Small Research and Training Grant: Proof, Persuasion, and Policy

University Of California-San Diego, La Jolla CA

Investigators

Abstract

From its inception in 1989, the Science Studies Program at the University of California, San Diego, has trained scholars who advance understanding of how science works in its full intellectual and cultural dimensions. In various ways, faculty and students have studied how scientific controversies are adjudicated; how evidence relates to theory; how information is distributed, shared, and hoarded; and how matters of credibility, authority, and trust are ultimately issues of politics and culture as well as of fact. With the prior support of NSF, the Program has developed into one of the premier science studies programs in North America, and has produced a cohort of graduate students now teaching in tenure-track positions in the United States and several other countries. Over the past five years, eight new faculty members have joined the program, adding new vigor, enthusiasm, and perspectives, and both the quality and quantity of our graduate applicant pool has increased. This is an opportune time to renew the commitment to the teaching and training mission. Seeing an alignment of faculty expertise, student interest, and societal need, this proposal seeks to dedicate the next three years to a programmatic theme of "Proof, Persuasion, and Policy." Given the salient but often ambiguous contribution of science to public decision-making, society needs to have trained experts who know how to study the process of scientific consensus: how scientists prove that things are as they are and persuade others that they have proof to do so. Given the myriad issues today that involve questions of scientific consensus--the reality of global warming, the approval of new pharmaceuticals, the efficacy of supply-side economic--it is important to think harder and deeper about the inter-relations between proof, persuasion, and policy. This proposal seeks to develop a concrete pedagogical plan for graduate student and post-doctoral fellow training by using the nexus of "Proof, Persuasion, and Policy" as a touchstone issue that all key program activities will engage with over the grant period. The post-doctoral fellow, whose research bears on the theme, will organize a major portion of the teaching and colloquia around the theme. The proposal will also increase support for graduate students through two first-year fellowships and one dissertation-year fellowship. The initiative will focus on three thematic areas: a) models and prediction, b) the social sciences, and c) disease and health. Each of these is an area that relates to important issues facing the United States today, and each is an area in which faculty and students are already working. The initiative will assist the Program to sharpen its focus, to strengthen its interdisciplinary connections, and to reach out to relevant communities at the university and beyond. The primary intellectual merit of the proposal is that it will facilitate a deeper understanding of how and why scientific knowledge does (or does not) impact public policy, and particularly why science at present seems to be failing to play the role that is often expected, or even demanded, of it. The broader impact will be the insights and knowledge that graduate students and post-docs take with them as they launch their own professional careers, as well as the stimulus the initiative will provide to both faculty and students to think more sharply about the connections between the abstract questions of science studies and tangible questions of public policy. The initiative will strengthen one of the premier centers for science studies research in North America, and will help reach outward towards the communities around UCSD that generate, use, and in some cases challenge scientific knowledge.