Post-truth is not necessary to accept uncertainty

An interesting read. There's much here I agree with. I just think that just because the findings of science are evidenced-based and provisional, and driven by humans subject to all the frailties associated with using blood-soaked goop to learn about distant galaxies, there's no need to question the assumption of an objective, measurable, external, logical reality. An entirely new philosophical outlook isn't required or beneficial just to recognise that science isn't (and can't be) perfect. Granted, front-line research is a different and much more uncertain endeavour that established paradigms. And I also grant that sometimes major paradigms get overturned. That just means research is uncertain, not that there are no facts at all.

However, I can't say I've ever really been under the impression that science is or is supposed to be infallible, as, according to this, apparently many people are. I've never seen scientists or other experts as authorities beyond reproach, indeed, no such authority exists in any field. That would be just about the most serious error possible, but it's an equal-but-opposite mistake to think that everything is a subjective social construct. That's just reversing the problem. It's just that experts are better at dealing with problem with non-experts. And a consensus of experts is even better. A consensus of experts with strong meta-knowledge of who believes what and a thorough understanding of the alternative theories, well, that may very well be the best of all.

Even "best of all" isn't perfect. Never will be. At a seminar last week, a prominent scientist said that "at some point we have to come to a decision, or we just keep debating this for the next hundred years". I disagree. I think a scientific consensus is immeasurably strengthened exactly because it isn't done by a Committee of Truth. It's people acting independently, coming to their own conclusions. Great Debates aren't intended to settle the matter or decide that anyone espousing theory X is to become a pariah. They're about exchanging ideas and letting people make up their own minds, not to enforce doctrine. Getting the community as a whole to make a decision would be just about the worst approach possible.
https://astrorhysy.blogspot.com/2015/06/consensus-and-conspiracy.html

From the article (a long read) :

Removing from his pocket a piece of paper on which he’d scribbled some notes, the psychologist hesitated before asking, “Do you believe in reality?” For a moment, Latour thought he was being set up for a joke. Latour had never seen himself as doing anything so radical, or absurd, as calling into question the existence of reality. As a founder of the new academic discipline of science and technology studies, or S.T.S., Latour regarded himself and his colleagues as allies of science. Of course he believed in reality, he told the psychologist, convinced that the conversation was in jest.

From the look of relief on the man’s face, however, Latour realized that the question had been posed in earnest. “I had to switch interpretations fast enough to comprehend both the monster he was seeing me as,” he later wrote of the encounter, “and his touching openness of mind in daring to address such a monster privately. It must have taken courage for him to meet with one of these creatures that threatened, in his view, the whole establishment of science.”

His early work, it was true, had done more than that of any other living thinker to unsettle the traditional understanding of how we acquire knowledge of what’s real. It had long been taken for granted, for example, that scientific facts and entities, like cells and quarks and prions, existed “out there” in the world before they were discovered by scientists. Latour turned this notion on its head. In a series of controversial books in the 1970s and 1980s, he argued that scientific facts should instead be seen as a product of scientific inquiry. Facts, Latour said, were “networked”; they stood or fell not on the strength of their inherent veracity but on the strength of the institutions and practices that produced them and made them intelligible. If this network broke down, the facts would go with them.

But what they [Latour's critics] would have missed — what they have always missed — was that Latour never sought to deny the existence of gravity. He has been doing something much more unusual: trying to redescribe the conditions by which this knowledge comes to be known.

Latour believes that if scientists were transparent about how science really functions — as a process in which people, politics, institutions, peer review and so forth all play their parts — they would be in a stronger position to convince people of their claims... Of course, the risk inherent in this embrace of politics is that climate deniers will seize on any acknowledgment of the social factors involved in science to discredit it even further.

As the assaults on their expertise have increased, some scientists, Latour told me, have begun to realize that the classical view of science — the assumption that the facts speak for themselves and will therefore be interpreted by all citizens in the same way — “doesn’t give them back their old authority.” In an interview last year, Rush Holt Jr., a physicist who served for 16 years in Congress, described the March for Science as a turning point: People, he said, were realizing “that they need to defend the conditions in which science can thrive.”

Whether they are conscious of this epistemological shift, it is becoming increasingly common to hear scientists characterize their discipline as a “social enterprise” and to point to the strength of their scientific track record, their labors of consensus building and the credible reputations of their researchers. Some have even begun to accept that their factual statements about the world are laden with judgments and warnings — that, in Latour’s words, “to state the fact and to ring the bell is one and the same thing.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/magazine/bruno-latour-post-truth-philosopher-science.html