Category Archives: philosophy

navigating the social sciences

Here is a tentative effort to map the social sciences for a novice, such as a student who’s thinking of taking some social science courses. (It is a counterpart to my recent post on the humanities.) I will risk over-generalizations to offer some pointers.

I would start with three familiar cases:

Researchers want to understand and, if possible, predict a situation in which many individuals face a similar choice that is concrete and observable. For example, people can buy a specific good at a given price, apply for a job, pursue a particular kind of education, marry, or vote. Although individuals’ motives and beliefs vary, there is a typical reason that one would do each of these things (e.g., one buys a good to possess it) as well as costs, disadvantages, and competitors. Thus it should be possible to model the whole situation with an equation that shows the outcome on one side of the equal sign. To test the model, we want to collect as much data as possible, and the data tend to be concrete and unambiguous. It may not be necessary to work with samples if data can represent all the relevant behavior, as a price reflects all the recent purchases of a given good or an election tallies all the votes. Economics relies heavily (but not exclusively) or large-scale data that markets generate or that bureaucracies collect for planning purposes. The mathematics that’s most useful includes statistics (especially statistical tools for inferring causality) and calculus, which reveals maximum values subject to constraints.
Researchers want to understand a mental characteristic that is not measurable with a single datapoint. For example, they want to understand anxiety, hand-eye coordination, prejudice, or knowledge of the American Civil War. They will probably study specific human subjects, rather than use data to describe populations, and they will devote attention and ingenuity to deriving measures of unobserved, latent, and/or unconscious characteristics. This is the point of a laboratory test of perception, a multi-item survey that measures an attitude, an in-depth interview, or an exam, which might include graded essay questions along with multiple-choice items. Again, statistics is a useful tool, but now often the main statistical question is whether an individual differs from the mean of a relatively small sample that shows a lot of variation. Qualitative research becomes more prominent. And a different kind of math emerges as useful: factor analysis and related methods that turn many datapoints into scales.
Researchers want to interpret a whole human situation: a cockfight in Bali, adolescence in Samoa, a ceremonial feast in the Pacific Northwest, or indeed, a US high school or a physics lab or a Manhattan apartment building with a doorman. The key questions are what happens and what that means. Often the important happenings (cockfights, gifts, rites of passage, holiday tips) recur regularly and may not seem optional or determined by the individuals’ characteristics, such as their personal desires. Quantitative data become less relevant. Instead, the researcher’s main method is to spend a considerable amount of time in the community, observing intensively and listening to many informants.

The bastions of these approaches are, respectively, economics, psychology, and anthropology. Each discipline arose to study a restricted range of topics and then expanded by applying its favored methods to other topics.

Economists began with markets but have studied topics like voting since at least 1942 (Schumpeter) and probably earlier. Some of the pioneering anthropologists sought to understand what they then called “Man” by conducting ethnographies of people who were presumed to live as early humans had lived. Several assumptions of that approach are now rejected, and ethnography is now applied to all kinds of communities. And psychology emerged from early studies of perception and cognition by people like Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) and William James (1842-1910) plus efforts to define and treat mental illnesses by doctors like Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). The discipline now extends to all areas of human and animal life.

As a first approximation, I would say that sociology and political science are not defined by their favored methods; they are methodologically pluralistic. Instead, they are defined by their topics: respectively, society and politics. That said, both make more use of representative surveys of populations than other disciplines do. (Economists would rather work with revealed preferences, and psychologists often intensively study smaller samples.)

Also, economics and psychology are often (not always) methodologically individualist, meaning that they seek to analyze group phenomena as aggregates of individuals’ behavior. But sociology has contributed powerful models and methods that treat other things–such as classes or institutions–as the causes of outcomes. Similarly, political science contributes a focus on power, which can be missing in models that presume that people have psychological traits and choose accordingly.

Unfortunately, I do not read much research in geography, but its unique contribution is spatial analysis. A characteristic tool of geographers is a map. Public health employs many of the methods favored in the other social sciences (including maps), but it addresses diseases and syndromes that affect human beings. “Epidemiology” is derived from the Greek words for “upon the people.” Focusing on non-human factors that are “upon us” requires studying phenomena like contagion and mutation that apply to bacteria and viruses in relation to people.

Disciplines like public policy, communications, and education are methodologically pluralistic and defined by their topics. In fact, some professors of these disciplines hold PhDs in the liberal arts and apply methods that they learned there. However, experts in these fields might rightly emphasize their distinctive approaches to research. For instance, public policy research has a distinctive emphasis on feedback loops (how policies affect society, which then affects policy). And education thinks developmentally.

