"Science, Anti-Science, Pseudoscience, Truth": A Conversation with Nima Bassiri (Keywords: Authority; Trust; Liberalism; Scientism)

This conversation was taken from our recent book, Science, Anti-Science, Pseudoscience, Truth, edited by Anthony Morgan. If you enjoy reading this, please consider becoming a patron or making a small donation. We are unfunded and your support is greatly appreciated.

In this conversation, critical theorist Nima Bassiri explores the spectre of “anti-science” in the Western political imaginary and, concomitantly, how the humanistic categories of “critique” and “critical theory” have been increasingly perceived as complicit with, and as providing intellectual succour for, scientific scepticism and, as such, culpable not only with the erosion of scientific truth but with core tenets of liberal democracy itself.

As Bassiri argues, the virulence of anti-scientific conduct may not be cured through mechanisms of educative hygiene alone, for such behaviours are not opposed to, but actually intimately bound up with the nature of scientific authority and to the conduct-inciting truth regimes upon which that authority rests. An unquestioned moral-political investment in the inviolability of the value of truth may not actually stamp out the menace of anti-science, but serve instead to inflame it.

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Amogh Sahu (AS): What do we mean when we talk about scientific authority? 

Nima Bassiri (NB): The nature of scientific authority is a contested topic in science studies and the history of science. There is a tendency to think that there is something about the sciences which means they have unadulterated access to the truth. But then, as a consequence of this unadulterated access, people are supposed to act in accordance with that truth, in a manner that is deemed rational and wilful; and to not act accordingly is viewed suspiciously, as an expression of deviance or behavioural aberrancy. The question of scientific truth, in other words, seems to have less to do with what specific truth claims say and more to do with how certain scientific discourses shape our behaviours. Ultimately, scientific authority is not about what science says, but about what we do as a consequence of what science says: our obedience or compliance, whether certain behaviours are seen as correct or incorrect, e.g. whether one gets vaccinated or believes in climate change. 

AS: So, science is not exclusively a set of claims or theoretical apparatus, but something like a cultural practice?

NB: This idea already exists in science studies, and certainly I agree that the way science creates effects in the world is not strictly epistemic but also related to our practices, procedures, and normative understandings. My background is in the human sciences and the history of the philosophy of the human sciences. Historically, questions about the nature of science, or the truth of science, have often emanated from the physical sciences, where the boundary between truth and error is clearer to distinguish. In a field like psychiatry, however, the question of what counts as the “correct” or “true” or “right” way to be mentally ill, for example, is a harder one. We can talk about truth and falsehood with respect to a proposition about the physical world, but when you move into the human sciences, you enter a more complex territory; here, it seems more interesting to think about the effects that scientific knowledge can have on us.

AS: This approach emphasises the intimate link between two types of authority that science claims for itself: 1) an epistemic authority of the sort that claims that science is the road to forming correct beliefs; and 2) a form of moral, or perhaps practical, authority. One way of understanding your position is to say that the contemporary notion of scientific authority claims for itself a certain kind of moral neutrality that denies its status as a practice; it says, “science is just a way of getting things right”, but ignores the fact that it is a politically embedded kind of practice.

NB: Absolutely. If you believe that science has unadulterated, non-contextual access to the truth, you might look at certain forms of opposition to scientific authority, such as people who are anti-vaccines, and think they are making an error, being irrational, or even being stupid. You then have difficulty making sense of this behaviour as one intelligible (even if unpleasant) expression of the underlying logic of our current social order. In the United States, over the past fifty years, access to scientific knowledge has been increasingly mediated through the marketplace; access to medical and technological science, for example, is purchased, so it is heavily commercialised and commodified. Once you recognise this, you begin to see that certain expressions of anti-science actually mimic the commercialisation of science; people are saying “no” to science in the same way that they might say “no” to a particular product. So, one way we can make sense of this behaviour is as a kind of economic reasoning. You only begin to see the resemblance between these two forms of behaviour when you embed scientific authority in everyday practices, rather than viewing it as a form of transcendental truth in relation to which a person can be judged as either correct or incorrect.

