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The Flat Landscape of Truth

There’s a fascinating comment in the Lancet, by Richard Horton, its eminent editor-in-chief.  It’s fascinating for it reports a meeting where there was subterfuge and an attempt to secure authority and legitimacy to a document called the Brussels Declaration.  Horton had been duped to attend and to be a signatory for a document that stated scientists have vested interests.  They were, in that sense, not much different to industry (tobacco, car manufacturers…).  Conflicts of interest were normal and should be handled procedurally.  Horton glossed the declaration as: ‘there is no truth, it’s all too complex, everybody is conflicted, and experts are more conflicted than most’. (The Lancet, 1/4/17: 1282).

The Additive Model of Engagement

At the same meeting, the head of the Alliance for Useful Evidence (!) stated the problem of post-truth is not evidence (the implication is there is lots about). It is power (the implication is that some have a lot more than others).  The answer, for the alliance, was to bring everyone and everything together – to have a proper deliberation, where “subjective evidence” was allowed and “new audiences” could be “engaged”.  Presumably imbalances of power and sexed up dossiers could be offset and ‘found out’ in a town hall, with various claims to truth assessed in the round to produce a legitimate, robust, cumulative account of how it is.  Post truth and post politics all vanquished in one neat shot.  Though I am not sure about the politics…

There Lies Madness

Horton is no autocrat, but he is no believer in people-rule either.  The normative pillars of independence, objectivity, science, and peer review require defence. “Truths are contested and contextual. But a rigorous quest for fact is all that separates us from chaos and damnation” (ibid).

Prelates to Dire Prophets

We could add more to this.  Horton doesn’t mention a possible recent shift in both the subject matter (the things) of science and the style which science is performed and communicated.  The things are the complexes, where, for example, the relative simplicity of medicine shifts to a more elusive matters of health, or climate shifts to interrelated and dynamic physical and social systems – the point is that these are multifactorial (at least) and complexly related, or even (better in my view) poetic assemblages.   Facts become harder to come by because there are more variables (to say the least).  Style-wise, there are those who suggest that scientists no longer tend to act as medieval prelates, revealing an inalterable truth. They are now as likely to act as dire prophets.  Careers and science are no longer built on probabilities and facts, but on possibilities and speculative engagements with things (Caduff, Cooper).

The Surfeit

This Foucauldian spirit of shifting discursive regimes of truth may be too much, but when we add the thing (complex gathering) and the swash and swirl of a saturated public realm, then perhaps it gets more interesting. A world of deficits (not enough knowledge, lack of information, in-expertise) becomes one of surfeit (big, wide and open data, and re-distributed expertise).  It’s also a world that is saturated or socially mediated, where perhaps for the first time “social knowledge is more visibly non-coherent than it was in the recent past” (Ruppert, Law et al. 2013: 42).  Non-coherent, not incoherent…  We are not in Horton’s world of chaos and damnation, yet.

The Problem of Speed

This is Latour, “the problem is that transparent, unmediated, undisputable facts have recently become rarer and rarer. To provide complete undisputable proof has become a rather messy, pesky, risky business. And to offer a public proof, big enough and certain enough to convince the whole world …” (Latour 2005: 9). Science studies provides us with a picture of the task – it was never easy to assemble proof – look at Pasteur (Latour again).  In the naïve realism of STS, proof really is a gathering together of witnesses (human, nonhuman, commerce…).  It is a public matter, and requires assembling a public

Stengers’ recent plea for slow science is cut from the same cloth.  Her response to a post truth world is to carry on assembling.  While not quite Richard Horton, the language is similar.  Slow science is a painstaking assemblage. In a passionate lecture aimed at the wrongful dismissal of a scientist for contesting GM science, she rails at the failure of authorities to recognise the need for dissent, and for a collective process that allows for hesitation, for different objects and abstractions that can force thought.  “If scientific knowledge has a reliability of its own, it is due to the collective dynamics that organizes publication, from the first critical verification by referees to the objections by competent colleagues for whom the reliability of the published claim is of vital importance for their own work and projects” (Stengers, 2011: 4). 

A problem is that peer review is under duress – insert the normal moans about open journals, the pressure to publish, automated editorial processes, lack of time etc.  But we also live in a world where car manufacturers (Hitler’s people’s cars no less) can indirectly (?) commission sending primates to exhaust chambers in order to prove that their diesels had improved over older, American ones.  In what world does that kind of science and evidence need or even countenance collective peer review?  How were these experimenters really planning to communicate their results, stripped presumably of their nonhuman subjects?  Presumably through a series of biomedical abstractions (that word again) that drew a veil over the primates’ presence, turning them into respiratory tissues and cell processes?

Truth Syncretism

So how to assemble truth in this world of surfeit, speed and subterfuge?  For one thing, we can’t simply add everything together and get a unit.  There is no Unitarianism.  Law and colleagues (2014) make the case for a syncretic approach to truth – partly because that is what people do (even the most rational of rationalist will mix traditional cures with bioscience in a quest for healthy bodies).  They suggest there are different ways to do this – they call them modes of syncretism.  This might be a place to start a conversation about how truth gets done, in practices, with many components and without perhaps yielding to the normative demands of high science or epistemological purification…

Steve Hinchliffe