Finally, history is often classified among both the humanities and the social sciences. A cultural historian who seeks to enrich our perception of human artifacts is very much a humanist. Likewise, a narrative historian who weaves events and intentional action into a nonfiction narrative is humanistic. But it is also possible to employ methods like econometrics and epidemiology to the past, in which case history operates as a social science.

See also: navigating the disciplines (from 2020, with a video); the humanities for specialists and for everyone; against methodological individualism; three cores of contemporary social science (which is worryingly similar to the current post, but written in 2016); is social science too anthropocentric? etc.

Karpowitz and Patterson, The Politics of Individualism

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In The Politics of Individualism (Oxford University Press, 2025), Christopher F. Karpowitz and Kelly D. Patterson make an important contribution by defining a new construct, moral individualism. They show that it is prevalent in the USA and may help explain various concerning outcomes, from resistance to public health measures to low voter turnout.

This post is a short review. Anyone who is attending this year’s Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association is welcome to an authors-meet-critics session about the book on September 6 from 8:00 to 9:30 am (early on a Sunday morning!) with comments by Michigan’s Yanna Krupnikov, Stanford’s Elizabeth Mitchell Elder, North Carolina’s Marc J. Hetherington, and me.

Karpowitz and Patterson define moral individualism as the conjunction of two beliefs: 1) any “authorities external to the self’ must curtail or abridge a person’s liberty, and 2) “only moral choices that are self-authorized are legitimate” (p. 32).

They measure this construct in nationally representative samples using an ingenious survey design. In part, they ask respondents to name who is most important when they’re deciding how to live their lives or what is best for society. The ten response options include a religious leader, a scientist or expert, and a family member, among others.

Respondents are then asked to evaluate ten statements about how to treat their chosen source, e.g., “Nobody, not even [the favored source] can decide what is right and wrong, except for me” and “The world has many truths, and whatever I learned from [the favored source] is just one of them.”

A moral individualist is someone who does not feel bound by what their own most important sources may say.

Scores on this scale do not correlate strongly with measures of economic individualism, such as “Any person who is willing to work hard has a good chance of succeeding.” Thus economic and moral individualism are not the same construct. Likewise, moral individualism does not have a partisan valence: it is found on both sides of the aisle. It does not correlate strongly with attitudes toward Donald Trump or MAGA.

Moral individualism does, however, correlate with important outcomes, even when other factors are controlled. It predicts lower odds of voting and serving other people, less commitment to family, less religious attendance, weaker sense of efficacy (confidence that one can make a difference), less support for patriotism, much less support for public health measures during COVID, and more suspicion that other people were violating COVID restrictions. Controlling for party, ideology and support for Donald Trump, moral individualism correlated with less opposition to the riot on January 6.

Traditionally, governments have tried to counteract moral individualism. For example, public schools and colleges (as well as private and parochial ones) not only instruct students to honor various external authorities–from the Constitution to science–but they also present the school itself as something that should be honored. Military recruitment campaigns often emphasize one’s duty to country. In WWI, Uncle Sam said, “I want you for U.S. Army!” Karpowitz and Patterson trace the evolution of the all-volunteer Army’s slogans from the communitarian “Join the People Who Have Joined the Army” (1973-1980) through “Be All You Can Be” (1980-2000) to the individualistic “Army of One” (2001-6).

State-supported efforts to combat moral individualism may not work today and could provoke a backlash. Indeed, there may be legitimate debates about whether and in what ways moral individualism is a public problem. Moral individualism correlates with outcomes like religious attendance and patriotism–but also voting and political confidence–which may concern some of us but not others.

In any case, institutions apart from the government have stakes. For example, the statements that measure moral individualism are explicit rejections of the various kinds of authority that religions tend to claim, and (as noted) the construct correlates with lower church attendance. So religions might want to work against moral individualism.

I couldn’t improve on the authors’ analysis of the American population (by way of large samples). But I am curious about distinctions that might emerge in more intensive qualitative studies, particularly if the samples included relatively thoughtful and self-conscious subjects. I think that people who are moral individualists could differ on dimensions captured by three broad questions:

1. To what extent are you concerned about other people’s moral autonomy?

You can believe that your life is your own business and that no one should interfere with it. That belief can be the basis for not feeling compelled to do anything for anyone else. Or you can believe that you and all other humans have the right to be the authors of their own lives and that this principle is worth fighting for.