AS: Philosophers of science who adopt a realist approach might interpret you as making sociological claims that dissolve truth into something practical, but that would be to read you in an overly rationalistic way. In fact, you’re not engaging in the realism/anti-realism debates at all. Rather, I take you to be saying that the problem with the dominant idea of scientific truth is that it prevents us from making sense of its connections; not that it is reducible to a kind of market mechanism or anything like that, but rather that there is something about contemporary scientific authority that hides this social reality that we are trying to access.

NB: Yes, and this concealment leads to all sorts of problems. How, for instance, do we deal with the problem of scientific distrust? Much of the current scholarship tends to approach scientific distrust as a dilemma to be resolved either through educative hygiene or through some sort of disciplinary regulation, which assumes that those who distrust science are either scientific illiterates or else wrongdoers whose behaviours need to be policed. I’m not sure this is the right orientation to take in part because this orientation presumes that those who trust science do it on rational grounds. I would propose, however, that a great deal of scientific trust and adherence is itself quite “thoughtless” in the sense of being habituated, routinised, and customary. I trust doctors, but I’m not sure if I could give a good reason why I came to do so initially, other than the fact that my parents taught me to trust doctors, and it is a socially embedded practice. We lose a lot of analytic detail if we overlook this important attribute of how science works on us.

AS: You are not claiming that there is no justificatory story to be told about scientific knowledge, but rather that this is how scientific practice functions.

NB: That is right; this is the same distinction that someone like Paul Feyerabend makes. He was constantly accused of being anti-science, but he was not. He was trying to differentiate between 1) what it means to produce scientific knowledge; and 2) how the distribution of that knowledge becomes a form of governance in the world. There is a presumption that something like scientific truth is an inherently democratic concept, and the relationship between democracy and truth is long-standing in the modern era. But there is a paradox here that Feyerabend and others point out: the presumption of truth’s democratic nature is based on the idea that truth is universal and can be accessed by everyone. However, not everyone has the same form of access to scientific truth, as only some people can produce it and talk about it in an authoritative way. So, truth actually has a very bounded, hierarchical structure; it presumes democracy but is not democratic, as the idea of us all voting on a scientific principle is radically opposed to the way science works. On the other hand, Feyerabend did in fact recognize the consequential perils of frivolous resistance to, say, medicine. He conceded, after all, that it is important that we have things like vaccines; millions of people died from a pandemic, millions of senseless deaths. But you will not change the minds of those who are anti-vaccine, however, by telling them that they are stupid or immoral or threatening them with fines or police action. Feyerabend argues that we can only hope to counter opposition to medical treatment if we understand that it is not the science per se that anti-vaccine advocates oppose but the tacit hierarchy of science that underwrites those scientific claims. Yes, anti-vaxxers appear to be contesting the merits of the science, but it’s only because scientific validity is enforced by way of an undemocratic hierarchy, according to Feyerabend.

AS: So, instead of understanding scientific discourse as a set of propositions which make purely epistemic claims, it is better understood as a discourse of governance.

NB: Yes. Another way of thinking about it is to say that scientific governance deploys truth claims according to what might be called a juridical model. And, of course, this makes sense, since this is one of the operative ways that state power is deployed. Put in the most schematic sense, to be “outside” the truth is not only to be erroneous but to be a kind of wrongdoer, a transgressor who has fallen into a state of penalty and who must be penalized in some measure. I think this is how scientific authority operates, and because it operates in this way – in a juridical fashion, like a cudgel that punishes transgressors – I think it almost guarantees a certain degree of resistance; not necessarily resistance to the science per se but to the quasi-juridical nature of the authority that deploys that science.

AS: Do you think that anti-science has the same juridical character?

NB: Maybe the best way of thinking about this is through the French philosophical notion of an episteme, most famously presented by Michel Foucault. Interestingly, when an episteme demarcates the right way to be true in a particular historical moment, it also demarcates the right way to be false. Anything that is not part of this episteme is neither true nor false, it is just nonsense. I have begun thinking about anti-science as the right way to be wrong about science adherence – the right way to disobey. By right way, I mean the way that seems most intelligible to us; and we can measure the intelligibility of anti-science positions by the anger they incite and sense of dangerousness they conjure. Scientific adherence and resistance, I propose, are part and parcel of the same episteme of scientific governance, linked according to a deep proximity or, rather, “symmetry” (to use the term popularized by the science studies scholars David Bloor and Barry Barnes).  

