Science and Public Skepticism

During the past fifty years, we have seen many discipline-based attempts to explain why a scientific consensus that seems compelling to many inside the research community often encounters skepticism and disbelief in the wider public.  Explanations have arrived from such fields as history, social psychology, communication studies, comparative policy, and science and technology studies.  This talk briefly reviews these major schools of thought and shows how each is offers a different account of the political subject, and hence can be seen as contributing to political theory.  The talk draws out the implications of these disparate frameworks for the democratic governance of science and technology in contemporary societies.