Let’s say you are an American who believes that every human being has a right to moral autonomy. You should probably conclude that your own moral autonomy is pretty extensive and safe but that other people (from those incarcerated in US prisons to all citizens of North Korea) are not able to decide for themselves what is right. This is a reason to work and even sacrifice to enhance all people’s moral autonomy.

Karpowitz and Patterson ask people to respond to the statement, “Only I can decide what is right. I cannot even trust [my preferred source] to help me decide.” I am curious whether respondents would say that other people should also be allowed to decide what is right for them (most Americans would probably agree so far) and that they have an obligation to defend other people’s freedom (which would probably be rarer). This distinction would divide selfish or egoistic moral individualists from altruistic ones.

2. How demanding is it to decide for yourself what is right?

Karpowitz and Patterson ask for responses to this prompt: “My own judgment is more important than [my favorite source’s] judgment.” Moral individualists agree with that statement.

But what must an individual do to make a judgment? Some people may think of judgment as synonymous with “preference” or even “desire.” Nothing should be binding on me except what I happen to want. But at least some people may think that the burden to decide what is right falls on the individual and is a heavy one.

In breaking with the Catholic Church, Martin Luther upheld the individual obligation of each sinner to discern the actual truth. He was not relativistic or morally permissive (at all) but was a kind of moral individualist.

Michael Foucault defined spirituality as “the search, practice, and experience with which the subject carries out the transformations on himself that are necessary to have access to the truth” (Foucault 1982). According to practitioners of spirituality, to know the truth, one must make oneself deserving of it, which may require intensive study, prayer, meditation, confession, direct engagement with the original Word, or even fasting and self-mortification.

To be sure, spiritual practices can be collective, but they can also be individual or even solitary. Science, on the other hand, presumes that truth arises from organized, transparent, cumulative work that does not require any particular kind of spiritual preparation. Thus we might imagine that some serious practitioners of spirituality are moral individualists, whereas scientists should not be.

We could divide moral individualists between those who think that deciding what is right is hard and those who think it comes automatically. Emerson, cited several times in the book as a moral individualist, may also be a serious spiritual striver, in the way that Foucault means.

3. What is the role of other people in supporting your moral individuality?

Reformation theologians offered a particular kind of moral individualism when they preached the Priesthood of All Believers and the doctrines of Faith Alone and Scripture Alone. They removed the mediation of the organized Church, claiming that each believer stands alone before God.

The question then arose: Why should there be Protestant churches at all? The dominant answer was that although each person is ultimately responsible, we need other people’s support. Someone who holds this view might agree with this item in Karpowitz and Patterson, “My own judgment is more important than [my favorite authority’s] judgment,” even if they’ve chosen their pastor as their authority. God judges you as an individual, weighing your personal faith; you get no points from the clergy’s behavior. Nevertheless, most Protestants have assumed that they are more likely to find their way to truth and good behavior if they belong to an organized community whose congregants and leaders can give them reminders and encouragement.

In sum, I think that moral individualism could be compatible with some altruistic, introspective, and communitarian values. I suspect that those combinations are rare and that most Americans who score high on Karpowitz’ and Patterson’s scale are also selfish, unreflective, and isolated. But the exceptions might be important.

Source: Michel Foucault, L’herméneutique du suject: cours au Collège de France (1981-2) (Gallimard, 2001), pp. 16-18. See also: the classical liberals versus the “egoists”; bootstrapping value commitments; Foucault’s spiritual exercises; why be introspective? etc.

on translation as spiritual practice

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“The feeling that the world is a bounded whole–that is the mystical.” — Wittgenstein

The Spanish word quedar can be translated as to remain, to stay, to meet, to fit, to suit (as in Ese color te queda bien), to be located, to end up, to agree, or to be left with (as in Me quedan 20 euros).

One of those meanings is “to agree.” That English verb can be translated back into Spanish as estar de acuerdo, acordar, convenir, coincidir, aceptar, or, again, quedar.

One of those meanings is acordar. Rendered back in English, that verb can mean to agree, decide, or make an arrangement, or–if it’s in a reflexive form–to remember. In turn, “to decide” could be conveyed in Spanish by decidir (or decidirse), resolver, acordar or determinar.

