US public puts faith in science, but still lacks understanding

Understanding "understanding" in Public Understanding of Science.

This study examines the conflation of terms such as "knowledge" and "understanding" in peer-reviewed literature, and tests the hypothesis that little current research clearly distinguishes between importantly distinct epistemic states. Two sets of data are presented from papers published in the journal Public Understanding of Science. In the first set, the digital text analysis tool, Voyant, is...

Faith in science.

Faith is the desire to believe in something as true, or, if not absolutely true, then at least dependable. Faith seems to have been promoted through evolutionary trends, and, as such, it is a concoction of deep brain processes. Related to faith is the concept of truth. Truth is an ephemeral mental construct. We each have some idea of the meaning of truth. Most of the time, our ideas of truth re...

Public values and public failure in US science policy

Domestic science policy in the United States is linked inextricably to economic thinking. We seek to develop a practical analytical framework that confronts the manifest problems of economic valuing for science and technology activities. We argue that pervasive use of market valuation, market-failure assumptions and economic metaphors shapes the structure of science policy in undesirable ways. ...

Public participation in science: still in need of definition.

"Insufficient" but still "necessary"? EBPM's dangerous leap of faith: commentary on Porter and O'Halloran (2009).

In the opening lines of ‘The postmodernist war on evidence-based practice’ (Porter andO’Halloran, 2009), the authors erect a false binary between health care practice ‘informed by research’ and ‘those who argue that there should be no restrictions on the sources of knowledge used by practitioners’. This, the authors submit, is the distinction between the evidence-based approach and the postmode...