SOCRATES – Social Credibility and Trustworthiness of Expert Knowledge and Science-Based Information

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To fulfill their societal role, the sciences must enjoy some level of trust as an authoritative source of credible and reliable knowledge about the world and at the same time be worthy of that epistemic trust—two goals between which there is often some tension. When controversial issues are at stake, trust in science decreases and common public knowledge often breaks down. Understanding how science can continue to serve as a source of shared knowledge, which not only enjoys trust but also merits it, is one of the most pressing challenges we are facing today. The Center for Advanced Studies SOCRATES aims to address this challenge by investigating the implicit and frequently unanalyzed philosophical presuppositions underlying different attitudes and practices that are significant for trust in science and scientific credibility. By providing a forum for interactions among philosophers across subdisciplines as well as a forum for discursive interdisciplinary engagement among philosophers, sociologists, researchers in communications and media studies, and other social scientists, SOCRATES aims to work toward a comprehensive and coherent philosophical treatment of scientific credibility and trust in science. Desired outcomes include detailed and nuanced characterizations of the different processes by which highly specialized scientific expertise can be credentialed or challenged and undermined, as well as an account of scientific trustworthiness that includes context-specific strategies for how science can improve its credibility or trustworthiness and how trust and trustworthiness can be well-calibrated to one another. To achieve this, the center focuses on the following issues of concern: (i) Trust, trustworthiness, and social values; (ii) Consensus, controversy, and uncertainty-management; (iii) Trustworthiness, the spread of information, and the mediatization of science and (iv) Trustworthiness and the globalization of science. In each of the two funding periods, the Centre will combine theoretical analysis with a systematic and sustained investigation of the problem of scientific credibility in three focal areas. The first funding period will focus on (1) climate science and the climate crisis, (2) scientific expertise in the health sciences (focusing in particular on expertise and trust in the corona pandemic), and (3) credibility within and of the behavioral sciences. The second funding period will be devoted to (4) artificial intelligence and machine learning (5) emerging technologies and (6) Earth system and complexity sciences.