The Discontents of Truth & Trust
in 21st Century America

Sheila Jasanoff

Credible fact-making for policy demands the same legitimating moves as are re-
quired for credible politics. Experts, like politicians, must represent the world in
ways that respect diverse standpoints, aggregate disparate opinions to produce a
semblance of objectivity, and find persuasive ways to bridge gaps between available
and ideal states of knowledge. Every society, moreover, commands its own cultur-
ally recognized approaches to producing and testing public knowledge, and expert
practices must conform to these to be broadly accepted. Insisting on the superior au-
thority of science without attending to the politics of reason and persuasion will not
restore trust in either knowledge or power. Instead, trust can be regained with more
inclusive processes for framing policy questions, greater attentiveness to dissenting
voices and minority views, and more humility in admitting where science falls short
and policy decisions must rest on prudence and concern for the vulnerable.

T he present has a way of engulfing all other time. For most of us, today’s

problems feel bigger, sharper, and more in need of correction than earlier
ones. This overvaluing of the near past is so pervasive that cognitive psy-
chologists have a name for our tendency to rely on recent memory in deciding for
the future: the “availability heuristic.”1 Loss of trust in expertise is one such prob-
lem that has acquired unique urgency in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Judged by the proliferation of media reports, books, articles, and research projects
on the topic, trust suddenly emerged as a salient problem for the Western world in
the early 2020s. But though it appeared to some as a new social malaise, it was any-
thing but that.2 Looking behind the attention-grabbing headlines, it is clear that
this crisis of legitimacy took root long before the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak of 2019.
It had germinated for decades in a miasma of rising skepticism toward expert
recommendations: in regulatory agencies, in courts, in advisory committees, in
large corporations, and in international organizations. Seen in hindsight, the elec-
tion of Donald J. Trump to the U.S. presidency in 2016 was not so much a cause as
a symptom of the growing discontent with expert authority. If “democracy dies in
darkness,”3 then trust would seem to have died in the glare of transparency, its end
hastened by the advent of the internet and social media. How can we begin to re-

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© 2022 by Sheila Jasanoff Published under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license https://doi.org/10.1162/DAED_a_01942

pair the frayed nexus of truth and trust in the light of this long and complex histo-
ry and in today’s ruthlessly unforgiving information environment? And how does
the theorizing of knowledge-power relations in modernity help us in this project?
In 1770, shortly before the American Revolution, Edmund Burke wrote an es-
say on the loss of trust between the sovereign and the populace in words that still
resonate strongly. His litany of “present discontents” reads like an eerie forecast
of our own time: a government “at once dreaded and contemned,” rank, office,
and title having “lost their reverence,” inaction a “subject of ridicule,” and hardly
anything that “is sound and entire” but that “disconnection and confusion” pre-
vail abroad and at home.4 When trust collapses, Burke observed, very little can
be done to summon people back to the same table, real or figurative: “When men
imagine that their food is only a cover for poison, and when they neither love nor
trust the hand that serves it, it is not the name of the roast beef of Old England that
will persuade them to sit down to the table that is spread for them.” His tract was
widely interpreted as a call for a better organized form of politics. Burke asked his
readers to rise above factionalism and embrace the formation of political parties
within which people would subordinate individual self-interest to a shared com-
mitment to the good of the nation. “Party,” he wrote, “is a body of men united for
promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular
principle in which they are all agreed.” Only by principled and virtuous associ-
ation would people acquire the strength and stamina to achieve higher political
goals. Trust, in short, was a matter of getting the politics of association right, to
better align what people should aspire to achieve in public life with what could be
practically accomplished.

The task of restoring legitimacy to experts and governing institutions looks
equally desperate in twenty-first-century America, where the COVID-19 pandem-
ic has raised the stakes yet higher for both experts and governments.5 In fights over
mask and vaccine mandates, disaffected citizens furiously questioned, and often
flouted, public health requirements that government officials justified on claims
of sound science. In April 2022, a federal judge in Florida unilaterally overturned
the government’s mandate to wear masks in airports and on public transporta-
tion, to the consternation of public health authorities.6 The causal relationship
between these acts of opposition and rising COVID case counts and deaths became
another topic of contestation. Activists and resisters upended normal rules of ci-
vility in shops and restaurants, school board meetings, legislative assemblies, and
airplanes in full flight. With trust in authority at historic lows, America confront-
ed a moment of disrepair and reckoning similar to Burke’s, and hence also a mo-
ment for rethinking what it might take to reconnect people to their ruling institu-
tions so that policy-makers’ claims, reasoning, and compulsions might again be
seen as legitimate. Unlike in Burke’s day, parties are not the answer: the two lead-
ing parties are embroiled in hostile moves likened to tribal warfare. From each po-

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesThe Discontents of Truth & Trust in 21st Century America

sition, the other’s facts and reasons are tagged as suspect and dangerous. On the
most urgent social issues of the present–from fair elections and racial justice to
climate change and public health–there seems to be no shared base of trusted ex-
pertise or common knowledge on which the government might build policy com-
promise, let alone consensus. Authoritarianism looms as the feared backlash.7

