good afternoon from the muse museum in trento and we have a few people in the audience welcome but there are many people following via the website of the festival of economics so welcome and welcome professor naomi oreskes i should say good morning to professor oresquez rather than good evening or good afternoon because she is with us from boston she is a professor of the history of science at harvard university thank you very much for participating in this event i will soon give you the floor and before doing so i will say that over the past months um with coved we often heard people saying that we rediscovered the centrality of science and scientific knowledge also in italy where for many years it was so that scientific knowledge played a marginal role actually in the cultural and political and social life of the country leaving a space also to the spreading of a pseudo science also within the sector of science so if it is so that the coveted pandemic reopened our eyes about the value of science at the very moment when we discussed about uh the crisis of uh trust or rather distrust for and to towards science so in this moment it's important that we reason about our relationship with science and the role of scientists in society these are the topics which are the focus of the studies of professor rasquez and this is also the subject matter over her latest book why trust science which we hope will soon be translated into italian because um this helps us understand how scientific knowledge is built without neglecting the limits constraints and failures also of something which is absolutely human this is useful in our battle against covet because we often ask and demand from science that we get immediately uh a response and an answer and we so misunderstand the role of science naomi rescues is a geologist and at harvard she also works she is a affiliated professor of earth and planetary sciences and you reasoned a lot on the top on the relationship between science and society and climate change this edition of the festival is devoted to growth and environment the pre-assumption so to say is the knowledge that we already suffer the influences of climate change and so we have to think about the future based on that and yet deniers of climate change with all the forms that they take from those denying that there is a role played by humans in climate change and the others who say that there are there is change but we shouldn't be worried so this uh group of deniers is very present in italy and certainly it is must be present also in the united states so much so that there is a a member of this group at the white house so naomi oreskes has many merits one of them is the fact that she wrote the book merchants of doubt that was published 10 years ago and translated into italian last year actually in that wonderful book she explains how distrust and trust work in relation to science and the fact that there are groups linked to various lobbies and the various sectors that raise doubts about for instance the human influence on climate change so she explains a method in understanding what bad science is which is rooted in the tobacco strategy which was created to contrast the emerging of scientific evidence linking tobacco and many diseases but that happened also with evolutionary theory and vaccines and the ozone ozone layer so after 10 years it is so that this system of discrediting science has found new ways of being widespread through social networks and so now i would like to give the floor to naomi oreskes to try together to understand better whether we can save a science which is the title of our meeting today so what can we do citizens and uh how are things so you have the floor professor oresquez well thank you very much grazie and buena it's a really a pleasure to be with you all today i'm sorry that i can't be with you in person to eat good italian food and drink good italian wine but this will have to do as the next best option as you heard i'm the author of the book merchants of doubt which was just this year translated into italian so i hope that you'll all have the opportunity to rebook but today i want to talk to you about my new work this book which i happen to have write with me why trust science and as you just heard we hope we can get this translated into italian so if there are any publishers out there please email me after the meeting this work is especially timely in a sad way we have seen this year through kovit 19 that the cost of distrusting science is very very high that science truly is a matter of life and death and therefore unders not just the science acts also the processes by which scientists come to their conclusions is urgent for all of us and it's urgent for us to be under able to understand not that we have a blanket faith in science because that would not be warranted but that we understand science well enough to make intelligent decisions as citizens as families and as countries and so that's what i'm going to talk to you about so even before teen we were already facing a number of important and contested issues regarding scientific information should we vaccinate our children should we accept genetically modified crops what should we do about climate change and now of course should we wear masks and will a vaccine for covet 19 be safe one of the challenges we face as citizens is that the science around these issues often seems very complex and rather uncertain scientists work at the view between the known and the unknown so by definition there will always be uncertainty at that boundary and sometimes that certainty can stick grounds for doubting the science or even rejecting it and sometimes that uncertainty is deliberately exploited by actors like the tobacco industry or the fossil fuel industry so what do we do as citizens well starting in the early 2000s i began working on the issue of climate change my own work in the history of climate science showed that by the early 90s there was an extensive scientific literature affirming the reality of the human causes or what scientists like to call the human fingerprint climate system but this led many people to ask me well why should we trust