I was awarded my Ph.D. in Philosophy in 2007. Early in my Ph.D. program, I mentioned to a more senior graduate student that I was interested in how science relates to society. This student explained to me that, while some philosophers of science consider the social structure of science, it simply is outside the scope of philosophy of science to examine the relationships science bears to broader society.
Of course, even at that time, some philosophers of science would have disagreed with this assessment. But nowadays it’s impossible to dispute that science’s relationship to society is within the domain of philosophy of science. The philosophical literature on values in science has exploded, and there’s new fascinating work on topics like public trust in science and public participation in scientific research. Still, science’s relationship to society is not quite codified as a central area of research. Consider, for example, that PhilPapers has more than 20 topics within the category “Laws of Nature,” but no category or topic at all on science and the public, public trust in science, public understanding of science, public participation in scientific research, etc. (There is a category “Science and Values,” with four topics within it.)
In 2024, I published Science and the Public in the Elements in Philosophy of Science series from Cambridge University Press. My guiding vision for this Element was to draw together this burgeoning philosophical research on topics bearing on science’s relationship to society in order to help make this topic—science and the public—a more easily discernible area of research in philosophy of science. Though this bears obvious relationships to the research topic of values in science, there are many more questions to ask about science’s relationships to the public than simply how societal values influence the progression of scientific research.
Philosophical questions about science and the public regard (at least) the nature and value of public understanding of science; public trust in science—whether it is warranted, what it consists in, how to promote it—and science denial; citizen science and participatory research methods; and the roles and responsibilities of science within society. There is important philosophical work on each of these topics, and it bears recognition as a unified target of study. My Element attempts to survey work on all these topics.
The project that emerged is an examination of what the institutions of science owe broader society and how these obligations might be discharged. I suggest that the institution of science has an obligation to society in virtue of societal investment in science, the potential societal value of scientific research, and science’s contributions to social problems. In my view, the resultant obligations include producing scientific advances of societal value, providing career pathways into science and public access to the knowledge and skills of science, cultivating the trustworthiness of scientific research, and producing research and research practices that ameliorate inequalities and social problems to which science has contributed. (See Section 1 and Section 6 of Science and the Public.)
I also motivate the idea of what I call responsive science as a model for scientific institutions discharging these obligations to public institutions and communities. Some attention in philosophy of science has been directed at the question of how scientific research priorities should be determined in a just society, including among other work books by Helen Longino and Philip Kitcher. Responsive science suggests addressing this question by leveraging two current trends in science: first, attention to diversifying the community of professional scientists, and second, burgeoning involvement of public participation in scientific research, such as in citizen science and community-based participatory research approaches. Diverse professional participation in science, coupled with expanded public participation in science, can provide a means for scientific research to reflect and respond to the values and priorities of public institutions and communities.
Diversified professional participation in science ensures that professional leadership in science is representative of the broad range of communities in our society. And then, incorporating sufficient public participation in scientific research enables community priorities to shape research goals. Both diversified professional participation and expanded public participation are needed, as professional leadership is needed to support and structure the involvement of public participants, while public voices from outside professional science are needed to authentically connect with community values.
There is, of course, a question of whether and to what extent this recipe of diversified professional participation and expanded public participation in science can achieve the stated goal of a just distribution of scientific priorities. I think we can be optimistic about the prospect.
A benefit of recruiting existing scientific practices to play this role is that we can consider the influence these practices have where they already exist. First, increasing the diversity of practicing scientists (along multiple dimensions) is widely valued by science policy experts for the epistemic benefit of expanded perspectives and interests. Diverse professional participation in science can also play a role in cultivating broader public trust in science. Second, at least in environmental and social sciences, scientific research is increasingly being put to work to achieve social goals through effective community collaborations, where public participants shape the research agenda and researchers (professional and public) pursue changes to policy and practices based on research findings.
I think there is reason to see special promise in the combination of diversified professional participation with expanded public participation. These emphases are mutually reinforcing, as diverse professional scientists can serve as connection points to an equally diverse range of communities, while effective community engagement can help motivate people with marginalized identities to pursue careers in science by creating ways for scientific research to have real societal impact. Further, openness to the goals of public participants helps make the scientific establishment responsive to community needs, while channeling these goals through the norms and practices of professional science creates some guardrails for what research is pursued, and in what ways. I hypothesize that the combination of diverse professional participation and expanded public participation is a powerful means scientific institutions have—now, in actuality—to help science become more responsive to community concerns and, in so doing, to discharge its societal obligations.
I’ll conclude with an illustration from my own experiences of how diversified professional participation and expanded public participation in science may be mutually supportive and meaningfully impact scientific priorities. The Center for Public Engagement with Science at the University of Cincinnati (which I direct) offers a series of courses for graduate students in any discipline to learn how to conduct effective public engagement with science, including community involvement in scientific research. This focus on public engagement disproportionately appeals to students with identities underrepresented in STEM: more than 85% of workshop participants have marginalized racial or ethnic, gender or sexuality, national or socioeconomic identities. Meanwhile, these diverse early career scientists (and humanists studying science) use the workshop to find ways for public participation to influence their research. A student in the first cohort of this program—a geoscientist—has said that the experience changed her understanding of what science is. This is, I believe, a pilot project in responsive science: better discharging science’s societal obligations through diversified professional participation and expanded public participation.
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