Article ID: CBB212129456

Mistrust in Numbers: Regulatory Science, Trans-science and the Crisis of Expertise (2022)

unapi

This paper characterizes the crisis of expertise, especially as it manifested during the covid-19 pandemic, as a crisis of trust in regulatory science. The temporal structure of the facts produced by regulatory science differs from Kuhnian “normal science,” while they also contain profound distributional implications. As a result, they suffer from a set of congenital problems that provoke mistrust in a way that normal science facts do not. While “expertise” is often offered as an answer to these problems, the paper shows that it is a symptom of the malaise, reflecting a situation where it is no longer clear how to decide between competing claims to authority as experts. The current mistrust in experts and regulatory science during the pandemic, therefore, is part of a longer and systemic crisis of expertise provoked and sustained by multiple factors. The paper then offers an unsystematic set of rules of method to observe when addressing the thorny issues involving trust and mistrust: 1) trust is not a subjective attitude that can be measured by a survey; 2) mistrust is not the opposite of trust; 3) trust is a social skill involving a set of ethnomethods for distinguishing between responsible and “blind” trust; 4) attention to temporal framing is key to these methods; 5) disruption of this temporal framing – as routinely happens with regulatory facts, and especially during the pandemic – destroys trust.

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Authors & Contributors
Matheus Monteiro Nascimento
Lee, Clarissa Ai Ling
Hooker, Giles
Haines, Monamie Bhadra
Noah Morritt
Tiago Ribeiro Duarte
Concepts
Expertise
Authority of science
Technoscience; science and technology studies
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)
Science and society
Democracy
Time Periods
21st century
20th century
20th century, late
19th century
18th century
17th century
Places
Jakarta (Indonesia)
Indonesia
United States
North America
Malay; Malaysia
Japan
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