the scientists and i realized that that was actually a fair question even if it was sometimes asked in a kind of skeptical and belligerent way to accept the safety of vaccinations or the reality of climate change we have to trust science we have to accept and believe and use the claims of scientists and that raises a troubling dilemma because for many people when we talk about belief if we talk about believing in science it sounds like faith and faith seems to be the domain of religion most of us have been raised to think that science and religion are two different things so how can we talk about belief in science well for me a good place to start to answer that question has to do with the great 17th century philosopher and mathematician blaise pascal pascal is famous for many things among them what is known today as pascal's wager pascal said that the greatest question of all was not a scientific or mathematical question the greatest question of all was does god exist and he concluded sorry let me go back for a moment oh sorry he concluded that the best way that the answer that question was to say well what happens if i believe in god and he doesn't exist versus what happens don't believe in god and he does and pascal says well the latter be worse because i will believe it i will end up burning in hell and therefore it's much less risky to believe in god than not to and so he took he clutched for what one of my professors in college said the handrail of faith hold on to that faith because it was less risky than the alternatives but this raises the question is science a leap of faith most of us have no idea how to judge whether or not scientific claims are true so we take the leak of faith we hope for the best and like pascal we assume that the risks of accepting science are smaller than the risks of rejecting it at least that's what most of us do but definitely not all and again we've seen in recent months how many people have rejected scientific evidence about covid19 in fact the risks have been very very great the standard most common answer to the question that that i've just posed is that we should believe in science we should trust the result scientific work because scientists use the scientific method and by this the implication is that there's a method by virtue of which the results of scientific work are true typically this method is considered to be what philosophers call the hypothetico div method by that they mean that scientists develop a hypothesis deduce consequences and then go out into the natural world or do an experiment to observe whether or not those consequences are true if they are true we accept offices if they're not then we reject it now there are some very great examples in the history of science where we can find scientists following the hypothetical deductive method the most famous of all probably is the bending of starlight predicted by the general theory of relativity einstein said that if space and time are not empty and absolute as newton said but rather are part of a manifold that is bent in the presence of bodies so that that space actually had a brick and that fabric had texture then we could detect that during an eclipse when light from a distant star would be bent as it approached the sun on its way to the earth this test this experimental test was performed in 1918 by the british astronomer sir arthur eddington and lo and beh it turned out to be and this was taken as a great proof of the truth of the funeral relativity now there's a problem though and the problem is that logically this method doesn't actually work it doesn't hold up logically and there are a couple of reasons why that's true the most famous is called the fallacy of affirming the consequent put in plain language that means that a false theory can make a true prediction so just because our predictions come true doesn't actually prove that the theory that it came from is true the most famous example of this in the history of science islamic system of the universe which was so famously overthrown by copernican and galileo ptolemaic ptolemy held that the earth was the center of the universe the guts were on celestial spheres that rotated around the earth we would today this was wrong that it was incorrect and yet this model of the universe made very very accurate predictions of the motions of the planets and that of the eclipses the second problem is the product philosophers refer to as auxiliary hypotheses by that we mean that when we make a test of a theory like the copernican system in the universe we're not actually just testing that theory or that hypothesis there are also other assumptions that we are making that are built into the test whether we realize it or not a very famous example of that comes from the challenge or the debate over the copernican theory of the universe so when copernicus and also galileo said that the earth was moving many critics said well if that's true using a hypothetical deductive framework then condenses that we ought to be able to detect those effects and one of the attack did one of the effects that people suggested we could detect was something called the stellar parallax so this illustration sort of oversimplified version of the stellar parallax argument the idea here is that if the earth is moving so here it is in december six months later it's here in june if we look at a particular distinctive star in the horizon then in december we will see that star against a particular backdrop of other distant stars but come june when we look at that same star from a different angle we will see it against a different set and that angular difference between what we see excuse me what we see in june versus what we see in december is called the stellar parallax so astronomers did this test they looked for the stellar parallax and they found nothing so according to the hypothetical deductive model we or they should have rejected the copernican theory it failed the hypothetical deductive test now of course today we would say that the copernican theory is right and that the ptolemaic theory was wrong so what went wrong in this test well in hindsight we can see that there was an auxiliary