When such radical “disconnection and confusion” prevail, there is no choice
for democracy but to go back to basics. Possibly the most foundational of mo-
dernity’s assumptions is that there are universally valid facts, many revealed by
science, on which everyone must agree, and these provide the necessary ground-
ing for values to negotiate from. Hannah Arendt, writing in 1967 on the tensions
between truth and politics, accepted that politics encompasses the art of persua-
sive lying, but she insisted that factual truth puts a backstop on what politics can
change at will, even when politicians think they can get away with mass decep-
tion.8 When distrust is endemic as now, however, facticity itself must be put under
the lens. Where and how is public knowledge produced and what is the appropri-
ate role for science in informing politics? Can science legitimate policies of high
economic, social, and political consequence while remaining, in terms constant-
ly invoked by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), “policy-
relevant but not policy-prescriptive”?9 How can any expert body accomplish that
delicate balancing of relevance and non-prescription without losing the public’s
confidence?

Several decades of scholarship in science and technology studies (STS) offer
an indispensable starting point for addressing these questions, and they starkly
underline the futility of trying to maintain sharp boundaries between the work of
science and the work of politics. STS research has transformed our understanding
of the nature of facts, knowledge, and expertise by examining in depth how scien-
tists build new knowledge domains, innovate methods, deal with uncertainty, and
come to agree on phenomena that are eventually treated as facts. Science, seen
through the STS lens, is never a pure encounter between the powerful, discerning
mind of the truth-telling natural philosopher and an unchangeable, preordained,
external nature. Rather, it is always a collectively constructed representation of
reality, a product of group effort, undertaken by communities of shared knowl-
edge and belief, embedded within institutions and cultures that have their own
social, political, and economic dynamics.10 That multilayered social framework
shapes how scientists look at the world, what they choose to investigate, and how
they interpret what they have seen within their own select communities.

Translating the results of science’s painstaking discovery process into political
or policy domains, subject to their own rules of the game, exposes scientific con-
sensus to alien forms of skepticism and added demands for legitimation.11 Out-
siders to science’s normal processes of consensus-building may reject the insider
agreements on varied grounds, such as perceived corruption, opposing religious

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151 (4) Fall 2022Sheila Jasanoff

and cultural beliefs, or experiential knowledge that runs counter to what scientists
take for granted. The factors that contribute to disconnects between experts and
lay citizens need to be disentangled if trusting relations are to be rebuilt. Expert-lay
relationships, moreover, are mediated by institutions that themselves must strike
an uneasy balance between scientific claims and political expediency. In the pub-
lic domain, expert knowledge is called upon to perform three tasks that cannot
be contained within the practices that philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn fa-
mously described as “normal science”12: representation of phenomena deemed rel-
evant for policy (what is the nature of the problem we are seeing?); aggregation
of knowledge from diverse sources and viewpoints (how do we reconcile different
interpretations of what we see?); and bridging to fill gaps between what is known
and what is needed for problem-solving (how do we extrapolate from available
data, or decide when we know enough?). Through techniques of representation,
science often shows us new things to care about (such as the ozone hole, climate
change, fetal abnormality, rising income inequality). Through aggregation of dis-
parate viewpoints, science seeks to tell a coherent–and, for policy purposes, ac-
tionable–story about complex, contested phenomena (such as a maximum mean
temperature rise to maintain a stable climate or an interest rate hike to stop infla-
tion). And through bridging mechanisms such as statistical analysis, models, and
algorithms, science enables predictions from imperfect knowledge (like which
prisoner is likely to revert to criminal behavior upon release, how much food will
be needed to feed a growing world population, how far must greenhouse gas emis-
sions be cut to prevent a climate catastrophe, or how likely is it that an asymptom-
atic, COVID-positive individual will infect a contact group?).

Importantly, just as the political tasks of representation, aggregation, and com-
promise are accountable to preexisting norms and rules, so too are the basic prac-
tices of public knowledge-making accountable to local cultures of sense-making,
or “civic epistemologies.”13 The three sets of practices that are essential for mak-
ing public facts–representation, aggregation, and bridging–are neither universal
nor grounded in an invariant “scientific method.” Normally backgrounded in the
theater of politics, these culturally authorized procedures for producing pub-
lic knowledge must be understood and respected in efforts to rebuild trust in the
wake of crises such as the pandemic. Civic epistemologies are part of the machinery
whereby contemporary polities integrate knowledge with values, and they constrain
the range of approaches to getting publics to accept and agree on facts. In the United
States, for example, such background norms include a preference for experts qual-
ified by certified disciplinary credentials and for open, adversarial contests among
stakeholders, even if such contestation makes closure difficult. Closed-door nego-
tiations among experts representing diverse economic and political positions have
found less favor in the American context than in many European countries, though
those approaches are more likely to lead to consensus on factual claims.14

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B urke’s solution to his era’s political discontents famously was a defense of

more energetic collective action. He proclaimed that “no men could act
with effect who did not act in concert; that no men could act in concert
who did not act with confidence; that no men could act with confidence who were
not bound together by common opinions, common affections, and common in-
terests.” Parties, for Burke, would represent the collective, aggregate their core
values, and bridge differences among members even if individuals disagreed on
some of their less central values.

