IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2022 - 29

Book Review
Why Trust Science?-Naomi Oreskes
(Princeton, NJ, USA: Princeton Univ.
Press, 2019, 360 pp.)
Reviewed by Jacob Ossar
an independent scholar, Brookline, MA 02446 USA
 Anyone pAying even the slightest attention
to the news in the last few years would have been
hard-pressed to avoid reports of wildfires, floods,
hurricanes, heat waves, and other natural disasters.
The severity and frequency of these extreme weather
events raise urgent questions about the degree to
which they are related to climate changes and what
measures we should take in response. Meanwhile,
the COVID-19 pandemic has forced people worldwide
to grapple with questions about the efficacy of
measures like masks, social distancing, and vaccines
in controlling the spread of the virus or mitigating
its effects. Most of us look to science for answers
to these questions, but not everyone accepts the
answers scientists give. Some dispute particular scientific
claims, but some go farther and challenge the
trustworthiness of science as an enterprise. Naomi
Oreskes, a professor of the history of science and
affiliate professor of earth and planetary sciences at
Harvard University, addresses these doubts and challenges
in Why Trust Science?
Oreskes' answer to the book's eponymous question
is that science is trustworthy to the extent that
the social process by which scientists vet research
findings and reach (or fail to reach) a consensus
about them is open to a diverse community of scientists
with ample opportunity to make objections and
critiques and have that feedback taken seriously.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2022.3147522
Date of current version: 9 March 2022.
March 2022
She devotes slightly under two-thirds of the book
to laying out her argument. In the remainder, she
models what she has argued are best practices for
seeking knowledge by including critiques of her
argument from historian of science Susan Lindee,
philosopher of science Marc Lange, climate experts
Ottmar Edenhofer and Martin Kowarsch, and political
scientist Jon Krosnick, followed by her replies to
their various objections.
To set the stage for her conclusions, Oreskes gives
us nothing less than a short course in the philosophy
of science. While her summary is necessarily brief
and incomplete, she cogently highlights key threads
in the development of (largely) Anglo-American
philosophy of science from the 19th century to the
present. Although the goal of this potted history is
to show where and how other influential answers to
her question have fallen short, her engagement with
the thinkers who serve as her intellectual foils is serious
and sympathetic.
Oreskes begins her brief history in the 18th and
early 19th century, with the establishment of scientific
honor societies like the Royal Society, the
Académie des Sciences, and, later, the U.S. National
Academy of Sciences. These bodies served to identify
individual " men of science " whose findings
could be treated as authoritative. However, as any
first-year logic student could tell you, the mere fact
that a Great Man claims something is true is not
a good reason to accept it. To the extent that it is
rational to take a Great Man's word for something, it
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29
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2022

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