Science Says Do What I Want

the nsf is really tripping me out, man

The endless drift in scientific policy proclamation, the discourse in which you have to do X on Monday and Not X on Tuesday because “the science changed,” has been, let’s be gentle about this, unimpressive. But the day-by-day malleability of “science” comes from somewhere, and we get some hints about that somewhere from a “new field of study” called Integration and Implementation Sciences.

It’s this t-shirt, but you have to stand on your head

The increasingly woke National Science Foundation will be hosting a lecture on that topic later this week, and here’s what the lecture will cover:

So: Integration and Implementation Sciences is a field of study (singular, despite the plural “sciences”) that focuses on tackling societal and environmental problems — it’s science about causing societal change. It’s a policy-focused field of study, practical politics as a scientific endeavor. It engages stakeholders rather than just trusting experts, and uses “action research and postnormal science” to arrive at outcomes.

Let’s take some fog out of that language.

The philosopher of science Silvio Funtowicz says this about postnormal science:

In post-normal science the problems are set, and the solutions evaluated, by the criteria of the broader communities that are affected. Nevertheless, post-normal science is a valid form of enquiry – a type of science – and not merely politics or public participation. Post-normal science has the paradoxical feature that in its problem-solving activity the traditional domination of ‘hard facts’ over ‘soft values’ has been inverted.

Postnormal science is science in which the soft values of affected communities prevail over mere facts.

In a longer, earlier essay, Funtowicz and a co-author defined postnormal science like this:

The old dichotomies of facts and values, and of knowledge and ignorance, are being transcended. Natural systems are recognized as dynamic and complex; those involving interactions with humanity are ‘emergent’, including properties of reflection and contradiction. The science appropriate to this new condition will be based on the assumptions of unpredictability, incomplete control, and a plurality of legitimate perspectives… 

This emerging science fosters a new methodology that helps to guide its development. In this, uncertainty is not banished but is managed, and values are not presupposed but are made explicit. The model for scientific argument is not a formalized deduction but an interactive dialogue.

So the National Science Foundation, an agenda-setting juggernaut in the funding and shaping of academic science, is hosting discussions about science in which science is depicted as a politically focused field of inquiry that replaces the old ideas about data and knowledge with a socially contingent “interactive dialogue,” and soft values prevail over hard facts.

Expect the science has changed to become a routine political declaration.