In modern times, science has stepped in to provide an added foundation of
commonality that many see as essential for societies to act in concert and with ef-
fect. To the list of opinions, affections, and interests, all of which can be factional-
ized, science has added the superior force of common knowledge, which, by defi-
nition, sits above mere interests. Good scientific knowledge is viewed throughout
the world as indispensable to the running of modern societies. It gives politicians
and policy-makers authority to identify, frame, and prioritize problems, assess the
likelihood of possible outcomes, evaluate their consequences, and design work-
able responses. But although democracy theorists from Arendt to contemporary
political epistemologists such as Hélène Landemore agree on a polity’s need for
shared truths to serve these purposes, where to look for common factual under-
standings in pluralistic societies and how best to arrive at them are by no means
settled.15 Indeed, the risks of political fracture and fractiousness, even on ques-
tions of scientific fact, have grown more intense in our era of instant electron-
ic communications and opinion-shaping digital technologies than in the older,
slower days of newsprint, telephones, and television.16

Democracy theorists have tended to divide on what we may call the “knowledge
question” and its implications for legitimacy and trust: Is shared knowledge indis-
pensable for good democracy? If so, then how should one treat factual disagreement
in communities of free-thinking and necessarily heterogeneous opinion holders?
John Rawls, one of the most influential political theorists of the twentieth century,
advocated a position of “epistemic abstinence,” associated with the argument that
insisting on any singular truth as a precondition for good politics would simply re-
sult in coercion of the less powerful by those with more power.17 In a series of rebut-
tals, other political theorists have insisted that abstaining from truth claims is not
only not a necessary condition for political consensus, but that a positive commit-
ment to correct epistemic positions is essential for functioning democracies. Lande-
more, in particular, holds that for a democracy to be successful, it must subscribe
to what she calls a “procedure-independent” standard of validity or correctness: in
other words, democratic processes cannot insist on neutrality with respect to where
the truth lies.18 Getting the right answers, in accordance with standards that are not
themselves embedded in politics, is part and parcel of good government, along with
securing the fundamental values of equality, fairness, and justice.

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It is one thing to subscribe to an ideal of independent standards of correctness,
however, and quite another to work out where such standards can be found. STS
research has repeatedly demonstrated that what we accept as fact for policy pur-
poses is not a preexisting condition of the world, discoverable through policy-
neutral processes, but rather the endpoint of socially sanctioned methods of ob-
servation, argument, negotiation, and persuasion.19 The production of credible
facts thus depends on prior agreement about the right ways to go about finding
facts. Without such settled agreements, controversies about the validity of sa-
lient claims and findings are prone to persist or continually resurface. Moreover,
in the age of social media, the lines between claim, finding, fact, information,
knowledge, and evidence are easily blurred. Scientists themselves have contrib-
uted to confusion by abandoning the slow and costly processes of peer review and
fact-checking to disseminate attention-grabbing claims–what political scientist
Yaron Ezrahi evocatively called “out-formations”–rapidly into the consumer
marketplace in place of better validated information.20 Such behavior is all the
more common in times of crisis, when reputation, intellectual property rights,
and financial support may hinge on claiming priority for one’s own work above
that of competitors and rivals.

In keeping with traditional political theory, however, conventional explana-
tions for the loss of trust in institutions providing critically needed, policy-rele-
vant knowledge tend to fall back on blaming the recipients and not the generators
of knowledge. The realist conception of science dominates the public discourse,
most especially in the United States, reinforcing the notion that facts have valid-
ity independent of human process, will, or intention. Possibly the most common
move is to pin the cause of distrust on the public’s misunderstanding of science,
which itself is explained in varied ways.21 On one common view, it is simply a
matter of ignorance. There is a built-in asymmetry between experts, who arrive at
the truth by virtue of their specialist knowledge, skills, and experience, and non-
expert publics who are too ill-informed, technically deficient, or interest- and in-
stinct-driven to accept the expert pronouncements as true. The legitimacy of ex-
pert consensus is not put in question. It is the deniers who are seen to have turned
away from expert judgment because they are “antiscience” or have bought into
the radically relativist “post-truth” position that there is no truth apart from pol-
itics: it is power all the way down.22 In the United States, the divisive years of the
Trump presidency added weight to this diagnosis through repeated attacks on sci-
ence advice from the highest places in politics–so much so that many left-lean-
ing scientists and commentators greeted President Joseph Biden’s narrow win in
2020 as a victory for science in a country widely seen as almost evenly split be-
tween pro- and antiscience factions.23

A second, partly related view is to blame popular misunderstanding on con-
scious corrupters of the truth who appropriate and subvert the processes of sci-