AS: The notion of trust plays an important role in the story that you tell. One might think, for example, that what is wrong with vaccine sceptics is that they trust the wrong people. This notion of trust is highly morally charged; who you trust is supposed to have deep implications for what kind of person you are and the ways in which you can be blamed.

NB: Yes, though what I would propose is that the difference between the trust of science adherents and the trust of science deniers is not the form of trust but merely its content. So, there is trust in both cases. Existing work on the concept of trust, written in response to the growth in anti-science movements in the last ten years, largely uses a rationalist account of what trust is as a form of behaviour. It strikes me, however, that the rationales we tend to develop with respect to whom we trust are largely retroactive; we rationalise our behaviour after the fact. It is not for lack of reason that someone trusts YouTube over a medical practitioner, but they come to trust YouTube on very particular or even arbitrary or capricious grounds and then rationalise that trust afterwards. For communities that have been subject to the intersectional violence of medical practice and governance – Black communities, Indigenous communities, immigrants – their distrust of the state is profoundly rational. We miss a lot when we think about trust in purely epistemic terms; in fact, many of these categories that we consider epistemic would be best understood as moral, administrative, and affective expressions of conduct rather than expressions of reason.

AS: This notion of trust seems similar to the idea of consent in the social contract tradition, in which you are considered to undertake a distinctive type of commitment when you subject yourself to the authority of the sovereign. By doing so, you become a member of a relevant political regime and, by implication, subject yourself to a set of laws, becoming a juridical subject. I take it that the resemblance is not incidental, and you are thinking of scientific authority as membership in a scientific community, a kind of polity.

NB: That is right. I would add that consent is not always a rational expression of agency; in some respects, we are put into a vector of consent and then find ourselves either agreeing or disagreeing with the consent that has already been asked of us. Although writing in a different tradition, Spinoza cautioned that “a person’s judgment may be subjected to another’s in many different and sometimes almost unbelievable ways to such an extent that, even though he may not be directly under the person’s command, he may be so dependent on him that he may properly be said to be under his authority to that extent”. So, there is a trajectory from Spinoza to Foucault in the idea that structures of power and authority are constantly in operation, and consent is something that may be happening to you rather than something you are doing.

AS: One difference between how we relate to the state and how we relate to science and scientific discourse is that in the case of the state, there is, at least, a vocabulary with which we can begin to interrogate the notion of legitimacy. What you are bringing out in the case of science is that there is a similar kind of attachment but not a similar kind of critical vocabulary; we cannot interrogate science in the same way that we can interrogate state authority.

NB: Yes, this is exactly right. You can interrogate science, but you risk being called an irrational anti-science advocate. This is Feyerabend’s point precisely; he is not saying we should say “no” to science, but that it is very difficult and risky to occupy such a position of critique with respect to the sciences. Even the question of distinguishing rigorous and thoughtful critiques of science from more puerile and blindly oppositional resistances to scientific authority is itself off-limits; the former tends to get collapsed into the latter. This is precisely what we see with the various denigrations of so-called poststructuralist thinkers like Jacques Derrida and Foucault, who are accused both of being relativists and of fuelling the flames of science denialism (both of which are patently incorrect views to take on those two thinkers). And we’ve seen also recently a fair amount of backpedalling, qualification, and disavowal in the field of science studies of some of that field’s early and radical ideas (the work of Feyerabend, for examples, or the writings of Bloor and Barnes). So even careful and methodically analytic critiques of science and its authority are seen as perilous, overly caricatured and lambasted.

AS: When we think about the paradigm of science, particularly in America and the UK, there is a hierarchy, with the physical sciences (and particularly physics) at the top. Often, the things that get debated in the public sphere do not have the generality of physics and are not even pure theory; they are applied public policy disciplines, medicine, and things like that. Medicine is not a purely predictive discipline; it is interventionist to its core. The scientific authority that is claimed in public debates is the authority of quantum physics, for example, but the disciplines involved are often applied sciences.

