Work in progress

Scientific Authority (with Hanna Metzen) (under review)

The erosion of science’s authority is an important issue, particularly within the values in science debate. However, despite its prevalence, the notion remains underdeveloped. First, it is unclear how authority differs from trust in science. Second, there is ambiguity about the type of authority that science has. Philosophers of science mostly talk about epistemic authority and use it interchangeably with trust. We argue that science not only has epistemic authority, but also indirect and potentially even direct political authority. Scientific authority should not be conflated with trust in science. As we show, this has consequences for value management strategies.

Values in communicating deeply uncertain knowledge on climate tipping points (with Mathias Frisch)

Climate tipping points have received a growing amount of public attention in recent years, yet at the same time research on tipping points remains one of the most controversial areas of climate science. While some researchers argue that multiple tipping point risks ought to be taken seriously by policy-makers, others warn that tipping point research is deeply uncertain and should therefore be not be communicated, or at least in a different manner. In this paper we disentangle some of the assumptions that appear to motivate the critics’ charge: we show why research on climate tipping points and in particular a possible AMOC collapse is deeply uncertain and discuss normative implications that this has.