Soziologie

I2SoS is happy to invite everybody interested in reflecting on science to its colloquium.

When? Tuesday, December 7th, 16:15 until 17:45 h

Where? Online (please find the zoom link below)

Our next speaker and topic is: Gil Eyal (Sociology, Columbia University) - Mistrust in numbers: regulatory science, trans-science and the crisis of expertise

This paper characterizes the crisis of expertise, especially as it manifested during the covid-19 pandemic, as a crisis of trust in regulatory science. The temporal structure of the facts produced by regulatory science differs from Kuhnian “normal science,” while they also contain profound distributional implications. As a result, they suffer from a set of congenital problems that provoke mistrust in a way that normal science facts do not. While “expertise” is often offered as an answer to these problems, the paper shows that it is a symptom of the malaise, reflecting a situation where it is no longer clear how to decide between competing claims to authority as experts. The current mistrust in experts and regulatory science during the pandemic, therefore, is part of a longer and systemic crisis of expertise provoked and sustained by multiple factors. The paper then offers an unsystematic set of rules of method to observe when addressing the thorny issues involving trust and mistrust: 1) trust is not a subjective attitude that can be measured by a survey; 2) mistrust is not the opposite of trust; 3) trust is a social skill involving a set of ethnomethods for distinguishing between responsible and “blind” trust; 4) attention to temporal framing is key to these methods; 5) disruption of this temporal framing – as routinely happens with regulatory facts, and especially during the pandemic – destroys trust.

The talk is given online only. It is accessible via the following link and code.

• https://uni-bielefeld.zoom.us/j/92654914015?pwd=N2dsbHcwamIyZ2lHQmJrTW1DdlR6QT09
• Meeting-ID: 926 5491 4015
• Passwort: 505383

If zoom is not already installed on your computer, it will do so automatically when you request access. Zoom is an interactive format so that you will be able to ask questions.