NB: This is an important point that has great significance in the French tradition of philosophy of science. Georges Canguilhem argues that the life sciences break from the physical sciences because of this fundamental difference between the organic and the inorganic world. The world of physics and the other natural sciences has a mathematised ability, a lawfulness that simply does not exist with respect to what you might call the life sciences and, eventually, the human sciences. Even though we might aspire to discover laws and principles that apply to how humans behave or how viruses work, that is not necessarily how they appear to operate. In fact, these fields become vulnerable to politicisation. This is why someone like Foucault was so interested in psychiatry and the science of sexuality, for example; they are always more prone to being commandeered as an expression of the social logic, in a way that physics could not quite be. Another point to mention here is that with respect to the question of governance, what we know about the physical universe may be useful knowledge but what we believe we know about the nature of human nature bears out in more direct policy applications.

AS:  What sort of reforms to science do you propose?

NB: That is a hard question and one that I cannot answer fully. I think there is something important in Feyerabend’s proposal that science is merely one form of life among others and should not be perceived as the dominant mechanism of truth-making. Science has important values, e.g. we should develop vaccines, we should develop technical infrastructures, but to suggest that it is the only form of life and anything which is not within it is in error is not going to generate the kind of democratic and equitable society that we want. Feyerabend also suggests that if science were to become merely one form of life among others, it would result in greater science compliance.

I want to ask: what would it mean to imagine scientific knowledge and truth shorn from the imperatives of governance, separated from juridical force? The history of science shows us how transient earlier conceptions of scientific truth, and truth in general have been. What other forms of truth-making are there? In a strange way – and Feyerabend says this too – science does not need truth in order to function. Truth is a supplement of force that is added to what would otherwise be a set of knowledges and practices capable of being put into use and operationalized. We think that truth is what underwrites the efficacy or repeatability of an experiment or the validity of a knowledge claim; we say that the experiment works because it is true. But I don’t think truth, or some sort of reality principle, is what grounds the viability of an experiment or a knowledge claim. It is not the experiment that truth stabilizes but, rather, it is my comportment with respect to the experiment or the knowledge claim that truth seeks to command. Truth, in other words, does not govern the scientific reality of the world; it governs my conduct with respect to that purported reality. I must accept the conclusions of an experiment or the validity of a knowledge claim because it is true; this is how truth operates. And it does so not only within the remit of scientific governance, since it is this very sense of truth that underwrites political knowledge claims as well as scientific ones. But what would it mean to imagine scientific knowledge and practices shorn from this attachment to truth. I think there is a worry that without truth, science falters; but I side with Feyerabend here to suggest that, perhaps, without truth science might actually prosper in as-of-yet unimagined ways.

AS: Another story you might tell is that scientific authority is filling a vacuum created by the ethical scepticism of liberal politics. Liberalism is suffused with suspicion of any thick, value-laden political discourse, so there is a gap in the public sphere, which is filled by science.

NB: I completely agree. Science also partially fills the vacuum created by the lack of a public ethos or ethics in an increasingly secularised world. When religious public ethics recede in the secular West, they have to be replaced by other modes of adjudicating moral value. This is a topic I take up in my book Madness and Enterprise. What models do we typically employ when attempting to resolve socio-moral quandaries today? On the one hand, we often make use of juridical models and assume that the law functions as an analogue for moral justice — this is, of course, central to the liberal tradition, though introduces potential problems of its own, which the cultural theorist Walter Benjamin outlined in his important 1921 essay “Critique of Violence.” We also use models drawn out of the human science – particularly economics and psychiatry – to presume that morally upright behaviour is simultaneously healthy and beneficial to society, according to some, even abstract, economic benchmark.

AS: Are you sympathetic to the anti-scientism position? 

