Framing Science from Australia
25 Apr, 2007 11:38 am
Yesterday I gave a talk in Melbourne at the Bureau of Meteorology, sponsored by the Melbourne Centre of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society. Although in my previous conference talk here I had already raised the subject of framing, this time (for the first time) I devoted an entire talk to laying out the arguments that I've been putting forward with the help of Matt Nisbet.
Meanwhile here in OZ I also had the opportunity to hear Australian of the Year Tim Flannery speak. He himself seemed very conscious of the need for "framing" science, though he didn't use those words. Flannery asserted that we'll probably never have a population that is educated at an extremely high level about science, and that perhaps that's not what we even would want. Instead, he said when he seeks to explain science to the public, he thinks of talking to his mother, a woman in her seventies who is intelligent but does not hold an advanced degree. Flannery further argued that instead of educating the public about all the details of science at a highly technical level, we ought to try to establish strong trust in scientists themselves. I couldn't agree more. More trust in scientists will lead more cognitive miser humans to make up their minds based upon scientific opinions, rather than attacks on those opinions from other sources.
In any event, Bora has done a tremendous job of chronicling the ever growing volume of responses to our work. Meanwhile Matt Nisbet, who's back in D.C. and not traveling around as I am, has continued to engage, most recently with this very informative comment. Nisbet has also just done an interview with the widely subscribed Point of Inquiry podcast on framing.
Finally, I just came across this statement from Richard Dawkins, which I think completely makes our point:
I think I would say that Colorado Springs, like other parts of America, is divided between two different Americas. There's the intelligent, educated, open-minded America, which is prepared to listen to evidence, prepared to listen to argument, prepared to change its mind. And there are close-minded, fundamentalist people who don't want to know, don't want to learn, don't want to listen. They know what's true, it's in the holy book. They've been told what's true, they feel passionately that they know what's true, and no argument, no argument whatsoever can ever sway them. And therefore, when they hear an argument that does sway them, they simply shut their eyes, shut their ears. And it's almost as though there's a kind of partition in America between the educated thoughtful half of the country, and the closed-minded thoughtless part of the country.On some level, Dawkins seems to recognize how hard it is to reach people who come to the table with vastly different assumptions than one's own. And yet at the same time, he proceeds to insult them...the first step towards never reaching someone.
Article originally posted at The Intersection
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F. Kenneth Hare, 1979 , The Vaulting of Intellectual Barriers: The Madison Thrust in Climatology; Bulletin American Meteorological Society; Vol. 60, No.10, Pages 1171 ? 1174.
?This is obviously the decade in which climate is coming into its own. You hardly heard the word professionally in the 1940s. It was a layman's word. Climatologists were the halt and the lame. And as for the climatologists in public service, in the British service you actually, had to be medically disabled in order to get into the climatological division! Climatology was a menial occupation that came on the pecking scale somewhat below the advertising profession. It was clearly not the age of climate?.
When it was not the ?age of climate? few decades ago, can it be the age now, when science is unwilling, or unable to define the term ?climate?? Discussing ?Framing science? under such circumstances is not only questionable, it is frightening.