assumption in this test the assumption was that the universe was small and that the stars were relatively nearby or put another way that the earth's orbit was large compared to the distance the stellar parallax would be big and it would be easy to detect today we would say that that's not true that the universe is infinitely large that the stars are very very far away and the starlax does exist but it's very very tiny very attacked in fact it wasn't until the 19th century in the work of sir william herschel so more than 200 years after copernicus first proposed this theory that telescopes became sensitive enough to detect the stellar parallel so we could say that there was a second hypothesis at work the assumption the faulty assumption that the telescopes were sensitive enough to detect the effects and i would say that that was wrong even though the theory itself was right but there's also another problem if the hypo deductive model did work a lot of science just doesn't fit it scientists do a lot of things other than testing their deductive consequences of theory the most famous example of that of course is sir charles darwin darwin's theory of species by natural section was not deductive it was what historians and philosophers call inductive inductive science is when you don't necessarily have a hypothesis or theory to test but you go out into the world and you observe you look you see there and then after some period of looking you come to a general conclusion about what it is you think you're seeing and that's what darwin did when he developed the theory of evolution by natural selection scientists also do many other things we only have half an hour today so i'm speak very briefly about some of the other activities that scientists do but important additional method of science is modeling when you build a model it could be a physical model like this one shown here in this picture or some other it could be an electrical model or a chemical model or his world a numerical simulation model a computer model in the 1970 scientists built physical models this is a picture of henry cadell who was a 19th century geologist who was trying to understand how mountains were built he was interested in the swiss and italian alps and he was interested in a phenomenon seen in the alps known as naps big folds where the rocks appear to have been folded back upon themselves often with large faults cutting across them in which the rocks even though we think of rocks as being hard we talk about things being solid as a rock but these rocks seem to have behaved as if they were soft as if they were clay and so he made a model using clay and sand to try to simulate the effects that he and others had seen in the and what he argued was that these effects could be explained if the rocks had been pushed from the side by some force and so here in this contraption he's developed a device to push the gay model from the sun lo and behold in fact he does produce features that look very similar to what he sees in the alps and this became an early argument in the argument in favor of the theory of continental drift that mountains were caused when continents moved horizontally across the earth now nowadays models are typically not made of clay and plaster and sand typically they're made with computers this is an example of an early simulation model produced by the ipcc testing the question of what was driving the range in temperature that we have seen on the planet since the industrial revolution so in this mark this black line here represents observations these are the actual temperatures of the earth the actual average temperature of the globe since the year 1900 and you can see very clearly from the observed data so this is reality that starting around 19 or a little before there's a big increase in average global temperature and this is the increase that today we would say we know is driven by human activities mostly greenhouse gases in this model the question is this is posed as a question to say well what could drive the observed change here's this model includes a whole bunch of different things that we know can climate these are sulfate particles from air pollution this is dust from volcanoes this is variations in ground level ozone this is variations in sunshine and solar radiation and this is the crease in greenhouse gases and look at this picture the only way you can reproduce the curved result is through all of the above putting all of these factors together but it's the greenhouse gas increase that is most clearly linked to the driving the ink temperatures so here the computer model is used to try to produce what has actually had a real world because of this diversity of methods the philosopher paul fire albin once famously said that the method of science is quote anything goes now he's often quoted as saying noted as if he was some kind of epistemological anarchy but actually what he really said the full quotation is a little bit more subtle he said if you would ask me if you would insist that i tell you a little bit of science is i would have to say that the only principle that does not inhibit progress is anything goes in other words scientists are creative they're innovative they figure out different ways to answer their questions so most historians have therefore concluded that actually there is no one scientific method there are set asides that scientists have used at different times and places so that leads the question what if any do these different diverse methods have in common and i think the answer to that question is evidence that all these different methods whether they're inductive deductive modeling etc are all means of generating evidence about objects and processes in the natural world they're based on experience on observation and on experimentation the different means of gathering evidence are ways that scientists use to come to agreement about the natural world and when scientists come to agreement that's when we say that something is known this is why i and many other historian sociologists and anthropologists of science have in recent decades become very into problem of scientific consensus because what we call scientific