Science and Public Participation: The Democratization of Science

Abstract

Thomas Jefferson, quoted in Fischer's Citizens, Experts, and the Environment (2001), said that wherever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government. But, nowadays, who can claim to be well informed enough about science to govern it except the scientists themselves? In 1959, Sir Charles Snow put forward the thesis in the Rede Lecture that there was what amounted to an opposition between literary intellectualism at one end, and proficiency in the physical sciences at the other. Snow dated his realization of this distinction to the 1930s. What we can say for certain is that there was a coming into common understanding that a reasonably well‐educated or cultured person could not, now, be expected to be normally able to comprehend both the sciences and the arts. This state of affairs is not by any means all the scientific community's fault, although science is guilty of creating, along with other forms of knowledge and understanding, elites. Elitism fosters disciplinization and subdisciplinization, and has given rise to mistrust and lack of understanding between the members of different disciplines and of science and scientists in general. The term “lay” was commonly used until the 1990s to describe those untutored in science, thus emphasizing the idea of a scientific priesthood or elite. For various reasons not dealt with here, this state of affairs is seen as being iniquitous, and so public participation in science, also known as public engagement in science, is seen as a means whereby that balance can be redressed.