Public Trust in Science and the Containment of Unwarranted Distrust
Jon Leefmann
23 October 2025
It is widely acknowledged that the public derives significant benefit from a well-placed trust in science. Although expert judgments may occasionally be wrong, non-experts, on average, benefit more from heeding scientific expertise than from disregarding it. Yet for cognitively limited beings like us, placing trust well is not easy. Consequently, much philosophical work has sought to identify the criteria that make scientific experts and institutions trustworthy. Far less attention, however, has been paid to the social and institutional conditions that both sustain this trustworthiness and shape the public’s reception of scientific knowledge. Social accounts of public trust in science promise to fill this gap.
In this (work in progress) talk, I introduce the idea of a social account of public trust in science and propose that such trust is enabled when a society develops effective practices for containing unwarranted distrust. I argue, first, that a social account is needed to fully understand distrust in scientific expertise. I then examine current literature on public trust in science, focusing on how distrust is framed as a social issue rather than merely an individual cognitive or affective attitude, and I discuss the account currently being developed by Gabriele Contessa. Finally, I present my own proposal and address possible objections.