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ence in order to manufacture doubt where none should exist, sow confusion
where clarity should prevail, and sap people’s will to act by diluting the power
of the expert consensus. Here again the public is cast in a passive and unknow-
ing role in accordance with what STS scholars call the “deficit model.” Culprits
in these corruption stories include powerful private groups, most prominently
the fossil fuel, chemical, and tobacco industries, and scientists who sell their ser-
vices to such lobbies for money and fame.24 From the standpoint of the media,
the pandemic spawned a new rogues’ gallery of scientists who touted quack rem-
edies or cures lacking adequate scientific validation, such as the drugs ivermectin
and hydroxychloroquine. But the line between rogue and responsible was never
so easy to draw. Prominent among the dissidents endorsing hydroxychloroquine,
for example, was France’s Didier Raoult, a charismatic, politically well-connect-
ed, and highly credentialed member of France’s COVID-19 committee from Mar-
seille. Raoult’s work had long been regarded with suspicion by colleagues in the
French scientific establishment, for whom he was an outlier.25 In a time of great
public anxiety and demand for quick solutions, however, a figure like Raoult, who
offered certainty and was not manifestly unqualified, carried heightened author-
ity. He won powerful support in France and elsewhere, although critics turned on
him for deluding people who seemingly did not have the knowledge or capacity to
disentangle good science from bad.

While the deficit model rightly points to gaps in expertise between special-
ists and publics, and hence is reassuring to mainstream science, it leaves unan-
swered highly pertinent questions about the politics of trust. Why, though indica-
tors demonstrate consistently high public confidence in science and medicine, do
some claims dismissed by mainstream science nonetheless gain ground in public
opinion? What accounts for particular focal points of distrust, and why do ob-
vious (even ridiculous) falsehoods find readier, more fertile ground in some so-
cieties than others? The STS framework of co-production helps make sense of
these puzzles. This theoretical posture derives from demonstrated intimate con-
nections between how we see the world (epistemic truth) and how we value the
world and wish to live in it (normative truth or justice).26 Whereas much of ad-
ministrative and legal practice is geared toward separating the former from the
latter, the framework of co-production posits that in practice the building of nat-
ural ontologies and representations, usually seen as the preserve of science, pro-
ceeds hand in hand with the work of developing discourses, identities, and insti-
tutions in any society. Indeed, an expert institution has authority as such–that
is, it enjoys institutionalized credibility–precisely because it can authorize both
knowledge and norms in order to persuade its audiences what are the right beliefs
and why those beliefs are the ones to live by. It is not that expert institutions find
and purvey truths from some “outside” that exists independent of society; it is
that institutions such as courts and expert regulatory agencies are accepted as le-

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151 (4) Fall 2022Sheila Jasanoff

gitimate largely because of their capacity to diagnose what matters to people and
deliver credible knowledge on those issues.27

Co-production is a pervasive feature of modernity simply because the lives we
live could not be led without the infrastructure of reliable expert knowledge. Find-
ing examples of co-production is therefore more a matter of how one chooses to
look at the role of knowledge in decision-making than what specific problems one
chooses to look at. Almost any technical certainty we live by can be revisited and
re-narrated in the idiom of co-production. It is, however, easiest to demonstrate
this process at work when significantly new ways of knowing the world gain a
hold on public consciousness and move societies to collective action. These might
include the germ theory of disease, the discovery of the ozone hole, the attribu-
tion of some cancers to chemicals, the reality of anthropogenic climate change,
or the identification of inequality as a social problem.28 In each of these instanc-
es, as in countless less transformative or consequential moments of altered un-
derstanding, the change in public awareness followed no simple, linear path from
scientific discovery to concerted action. Rather, what historians, political scien-
tists, sociologists, and STS scholars, among others, have repeatedly document-
ed is an intertwined, often long-drawn evolution of new instruments and ways
of seeing (such as microscopes, atmospheric chemistry, toxicology tests, climate
models, statistics); professionals with acknowledged skills and training (such as
doctors, earth scientists, modelers, economists); groups willing to be seen as af-
fected (such as asymptomatic disease carriers, bearers of genetic risk, econom-
ically disadvantaged groups); and institutions capable of making and certifying
knowledge claims even under conditions of uncertainty (such as university de-
partments, professional societies, expert committees, and regulatory agencies).

What emerges forcefully from these convergent lines of research on knowl-
edge production is that–especially in contested political domains–the legitima-
cy of scientific facts and representations cannot be disentangled from the ways in
which powerful actors account for their claims of expertise to varied audiences.
In this sense, public knowledge and public authority are interdependent and co-
produced. Put differently, standards of epistemic correctness do not stand outside
of politics but are configured through the same processes of social authorization
as political legitimacy. It follows that any attempt to build trust solely on the basis
of the claimed robustness of science, without addressing the associated politics, is
likely to founder under stress.