I chose quedar because it has a famously wide range of meanings, a bit like rendre or tenir in French. But notice that each of the words that I’ve mentioned connects to a unique list of words in the other language. This is typical. Putting two languages together creates a pattern of intertwined connections, like an arabesque design.

When you study a language, you memorize foreign words as sets of distinct words in your home language. In a given context, quedar means one thing, such as “to stay” or else “to agree.” A translator should know–or look up–the full list of meanings for each word and must pick the best one for each sentence. Sometimes there is no single best choice.

But once you know the language reasonably well, a word no longer decomposes into several words in a different language. Now it covers its own space. Presumably (I don’t have good enough Spanish to know) each use of quedar carries an implicit trace of its whole range of meanings.

Todo pasa y todo queda, 
pero lo nuestro es pasar, 
pasar haciendo caminos, 
caminos sobre el mar. 

Everything passes and everything stays,
But ours is to cease to be. 
As we go, we make a highway,
A highway on the sea. 

Antonio Machado, Proverbios y Cantares (1912): XLIV

Here I’ve rendered the first line with the verbs “to pass” and “to stay,” but I had other choices. Pasar could mean to go through, to happen (¿que pasa?), to spend time, etc. And we have already seen the range of meanings for quedar. Its other senses are missing in the English word “stay,” but that verb has its own range of meanings, including to visit and to prevent something from happening. Those are absent in Machado’s original.

I chose “to pass” for several reasons, including the sonic resemblance to pasar as well as some vague sense of English allusions, such as “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh” (Ecclesiastes). I chose “to stay” as a single syllable that was a near-rhyme for “ways.” Translation is not only about matching words but also about syntax, rhythm, and sound.

Artificial Intelligence is good at translating prose. It generally chooses an appropriate equivalent for each word. Thanks to AI tools, I have been able to read articles in languages, such as Japanese, of which I know nothing. I have also developed a careful practice of asking Claude to list all the dictionary definitions of words in languages, such as Sanskrit and Pali, that interest me. I hope that viewing these lists gives me some sense of how the words work in their original languages, although I must look through that glass darkly.

What AI cannot do is give a person the experience of parsing the whole world a bit differently by beginning to think in a different language. In turn, that experience teaches us that anyone’s model of the world is limited and contingent, and much always remains beyond anyone’s grasp.

A language is a whole system of meanings. It allows us to work with the world, yet it coexists with other systems that present the world differently. Those other systems include not only human languages (which are, after all, rather similar and interconnected), but also other consciousnesses. To glimpse this plurality is to see our own world as if from beyond it.

In the detail from a 13th-century Persian mihrab that accompanies this post, each arabesque field could stand for a pair of intertwined human languages, but there are also fields across the boundaries formed by the Quranic calligraphy. And the whole mihrab is a threshold to the beyond.

Wittgenstein writes, “Das Gefühl der Welt als begrenztes Ganzes ist das mystische” (Tractatus 6:45). Acknowledging that this sentence could be translated in many ways, I will render it: “The feeling that the world is a bounded whole–that is the mystical.”

It’s another way of saying that we make our highways on the sea.

See also: Machado’s Glory is Never What I’ve Sought and Highways on the Sea; paradigms of attention; why the humanities could never be automated; and thinking both sides of the limits of human cognition. Photo credit: detail of a mihrab from Kashan (1226) in the Pergamon Museum, Berlin, via Wikimedia Commons.

where is the attention?

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Sometimes, my dog wonders something about me. Perhaps: Will I will play with him?

He stares at my face, which means he must look quite far above his own head. His nostrils may twitch, and I guess that he is gathering as much data as he can with his nose. His head is cocked, which signals to me that he has a question. His ears (being floppy) are harder to interpret, but usually you can tell that they are tensed forward to listen.

Where is he when he attends this way? One valid answer: between his nose and his tail. Or: in the space contained by his fur.

But it would be a normal use of the English language to say that his eyes–or his mind–are on me. Presumably, he is not thinking about his tail, whereas he is intentionally focused on my face. His eyesight is directed, so that he is not looking anywhere other than my face. Even the space between us and behind me is presumably blurred for him. I am the “figure,” and the rest is the “ground.”

The senses of smell and sound are less directed. Information can reach a nose and ears from any direction. But Luca is probably trying to screen out other olfactory and auditory data and lean into information about me that may be carried by smells and sounds.

He cannot feel me from a distance, and he is probably inattentive to the things that he can feel, such as the ground below him–unless it moves. He is not focused on touch because it will not tell him whether I am going to play with him.