NB: I try not to talk too much about scientism. Even the strongest forms of science adherence are not necessarily scientistic. Scientism would be someone saying, “I believe that we should get vaccines, and also, I think scientific reason should be the logic by which we imagine everything else.”  But why do we think scientism is dangerous? If we think that scientific overreach is a problem, what is it that we want to protect? The economist Friedrich Hayek, for example, was anti-scientism as he was resistant to the rules of social behaviour being excessively formulated into mathematical models of action. His idea of the neoliberal marketplace requires there to be an ineffable spirit in human action that can produce spontaneous market innovations. This proximity to early neoliberal thinking is what makes me suspicious of adopting a strong position of anti-scientism. But also, I think the question of scientism somewhat misses the point. If science overreaches, it does so not explanatorily but administratively – it is an overreach of governance. I think this is a different genre of overreach, and we may perhaps want to reconsider what we mean by scientism exactly.

AS: Some people, particularly in the US, seem to think of anti-science as a form of positive political praxis, a politics of liberation that is taking a stand against Big Science. Do you think there is any political potential in the anti-science movement?

NB: When you connect science and governance, as has happened in the US, you will always have forms of resistance. This emphasises Feyerabend’s point that if you make science into one form of life among others, you reduce its dominance in the polity, and more people are likely to comply because the question of obeying or resisting is no longer relevant with respect to science. I do not know what kind of positive programme you could separate out from the anti-science movement, but however dangerous they are, anti-science behaviours are not irrational, as their behaviour is intelligible. As I suggested above, what I think is very interesting, what I think many of these forms of anti-science behaviour show us – forms which are for the most part vulgar, thoughtless, and puerile – is that we don’t actually have an incisive and rigorous practice of science critique today. Any form of (not expert) resistance is seen as transgressive, and as I mentioned many science studies scholars have shied away from the field’s earlier and more radical positions – a sort of ‘we went too far’ mentality. Now some might wonder, but why do we need a rigorous critique of science today? Wouldn’t that be a politically perilous position to adopt? To that I would respond, if there is no avenue for resistance, then this is a signal that science is not “truth” but, rather, imposition. This is what Feyerabend meant when he so brazenly called science a “tyranny”; everything should present the possibility of resistance because that is the hallmark of democracy. We do not have the democratic option to oppose science, which signals something about the undemocratic nature of science itself. And we end up in a paradox of sorts: (scientific) truth is necessary for democracy, so long as the layperson is not allowed or able to oppose (scientific) truth.

AS: Do people peddling pseudoscience take science more seriously than the anti-science movement? They at least try to operate within science’s conventions.

NB: The tricky thing about the term “pseudoscience” is that it can mean a lot of different things. For instance, Karl Popper refers to psychoanalysis as a pseudoscience because it does not have the strict falsifiability of an experimental scientific programme. However, you could say the same about medicine more generally; a great deal of medical research, from vaccine efficacy trials to experimental psychiatric treatments, does not necessarily possess that kind of falsifiable quality. Medicine is not always a rigorously falsifiable experimental science. Sometimes, you can only really ascertain whether a therapy works by virtue of whether the symptoms seem to recede; and often, retroactive determinations of the nature of an illness are determined by whether the patient responded to one form of medical treatment over another. I try to avoid the nomenclatural classification of things as “pseudoscience” or otherwise and prefer to use the term “anti-science” because I want to think about resistance to scientific authority. 

AS:  The moral force of scientific authority becomes especially clear when science is used to defend racist or misogynistic views, such as suggesting a scientific link between race and intelligence. What does your account say about these types of cases?

NB: In such cases, the consensus is that we are not dealing with a science but just racism masquerading as expert knowledge (which it is not). I do not focus on such cases, since even good and proper institutional science is still profoundly complicit with forms of structural racism. As we know, mortality rates for Black women in reproductive medicine are horrifyingly high. There is no other explanation except that there are tacit forms of structural racism in operation. We can say the same thing about virtually every form of medicine, psychiatry in particular. Normal medicine, despite itself, can operate in devastating ways, and to that end, I want to pay attention to this rather than looking at cases that would likely not be considered as science in the first place.

Further Resources:

Nima Bassiri, “The Force of Scientific Authority”, The Philosopher, 109:2 (2021)

Nima Bassiri, Madness and Enterprise: Psychiatry, Economic Reason, and the Emergence of Pathological Value. Chicago University Press, 2024

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