Advising and controling: science communication at a crossroads

Abstract

Pierre Bourdieu wrote that Sociology is “a disturbing science” [une science qui derange] (Bourdieu 1984), because somehow we are all, or believe ourselves to be, sociologists a little bit. Social scientists are used to this situation and nobody complains when citizens talk about globalization or capitalism without too much conceptual knowledge. But also no one is scandalized, for the same reason, if a biologist, biochemist or nuclear physicist talks about these things in the same way. Things are quite different with natural sciences, which have built their languages around representations and numbers (Baird and Hacking 1988). Due to the lack of personal experiences and expertise, very few people can comment on issues such as the atomic structure or the half-life of viruses in a face mask. This produces a double effect: admiration or rejection of natural sciences. Associated with the above, there are overlaps between disciplines and levels of specialization, gray areas in which, for example, a biologist, who studies camelids, can comment on the coronavirus (Airhart 2020; Wrapp et al. 2020) with greater public acceptance than a historian specialized in public health (Cueto 2020). However, the multidimensional crisis unleashed by the coronavirus increased the tensions between knowledge(s) and common sense, and as a consequence several social mechanisms have started. The most visible is infodemic, a term coined in the World Health Organization to denounce a practice that consists of spreading false news about the pandemic increasing panic in societies