T he framework of co-production has rendered obsolete the model of sci-

ence policy captured in the well-known phrase “speaking truth to power.”
That description of the idealized relationship between science and poli-
tics firmly located truth-making on one side of a normative wall and political ac-
tion on the other. Neither side, this formulation implies, should be allowed to in-

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terfere with or contaminate the other: scientists and technical experts should find
and speak the truth, wherever it may lead; and power should enact society’s pur-
poses, with deference to the truths spoken by science, but not constrained to act
in specific ways based solely on what the science says. It is a foundational find-
ing of STS that such a bright line between truth and power does not exist in prac-
tice–not until it has been put in place as a result of negotiation or the exercise
of power.29 Politics and power, with small p’s, enter into the practices of public
knowledge-making in innumerable ways, from close-in choices of instrumenta-
tion, methods, and disciplinary criteria of soundness by scientists to larger public
determinations about the sources and objectives of research funding, the framing
of questions that need to be answered, and decisions about when to declare that
knowledge is sufficiently robust for application. The uses may range widely, from
administering a vaccine to launching a rocket to offering an algorithmic substi-
tute for counting a population, and much else besides. In each instance, the de-
ployment of knowledge or technology is a social choice, shot through with collec-
tive values and preferences.

For practical purposes, of course, as members of modern societies, we mostly
accept expert claims and technological artifacts unquestioningly and at face val-
ue in our daily lives–for example, airplane timetables, food labels, drug doses,
or standardized test results–simply as the price of leading our lives without con-
stant uncertainty. But it remains the case that each of the countless points of epis-
temic stability, or stubbornness, that we rely on daily comes with its own history
of struggle and compromise. And when any one of them becomes controversial,
such as through allegations of racial bias in the case of standardized tests, that pre-
history can be excavated and reopened for contestation.

This state of affairs, in which a largely invisible world of expert knowledge
and skills undergirds the safety, security, and quality of our lives, has led to what
we might see as a tacit constitutional settlement: no representation (of condi-
tions in the world) without representation (of the voices of those affected). In-
deed, one great movement of democracy through the long twentieth century has
been toward publics in all societies demanding more transparency, accountabili-
ty, and say in the ways that experts determine, and rulers deploy, facts of relevance
to all our lives. These moves take many different, culturally grounded forms.
Some countries have turned to the law through measures such as the 1946 U.S.
Administrative Procedure Act guaranteeing hearings before regulatory action,
France’s Charter for the Environment cementing citizens’ right to participate in
decision-making, and the South African Supreme Court’s decision upholding the
public’s constitutional right to participate in law-making on issues of life.30 In
other contexts, citizens have taken to the streets in droves to signal dissatisfaction
with official policies on technological issues, such as Germany’s massive nucle-
ar protests in the 1970s or the 2008 beef protests in South Korea challenging the

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government’s decision to import U.S. beef despite public concerns over mad cow
disease. What all these moves have in common is a deepening unease with rule by
experts and a worry that government reliance on technical expertise often masks
the promotion of particular sectarian, class, or economic interests at the expense
of the broader public good. The breakdown of trust in experts thus can be traced
to a deeper sense of being excluded from the processes by which powerful expert
knowledge is made.

D emands for representation raise a corollary problem that Rawls and other

political philosophers have wrestled with: what to do about the dilemma
of epistemic pluralism, or the fact that in modern societies, people may
see things differently based on their particular interests and standpoints. Since
the Progressive Era, a pragmatic answer has been to look to expert institutions to
aggregate epistemic differences and develop consensus on complex policy prob-
lems requiring diverse technical inputs.31 The IPCC is one such body with enor-
mous clout at the international level, a cowinner with former U.S. Vice President
Al Gore of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for alerting the world to the perils of climate
change. The COVID-19 pandemic thrust any number of other national and global
expert bodies into the limelight, from the Centers for Disease Control and Preven-
tion (CDC) in the United States to the World Health Organization (WHO). One
might have expected bodies such as these to consolidate trust during the pandem-
ic, but despite their long-established claims to expert authority, neither the CDC
nor the WHO proved equal to the task. Under pressure to justify extensive and un-
palatable restrictions on personal liberty in the name of public health, neither or-
ganization found its expert reputation to be a sufficient shield. Both fell victim to
charges that they were captive to special interests whose political impulses had
colored the parent body’s reading of the evidence.

Faced with such challenges, expert groups often adopt the discourse of factual
truth almost as a conditioned reflex. They claim to be “following the science,” as if
their own practices of representation, aggregation, and bridging had nothing to do
with the knowledge they relied upon. The discourse of truth seeks to abandon the
messy battleground of epistemic pluralism by escaping to a position above the fray,
seemingly untouched and untouchable by political winds. In complex modern so-
cieties, some epistemic moves that serve this purpose have come to be accepted as
necessary if an expert body’s judgment is to be trusted. Chief among these is the
claim of objectivity, the posture that allows knowledge-makers to speak as if from
a viewpoint untainted by cognitive bias, subjectivity, or special interest.

Objectivity, however, is not procedure-independent in the sense desired by
political theory. It is not an invariant standard but a historically and culturally
grounded achievement.32 Objectivity is constructed in accordance with locally
specific criteria of virtue and validity that experts must respect if they are to as-

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sert their credibility and legitimacy. Three standpoints are widely seen as guar-
antors of objectivity, although each is achieved through its particular epistemic
practices and forms of accountability: the view from nowhere (sanctioned by the
methods of empirical science and quantitative analysis); the view from everywhere
(sanctioned by inclusive representation and fair deliberation); and the view from
somewhere (sanctioned by individual witnessing and moral authenticity).33 These
standpoints are often brought together within decision-making institutions be-
cause each has its frailties and thus, on its own, is vulnerable to challenge and cri-
tique. Performed together, they are thought to ensure a kind of overlapping con-
sensus that offers a closer approximation to truth and reality.