facts are really no more or no less than matters about which expertise have come to consensus after considerable discussion and argument now so this is the central argument of my book and if you want to know more about it again i invite you to buy and read the book in english if you can or hopefully in italian next year uh but what i have found since the book came has come out is many people like it many people agree with most of the part that they don't always like the part that upsets many people is that this seems to be an appeal to authority it seems to be that i'm just saying we just have to accept whatever scientists say and many of us have been taught that the appeal to authority is a logical fact that we shouldn't believe something just because an authority figure says so well so i'm going to argue that actually science is an appeal to authority but it's not the of any one individual it's the authority the track record of the process of the scientific process of observing of demonstrating and of coming to conclusions based on evidence so in this picture you see this woman who's clearly a scientist because she's wearing a white coat and she's showing her colleagues something and what is she showing them some photographs some graphs she's showing them evidence now i always like to say i'm a little suspicious that these people are actually scientists because they look far too happy but we'll set that aside and we'll just assume that these are in fact happy scientists but the important point here the really crucial point of my argument is it's not the authority of the individual scientist no matter how great or that scientist is and we really do ourselves a disservice when we focus too much on great individuals like einstein or galileo or pascal that we need to focus much more in order stand science focus much more on the process we can think of science as being a jury of scientific peers but however we want to think about it what we come to is the conclusion that what we call scientific knowledge is the intellectual and social consensus of affiliated experts based on the weight of available empirical evidence and evaluated according to diverse but talented methodologies so it's not anything goes it's a lot of though but they all get evaluated by this community who argue who debate and agreement or not um i want to close with just one uh one analogy um but i need to just take a second here because my power's about to run out and i don't know why so okay it looks like my chord became a little loose so hopefully we'll um it would be bad to lose power right at the end here so um if we think about modern technology think just for a moment about the modern car the modern car is an extremely efficient and effective and reliable instrument and how is that it's not because of the brilliance of any one individual it's not because of the brilliance of dame ford or ben's it's because the modern car is the accumulated result of a hundred years of experience expertise thinking and hard work well i want to believe that science is actually or i want to argue that science is actually a lot more like technology than we sometimes realize that our scientific knowledge is based on the accumulated experience and expertise not of one genius any peeking together it works like our cars because of accumulated experience and expertise we should believe in science as a process because by and large it has worked but that leaves me with one more thought if we go back to pascal's wager we can ask the question well if we believe in climate science uh you know and it turns out to be false what happens i would argue that we should believe in climate science as well as the science of covid19 because if we don't and we are wrong the consequences as in pascal's wager are pretty darn dire on the other hand if we accept the science and it turns out to be wrong and it turned out to just be a big hoax well we will have created a better world for nothing thank you very much for this brilliant presentation thank you very much for explaining so well the content of your book why trust science i have a question can you expand on something you said you laid the emphasis on science as a collective venture um in the history of science well uh until recent years we simply concentrated on the uh great uh successes of some scientists such as galilea they had to fight against the system of their times which were considered rooted and consolidated that's a key element of which we have to think another point you raised in your book has to do with what happening in the debate on climate change and the people who complain with politics they think that they are very slow to act i'm thinking of young people movements fridays for future and many others they talk about diversity and the fact that including embracing diversity is important you say in your book that it is uh also very important to give value to diversity diversity strengthens our knowledge what does that mean in a very complex scenario like the one we are in climate change and the pandemic thank you those are excellent questions and of course the galileo question comes up a lot and i expect it to come up in italy so one really important thing that we need to remember is that galileo was not oppressed and arrested by his fellow scientists he was oppressed and ultimately arrested by the catholic church who was the governing power of at that time so the fault there did not lay in the scientific process in fact we know that many of galileo's scientific colleagues were engaged with him corresponding with him discussing these issues just as we would want them to be but the catholic church wasn't threatened by his challenge to aristotelossa and so it it oppressed him and that is exactly the same as we're seeing today with climate change clantus are not being attacked and harassed by fellow scientists they're being harassed and attacked by the u.s government by members of the u.s congress who have threatened to subpoena them who have um who had their papers uh who have harassed them and they've been threatened by the fall industry which is a very powerful industry so the threat to science i opinion we see