epistemology. In fact, equity, diversity, and inclusion should be recognized as fundamental values in science not only for ethical reasons, but also on epistemological and methodological grounds.

The piece originally published was programmatic, prompted by the publication of a collection on Covid-19, and the potential contribution of the humanities. We think that these principles need further development, as they are likely to be an important contribution of history and philosophy of science, philosophy of science in practice, and of science studies to the ongoing and much needed transformations of a post-pandemic science. Such an epistemology for science of the public good should be understand also in the context of complexity science and its potential contribution to policy problems.

Caniglia, G., Jaeger, C., Schernhammer, E., Steiner, G., Russo, F., Renn, J., Schlosser, P., Manfred L. D. (2021) COVID-19 heralds a new epistemology of science for the public good. HPLS 43, 59. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-021-00413-7