Abstract
In response to the challenges of policy issues of risk and the environment, a new type of science-‘post-normal’-is emerging. This is analysed in contrast to traditional problem-solving strategies, including core science, applied science, and professional consultancy. We use the two attributes of systems uncertainties and decision stakes to distinguish among these. Postnormal science is appropriate when either attribute is high; then the traditional methodologies are ineffective. In those circumstances, the quality assurance of scientific inputs to the policy process requires an ‘extended peer community’, consisting of all those with a stake in the dialogue on the issue. Post-normal science can provide a path to the democratization of science, and also a response to the current tendencies to post-modernity. Science always evolves, responding to its leading challenges as they change through history. After centuries of triumph and optimism, science is now called on to remedy the pathologies of the global industrial system of which it forms the basis. Whereas science was previously understood as steadily advancing in the certainty of our knowledge and control of the natural world, now science is seen as coping with many uncertainties in policy issues of risk and the environment. In response, new styles of scientific activity are being developed. The reductionist, analytical worldview which divides systems into ever smaller elements, studied by ever more esoteric specialism, is being replaced by a systemic, synthetic and humanistic approach. 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. At present, there is no agreed description of what the future will bring, but
Highlights
Science always evolves, responding to its leading challenges as they change through history
We originally argued for Post-Normal Science (PNS) on methodological grounds, shifting the focus from truth to quality, we recognised from the outset that there are essential social and political dimensions of the problem-solving practice
With the dominance of applied science, the rationality of reductionist natural-scientific research has been taken as a model for the rationality of intellectual and social activity in general. Successful it has been in the past, the recognition of the policy issues of risk and the environment shows that this ideal of rationality is no longer universally appropriate
Summary
Science always evolves, responding to its leading challenges as they change through history. As an alternative to post-modernity, we show that a new, enriched awareness of the functions and methods of science is being developed In this sense, the appropriate science for this epoch is ‘post-normal’. One is the quality of scientific information, analysed in terms of both the different types of uncertainty in knowledge and the intended functions of the information. In the area of post-normal science the problems of quality assurance of scientific information are acute, and their resolution requires new conceptions of scientific methodology In this new sort of science, the evaluation of scientific inputs to decision making requires an ‘extended peer community’.6. The new challenges for science can become the successors of the earlier great ‘conquests’, as of disease and of space, in providing symbolic meaning and a renewed sense of adventure for a new generation of recruits to science in the future
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