Science

Science as the Open Society

The interrelationships of science and governance are largely opaque. For Steve Fuller, this is because debates center on the utopian promise or dystopic menace of science and technology, so little attention is given to how scientific knowledge is constituted or to the people that produce scientific knowledge. The institution of science is portrayed as an open society, which, in its pursuit of universal knowledge, assumes the authority to speak for all of society. But when science is seen as an institution that governs, this raises a series of questions that unravel the relationship between this open society and democracy. Is science anything more than an institutionalized assertion of faith that commands blind loyalty from the public? How can science be universal when not everyone can simultaneously participate, and a handful of unelected practitioners speaks for all? And who, precisely, is selected to give scientific advice?

Fuller studies science's internal organization, and instead of an open society finds a hierarchically driven [Page 853]institution, ruled from within by a small, self-selecting elite group of white, middle-class, middle-aged males, whose interests are distilled as expertise to the state and society. They speak for the whole scientific community and for all of humanity, although they regularly pronounce on areas divorced from their own scientific expertise and personal experience. Fuller questions how these scientists can speak for all when multiculturalism is ignored and when science's application may affect different people in different ways.

This is far removed from the promise of science as the open society, although Fuller believes this ideal can be realized. This entails a transition from government to governance through democratizing the organization of, and participation in, science and science policy. The first step is to deconsecrate the state funding of science through developing alternative programs of research to challenge the worldview of elite science. The second step is to encourage public participation in a republic of science. Rather than science literacy initiatives aimed at remedying the public's cognitive deficits, this should involve epistemic challenges to the authority of science and deliberative engagement in science planning and policy. The aim is to secularize or decenter this unelected governing institution by loosening its ties to state power and weakening its dominion over knowledge claims.

Science as a Political Concept

The ability of science to assume the authority to speak on behalf of all people in a manner that transcends all cultural and economic barriers entails that science may conceptually be understood as a vehicle of global governance. Echoing Francis Fukuyama, Fuller notes that an unchecked universal science can put an end to history: When one society fully harnesses the natural trajectory of science to its future, the course of history (and politics) will be the rest of the world replicating the same steps to catch up with that society. Politics will be the story of global liberation through modernization. The standardization of the public provision of education and health care throughout the world is taken as evidence of science being the force that steers policy.

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