Understanding and Trusting Science

Science communication via testimony requires a certain level of trust. But in the context of ideologically-entangled scientific issues, trust is in short supply — particularly when the issues are politically “entangled”. In such cases, cultural values are better predictors than scientific literacy for whether agents trust the publicly-directed claims of the scientific community. In this paper, we argue that a common way of thinking about scientific literacy — as knowledge of particular scientific facts or concepts — ought to give way to a second-order understanding of science as a process as a more important notion for the public’s trust of science