Thus, if you ask where is he when he wonders about me, a plausible answer would be: In a zone centered on my face. But my face is merely a source of information, so another answer could be: He is in relation to me. Or: We are together. After all, the purpose of the cocked head is to tell me that he is attending to me so that I will be more likely to answer his question.

This act of attention has duration. Luca sustains his gaze, which is why I infer that he is attentive. Besides, he is interested in whether I will play with him in the future because I have played with him in the past. I don’t know whether a dog thinks about memories or plans, but humans certainly do. And neither memories nor plans are in the present.

If Luca already knew what he wanted to know, he would no longer pay attention. Nor would he attend if there were nothing present that might answer his question. Maurice Merleau-Ponty says that attention arises “in the process of learning” (1945, p. 34). He defines the “attention itself” as “circumscribed ignorance, an intention that is still ’empty’ but already determined” by what is really there.

Let’s say that any sentient being is its attention, or at least that its attention is a very significant aspect of the being. I have explored that thesis a bit here.

Our attention has a location that is related to the location of our body, but the two are not coterminous. In fact, we are rarely aware of most of our body, and we cannot become aware of some parts or aspects of it, such as the blood in our veins. Although Luca’s sensory capacity is concentrated inside his skull, he is not attentive to his skull and can never even see the back of it.

Still, the body has an important relationship to attention. If something happens to the body, we may immediately notice it and may be compelled to attend. I pulled a muscle in my back on Monday, and that certainly got my attention. If the body dies, the attention ends.

Our attention has a location in time that is related to the present hour and minute, but the two are not identical. We can be deeply engaged with a memory or a fear or hope for the future. And an instant of attention may make sense only as one part of an extended act. I may attend to one word while writing this whole post, but no word means much alone.

Two or more attentions can be connected, with each serving as the object of the other. Then it may be more meaningful to ask where we are than where I am.

Where? and When? seem to be questions about limitations. We are finite, limited creatures who cannot be everywhere or last forever. However, we are not limited in quite the way we may assume when we identify with our body at the moment that is shown on a clock. Our place and time are different from that.

Source: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Gallimard, 1945). (“La conscience en train d’apprendre” is “cette ignorance circonscrite, de cette intention <<vide>> encore, mais déjà déterminée“). The metaphor of figure and ground also comes from this text.

what it would take for the public to trust science

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On July 19, the President posted on the social media platform that he owns:

The National Academy of Sciences has historically published analytical Scientific Manuals expressly for our Federal Judiciary. Of course, the Academy has been run by Radical Left Dumocrats who, it turns out, published fraudulent, biased, and misleading Manuals on Climate Change. These bogus Manuals were used by Judges to decide massive “Climate Change” Cases, and have created huge losses across our Country. These Manuals have been totally DISCREDITED. Our Nation’s Federal Judges deserve Facts and Science, not Political Fraud and False Science on Climate. With this TRUTH, I hereby order Federal Suspension and Debarment Officials to review this conduct. Our Taxpayers should not be funding Climate Fraud, and Judges should never have relied upon it. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP

When I heard about this post, I assumed that I would trust the National Academies manual that Trump was denouncing. This was an interesting reaction because I had not seen the document.

I then looked at it (and you can too). It struck me as cogent, informative, and cautious. But I do not independently know whether its claims are true.

Nor do its authors. For the most part, the document refers to large, organized groups, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the National Research Council. But consider a scientist whose work is very close to the natural phenomena: collecting and measuring atmospheric samples. This person knows what they are doing but not what everyone else’s samples show, let alone how to build the instruments that they all use. And current CO₂ concentrations are only some of the variables that we must measure to understand the climate. The vast majority of what any individual scientist knows comes from reports of what others have done.

As the report that Trump denounced says,

The Earth’s climate system is enormous and complex, consisting of many nested and interlinked subsystems, including the atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, lithosphere, and biosphere. …. Owing to the breadth and complexity of the climate system, climate research spans many different scientific disciplines. For example, research on the physical science of climate and climate change (i.e., understanding of the physical properties of the climate system and how it is changing) encompasses: (1) mathematics and statistics; (2) basic sciences, e.g., physics and chemistry; (3) earth sciences, e.g., atmospheric sciences, climatology, physical geography, oceanography, meteorology, hydrology, biogeochemistry, and cryospheric sciences; and (4) computer sciences and data analysis. Most climate research involves collaboration across these different fields (National Academies 2025)

The chemists must trust the oceanographers, who must trust the computer scientists. In fact, each chemist must trust the other chemists.