historically does not typically come from fellainis argument among scientists is what we expect it's what we need but suppression and repression typically comes from powerful forces within society who are threatened by scientific findings and this of course is one of the reasons why i argue that scientists need to be diverse because if science is going to work as we wanted to then scientists themselves to be willing to take criticism um to be able to answer tough questions and to really listen to each other and what i argue and other philosophers of scientifically the feminist philosophers of science like helen longino and stanford and others is that this process is most likely to work well when the community is diverse because in the diversity different perspectives are brought to bear and so we're less likely to have major blind spot we're more likely to ensure that if there is a problem could say well hold on wait a minute you know this feels to me like you're missing a point and we do have good evidence that when scientific communities are not diverse they often are are biased by class race gender or other preferences but when they're more diverse those kinds of biases are more likely to be exposed and corrected i'm just going to stop again for one second because i'm having a problem with my electricity computer is plugged in but it doesn't seem to be working i'm just going to check the power cord disappear from the screen for just while i go underneath my desk so we wait for you professor oreskas so there is a technical issue there naomi oreskis was discussing one of the fundamental topics in this book why trust science which clearly is a very important and crucial moment we can but if if you lose me then i'm just going to have to apologize we can hear you actually so i hope that you can hear us as well can you hear us can you hear us yeah can you yeah can you hear me now we hear you perfectly well so i would like to go back to the topic of climate change because it is a de facto the uh topic at the center of this a festival of economics which is devoted to growth and the environment in your book merchants of doubt translated into italian last year but published 10 years ago in english you presented a very topical aspect and you also addressed the relationship between neoliberal policies neoliberal economic policies and the deniers uh work and activity so is there a connection between the two is does it still apply today what you wrote 10 years ago yes sadly it does we would like our book to be obsolete but sadly it's not so what we showed in the book we asked the question why would intelligent educated people reject the scientific evidence of climate change and what we found was that the leaders of the climate change we have an issue with the connection because now the rest is has disappeared so let's try and see whether we can solve it in the meantime so i would try and continue this line of reasoning we were talking about the connection um between science and the economic sector and the uh scientific denial that is to say the fact of raising doubts in people about aspects which pertain to the human related causes of climate change in a now may rescues a merchant's book merchants of doubt there is a very in-depth analysis of this topic this is a very interesting topic and indeed this is a something that warns and warns us against the temptation of being seduced by opinions which deny the extent of the anthropogenic cause of climate change this happens when uh editorials are posted on websites and in newspapers and so on and so forth the journalists here have a major role to play there the problem indeed is crucial at a time when fake news and ungrounded information indeed can create many problems in terms of decisions political decisions so i ask the technical staff whether we can reconnect with naomi oreskis otherwise i would say that we can wait for professor oresquez to come back is there a problem with skyping what what is it we have to see whether we can connect again with the professor oresquez and in the meantime what can i say i really would like you all to read the books published by naomi oreskis including merchants of doubt that was published in 2010 in the united states by professor robresque is it was a very fair it has become a very famous book because she has a satellite shed light on a number of issues related to the reasons why a number of scientists deny scientific evidence which has consolidated about the anthropogenic cause of climate change the analysis made by professor oresque is a do not only pertain to climate change but also safety of vaccines evolutionary theories which again is a much debated topic in the united states because we know that there are um groups fundamentalists and religious fundamentalist groups that deny the solidity of the theory of evolution so professor oresquez made a very in-depth analysis of all these cases in that book and she continued to do so even more systematically in the book published last year in the united states why trust the science that was the subject matter of her contribution today she presented a number of aspects earlier on i do not know whether we can actually again establish a connection with professor rescues please tell me something about that otherwise i would say that we can conclude the meeting here i kindly ask the organizers and the technical staff to inform me about this because it seems that it is technically impossible to retrieve the connection with professor oresque so she's a geologist a professor she is a professor at harvard based in boston and she started her career as a geologist in the mining sector and then she worked more in the field of science so unfortunately it is not possible to retrieve the connection with naomi rescue so i would say that we can conclude here we apologize for this technical problem we're very sorry thank you very much for attending this meeting thank you also to people following what we're doing online and i would like to thank claudia marcilli and dana for interpreting and naomi rescues and i i hope that you enjoy the festival and the rest of the festival and the next appointment thank you very much you