A formal courtroom proceeding, for instance, unites the view from somewhere
and the view from nowhere. Opposing parties make their case, unabashedly rep-
resenting their interpretation of the evidence with all the persuasive tools at their
disposal. Markers of authenticity, such as expressions of sincerity or remorse, car-
ry weight in such representations, which is why defense lawyers generally try to
put their clients on the stand. While legal ethics forbids outright lying by lawyers
and witnesses, the spin placed on the facts is allowed to be as partisan as good ad-
vocacy can make it, and there is no obligation to represent the situation from any
viewpoint other than the litigants’ own. It falls to the judge or jury to derive from
the opposing arguments a conclusion that does not bear the positional stamp of
the parties, but distills from clashing testimonies “from somewhere” a detached
and impersonal verdict “from nowhere.” The scientific process of peer review fol-
lowed by editorial judgment offers a similarly hybrid approach: the editor’s task
is to synthesize from multiple reviews, each possibly reflecting the reviewer’s per-
sonal biases, a composite recommendation that pushes a publication closer to im-
partial truth.

By contrast, fact-finding within a typical expert advisory committee aims to
produce a synthetic view from everywhere that does not foreground personal
opinion or special interests. Here, the presumption is that holism is the best ap-
proach to fact-making, and a committee comes closest to reality by combining all
relevant perspectives into an inclusive whole. While the size and composition of
expert bodies may vary, based on the scope and significance of the issues at stake,
the notion that they should incorporate political as well as epistemic diversity is
widely held. Committees entrusted with public fact-making often represent mul-
tiple disciplines, as well as a cross-section of stakeholder perspectives. Though
each participant may bring a view from somewhere, colored by the specifics of
that position, the presumption is that, by integrating knowledge from every sig-
nificant standpoint, the collective body arrives at a representation that can be ac-
cepted as unbiased, and hence objective, by all. To strengthen the appearance of
consensus, some bodies take pains to avoid dissenting opinions, though others
see dissents as contributing to the committee’s credibility.

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Some approaches to aggregating diverse epistemic positions avoid mediating
bodies such as courts or committees and seek instead to take the measure of pub-
lic opinion directly through mechanisms such as deliberative polling or referen-
da. Associated particularly with the work of political scientist James S. Fishkin,
deliberative polling attempts to combine the virtues of crowd-sourcing informa-
tion and opinion formation through deliberation in small groups.34 Any effort to
model so large and amorphous a collective as a public can be critiqued for errors
of sampling and faulty representation, and Fishkin’s approach has drawn its share
of such commentary. From an STS perspective, however, the more serious lim-
itation is that instrumental elicitations of public opinion as inputs to policy may
reinforce the biases that led to particular, possibly un- or antidemocratic formu-
lations of public problems. For example, in a far-reaching study of deliberative
mechanisms designed to set limits on embryo research, STS scholar J. Benjamin
Hurlbut showed that most methods of aggregating citizens’ views on the subject
narrowed the scope of deliberation while technology itself was enlarging the goals
and purposes of intervening in human reproduction.35 Such mismatches between
what is of concern to citizens and what actually gets discussed in formal delibera-
tive proceedings can contribute to the gulf between experts and publics and to the
undermining of trust.

In practice, collective knowledge-making in any society draws on long-accepted
traditions of representation, aggregation, and bridging gaps between what is and
what needs to be known. Expert processes do not freely adopt styles of how to ar-
gue and how to build agreement. They are regulated by law or embedded in polit-
ical tradition. Modes of demonstrating objectivity are similarly conditioned by
prior social commitments, including rules governing expert professions or de-
rived from administrative law. For example, the view from nowhere has earned
special purchase in American politics through entrenched and interlocking prac-
tices of public claims-testing that differ considerably from those in other nations
with comparably active democracies and powerful scientific communities.36
These cross-cultural differences play a substantial part in framing how the prob-
lem of trust manifests itself within a given society.

T he intertwined production of public facts and public norms means that

expert bodies cannot achieve buy-in unless their epistemic practices are
accepted as valid by the societies in which they operate. These practices
vary widely across political systems, even though in principle all such bodies are
committed to the same standards of objectivity, “sound science,” and “evidence-
based” judgment. Just as cultures are defined by recognized and recurrent prac-
tices of meaning-making around fundamental social relations–such as kinship,
marriage, worship, property rights, death and dying–so political cultures gravi-
tate toward the institutionalized patterns of public fact-making, demonstration,

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and reasoning that I have termed civic epistemologies. National political cultures
differ, for instance, in the methods they use to construct objectivity in public de-
cisions: through delegation to trusted individuals such as experienced civil ser-
vants, through consensus-building within multipartite representative bodies, or
through adversarial processes designed to sift good from bad arguments and ap-
peal to impartial knowledge. Institutions that conform to their culture’s domi-
nant civic epistemologies are able to maintain public trust because experts and lay
publics agree on the right way to develop facts and arguments; by the same token,
institutions sacrifice trust and credibility if they operate without awareness of, or
against the grain of, their culture’s preferred ways of knowing.

