Upstream Issues

Oh, I just know this is going to get enmeshed in arguments about framing, but I don’t care.

A new movement in the UK, home of democracy as we know it, involves scientists getting out there and active in public engagement. So what? I hear you ask. This is old stuff. But what is new here is that it is the scientists who start the debates, before the public has a chance to react and set up the framing issues, to ensure that a reasonable and informed debate is had. It is called upstream public engagement.

I think this might be a useful modus operandi for other public intellectual domains; for example philosophy of science. More under the fold:

Here’s an example of a sort of upstream piece, from The Australian Higher Education Supplement by Gerry Cassis and Pauline Ladiges. Cassis and Ladiges are plant systematists, and they are noting the effects on agricultural trade of not having proper systematics done of parasites. They have an agenda: we desperately need funding of “alpha” taxonomy, the description of species and their habitats and ecological roles. Funding for this “boring” part of science has been downgraded in favour of blue sky projects designed to take existing descriptions and putting them in an open access database. There are at least four of these that I know of, but nobody is funded to go into the field and just describe species any more. It’s as if we have forgotten to do the, you know, science.

This is not yet a public issue, and it is admirable that this is being raised now, and not forty years from now when it is too late. But it’s not the exemplar of upstream engagement. This is in the field of nanotechnology, a science which promises much, delivers, so far, very little, and which seems to lack problems to which it is a solution. That is not a criticism, by the way, for I think that basic research in any discipline ought be done independently of instrumental outcomes in technology or industry. But it obviously catches public imagination, and it is not hard to see that in a few years there will be some critic who will treat it the way Genetically Modified Organisms have been treated, and attach the label “frankentech” to it the way “frankenfoods” have been.

So we ought, if we are scientists, to start the debate and frame it before the critics, who sometimes are acting purely out of fear of the new and other times from a more measured base, get to do it themselves. In short, act, don’t just react.

A book is available online, entitled See-through science, which I suggest you read.

How might philosophers of science employ this? Obviously, ethical concerns are high on the list, but I wonder if we can’t engage the “folk” on terminology and concepts that are in common use but have a large gap between the folk concept and the scientific concept. For instance, notions attached to evolution such as “species” (my obsession), selection, adaptation, design and so on are all important aspects of the battle against creationism. Can anyone suggest issues that they know might become a philosophical issue in the public arena that we might engage now?