Perhaps all of science depends on trust, although that is less obvious in classic cases, like Galileo dropping objects from the Tower of Pisa, than in climate science. The study of the earth’s climate is intensely collaborative, involving many more people than could ever know each other. It depends on the Integrated Assessment Models, which have developed for more than fifty years (Van Beek, Hajer, Pelzer, van Vuuren & Cassen 2020). Anyone who contributes to these models must presume that the previous contributions have been generally reliable, even when new data changes some of the current findings.

Why do I trust those models? Why do I trust the National Academies summaries of them, or Karen Zraick’s New York Times article that drew my attention to Trump’s “TRUTH”?

On one hand, I have no doubt that the cautiously presented conclusions of the National Academies are valid. On the other hand, my confidence has a sociological explanation. Institutions like universities, scientific disciplines, and the Times have treated me well all my life. I have benefited from operating with an overall model that incorporates confidence in what these institutions say plus direct observations that concur with their findings. I have observed the climate get hotter in New England, but I only believe that this is a global trend and a function of humans’ burning carbon because I believe in institutions, like The New York Times, that report on institutions like the National Academies.

Few people are treated as well or have as much experience with these institutions as I do; I am a college professor in the United States. It is unreasonable to ask people to trust institutions that are unaccountable to them and distant from them. I think that scientific institutions can adjust their behavior to be somewhat less distant from the public, but they cannot bear that responsibility alone.

The classic solution has been intermediary organizations that obtain people’s trust and then independently present information. An important example was the 20th century city or town newspaper. In 1972, the General Social Survey (GSS) found that 69 percent of Americans read a newspaper daily.

Some 20th century US newspapers had specific social or ideological slants, but the market was dominated by local monopoly publications. Like the broadcast television networks of the same period, newspapers would have presented the American Academies’ position on the climate as scientific truth. In those days, Trump’s response would have been much more marginal.

In 1998 and 2008, the GSS asked people whether we trust too much in science. In both years, those who never read a newspaper were much more likely to distrust science than those who did read one. When I made a model that controled for age, race, gender, and years of education, reading the newspaper still predicted less distrust in science, net of the other factors (p <.001).

This doesn’t mean that newspapers caused people to trust science. It could be the other way around–people who trusted science subscribed to newspapers. But I think that newspapers devoted resources and skill to building trust and then guided people’s reactions to other institutions, such as science.

The recipe that sustained metropolitan daily newspapers during the 1900s included hard news plus human-interest stories, comics, sports, gossip, and other features aimed at various members of each household, all funded by a combination of revenue from subscribers and advertisers. Once the internet captured advertising revenue, this model disintegrated. By 2014, just one-quarter of respondents told the GSS that they read a newspaper daily, and the GSS subsequently retired the question, as it ceased to be a useful measure of news consumption.

All intermediary institutions have “business models” of some kind. A 20th century newspaper relied on subscribers and advertisers. An American high school typically gets most of its resources from local property taxes in return for training and minding the community’s teenagers and providing sports and entertainment. Among other things, a school teaches scientific findings and respect for science. Similarly, a public university in the United States offers job training and credentials, health services, quasi-professional sports, patented inventions, and high culture in return for tuition, donations, state subsidies, and fees. Meanwhile, the big social media platforms use algorithms to attract attention, which they sell to advertisers.

Each business model determines the institution’s results, including its impact on trust or distrust for science. Metropolitan daily newspapers tended to boost trust, while today’s social media degrade it.

Trust in science is not self-evidently good; in fact, we can trust too much. And the fact that most newspapers were local monopolies was problematic. They generated trust, but arguably at the expense of freedom. The question is whether we can invent business models for the 21st century that yield genuinely civic outcomes.

Sources: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2025. Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence: Fourth Edition. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press; Van Beek, L., Hajer, M., Pelzer, P., van Vuuren, D., & Cassen, C. (2020). Anticipating futures through models: the rise of Integrated Assessment Modelling in the climate science-policy interface since 1970. Global Environmental Change, 65, 102191.

Peter Levine

A Blog for Civic Renewal

Category Archives: philosophy

navigating the social sciences

Karpowitz and Patterson, The Politics of Individualism

on translation as spiritual practice

where is the attention?

what it would take for the public to trust science