Sometime in April 2020, a new icon of trust emerged on the American scene:
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases and chief medical advisor to the president. Born on Christmas Eve in
1940, Fauci was an unlikely folk hero. Yet the slogan “In Fauci We Trust” sprouted
on innumerable yard signs and pop culture merchandise like mugs and T-shirts.
Dubbed the “nation’s top infectious disease expert,” Fauci conducted countless
press interviews while also appearing frequently at President Trump’s side in his
daily briefings on the pandemic. Fauci’s absences drew panicky comments, and
his “two-second grimace and a face-palm”37 on a day when the president joked
about the “deep state department” turned him into an internet sensation. As one
expert on popular culture observed, “he seems to be talking sense and science.”38
It is tempting to read the Fauci phenomenon as an example of America buying
into the view from somewhere, specifically the position of personal credibility oc-
cupied by the honest and experienced Dr. Fauci. More plausibly, however, Fauci
came to personify the caretaking ethos of the physician who has sworn an oath to
put the patient’s health foremost, in a moment when no one else in the federal ad-
ministration seemed to offer coherence, competence, or caring. So seen, Fauci be-
came the voice of transcendent epistemic authority because his mission was that
of the nation’s healer, an embodiment of the view from everywhere. Instructive-
ly, the CDC’s efforts to restore trust through abstract appeals to science (the view
from nowhere) in the first year of the Biden administration proved less persuasive
than Fauci’s pronouncements at the pandemic’s height.

The peculiarity of the U.S. debate over the trustworthiness of pandemic sci-
ence emerges most clearly by contrasting it with parallel developments in other
Western democracies.39 Strident objections to vaccine and mask mandates sur-
faced elsewhere too, for example, in Germany, France, and Canada, but these
mapped onto political dissatisfaction with the country’s ruling party. Thus, in
France, protests against the required use of the passe sanitaire (later passe vaccinal)
to gain entry into specified public spaces reflected much of the same discontent
with the policies of Emmanuel Macron that had also fueled the “yellow vest” pro-
tests of 2019.40 At stake in the European debates were explicit constitutional ques-

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tions, such as the extent of the state’s emergency powers and the proportionality
of the state’s mandates in relation to the solidity of the available evidence. Neither
the dissidents nor the press cast the conflict as one over scientific validity, whereas
American media continued to frame comparable U.S. conflicts as stand-offs be-
tween the authorizing forces of science and politics. As late as February 2022, two
years into the pandemic, an editorial in The Washington Post declared, “Science,
not politics, should dictate school mask mandates.”41

Debates in Britain focused even less centrally on science or on epidemiological
evidence. In sharp contrast to the U.S. case, the most politically visible contro-
versies of the pandemic era had to do with rule-following by scientists, political
officials, and the prime minister himself. The epidemiologist Neil Ferguson, the
prime minister’s chief strategy adviser Dominic Cummings, and eventually Boris
Johnson all paid hefty political prices when each appeared to set himself above
the constricting rules that applied to the rest of the British public. Boozy Down-
ing Street parties, some attended by Johnson, called forth police investigations
and sanctions, while images of these seemingly illicit gatherings circulated in so-
cial media alongside the poignant, dignified image of the Queen observing public
health guidelines by mourning alone the death of her husband of seventy-three
years. The British public by and large went along with the rules, taking special
pride in winning the race to approve the first COVID-19 vaccine. Mask mandates
were accepted as matters of public health prudence, and few recorded incidents
emerged of conflict over people’s acceptance or rejection of masking rules.

The point here is subtle, but profoundly important for the topic of trust in sci-
ence and expertise. Only in the United States was science repeatedly represented,
and called upon, as a direct authorizer of restrictions on public conduct. In oth-
er countries, from authoritarian China to democratic Western Europe and coun-
tries of the Global South, such as Brazil and India, conflict centered on the role of
specific mediating bodies–elected or unelected officials, political parties, expert
committees–responsible for translating knowledge to action. The institutional
authority of science itself in the public eye proved most fragile in the country, the
United States, whose dominant civic epistemology relies most heavily on main-
taining a strict separation between facts and values. Put differently, trust eroded
most where the alleged objectivity of science was called to substitute for a more
open politics of representation, aggregation, and bridging.

C onventional wisdom in America calls for restoring trust in governing in-

stitutions by doubling down on technocracy’s most sacred legitimating
devices: scientific integrity, separating science from politics, and teaching
science to publics constantly seen as being in a deficit of knowledge and under-
standing. This is consistent with the commitment to the distinction between epis-
temic truth and populist politics that has been a defining feature of this nation’s

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civic epistemology, as propagated by its intellectual and professional elites and by
many democracy theorists. An approach grounded in STS suggests that this way
of thinking will not get to the heart of weakened trust in our era of fractured facts
and polarized parties. If there is something still to be taken away from Burke’s pre-
scription for how to restore trust in a time of profound discontent, it is that the an-
swer lies in doing politics better–only, in modern times, that prescription has to
extend beyond making stronger political collectives to improving the production
of knowledge for politics. Parties alone cannot be the answer when the parties are
separated by their understanding of the rightful connections between power and
expertise. At the same time, mechanisms geared toward improving science com-
munication or sampling public opinion on already defined policy issues are also
likely to fall short by ignoring the intertwining of epistemic and political values.

Credible fact-making for policy purposes demands the same broad moves as
are required for credible politics. Experts must represent things in the world in
ways that give voice to diverse standpoints, aggregate disparate opinions to pro-
duce a measure of objectivity, and find persuasive ways to bridge the gaps between
available and ideal states of knowledge. Expert practices in any society, moreover,
must conform to its own recognized approaches to producing and testing public
knowledge. Simply insisting on the authority of science without attending to the
politics of reason and persuasion has proved not to restore trust in either knowl-
edge or power. In a polarized political system like that of the United States, where
each side doubts the other’s epistemic integrity, there is no panacea that will mag-
ically restore trust. Modest beginnings can be made, however, with more inclusive
processes for framing policy questions, greater attentiveness to dissenting voices
and minority views, and humility in admitting where regulatory restrictions are
based more on prudence and concern for others than on “sound science.” Ulti-
mately, the solution to a world whose “solemn plausibilities . . . have lost their rev-
erence and effect” is not to walk away from the politics of truth, but to under-
stand, improve, and knowingly embrace it.

about the author

Sheila Jasanoff, a Fellow of the American Academy since 2021, is the Pforzheimer
Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Harvard Kennedy School. She
is the author of Can Science Make Sense of Life? (2019), The Ethics of Invention: Technology
and the Human Future (2016), Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the
United States (2007), and The Fifth Branch: Science Advisers as Policymakers (1990).

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endnotes

1 Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Availability: A Heuristic for Judging Frequency

and Probability,” Cognitive Psychology 5 (2) (1973): 207–232.

2 Sheila Jasanoff and Hilton R. Simmet, “No Funeral Bells: Public Reason in a ‘Post-Truth’

Age,” Social Studies of Science 47 (5) (2017): 751–770.

3 “Democracy dies in darkness” is the motto of The Washington Post.

4 Edmund Burke, Thoughts on the Present Discontents and Speeches, ed. Henry Morley (Salt
Lake City: Project Gutenberg eBook, 2007 [1770]), https://www.gutenberg.org/files/
2173/2173-h/2173-h.htm.

5 I am focusing on the United States in this essay, although loss of trust in government
and expertise is a more pervasive phenomenon, heightened by the constraints of the
COVID-19 pandemic, especially in democratic societies. The 2022 trucker rebellions
that spread from Canada to countries such as Australia, France, and New Zealand are
just one example of an international rebellion against what I have elsewhere called
“public health sovereignty.” Nonetheless, the almost fifty-fifty cleavage of the polity
into opposing camps across a range of issues demanding expert judgment was unique
to the United States before and during the pandemic era.

6 Charlie Savage and Heather Murphy, “Federal Judge Strikes Down Mask Mandate for

Planes and Public Transit,” The New York Times, April 18, 2022.

7 Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Crown Publishing,

2018).

8 Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” The New Yorker, February 25, 1967. Arendt offered as
an example of an incontrovertible fact that Germany invaded Belgium in 1914 and not
the other way around. The Russia-Ukraine war of 2022 renders that reading problem-
atic in ways that others have noted but are beyond the scope of this essay.

9 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “IPCC Factsheet: What Is the IPCC?”

https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2021/07/AR6_FS_What_is_IPCC.pdf.

10 Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, trans. Thaddeus J. Trenn (Chicago:

University Chicago Press, 1979 [1935]).

11 Sheila Jasanoff, The Fifth Branch: Science Advisers as Policymakers (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 1990).

12 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1st ed. (Chicago: University of Chica-

go Press, 1962).

13 Sheila Jasanoff, Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States (Prince-

ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005).

14 These are, of course, broad generalizations, but they are backed up by many case studies
and longue durée observations. See, for example, ibid., comparing biotechnology regu-
lation in Europe and the United States. One may also cite in this context relatively high
degrees of American skepticism toward the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change and, more recently, even the COVID-19 policy recommendations of the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Both the IPCC and the CDC operate mostly
in the expert committee mode.

15 Hélène Landemore, Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2013); and Hélène Landemore, “Beyond

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the Fact of Disagreement? The Epistemic Turn in Deliberative Democracy,” Social Epis-
temology 31 (3) (2017): 277–295.

16 Zeynep Tufekci, “How Social Media Took Us from Tahrir Square to Donald Trump,” MIT
Technology Review, August 14, 2018, https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/08/14/240325
/how-social-media-took-us-from-tahrir-square-to-donald-trump/.

17 John Rawls, Political Liberalism, exp. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); but
see also Joseph Raz, “Facing Diversity: The Case of Epistemic Abstinence,” in Ethics in the
Public Domain: Essays in the Morality of Law and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1995).

18 Landemore, “Beyond the Fact of Disagreement,” 280–285.
19 Classic STS works that make this fundamental point include David Bloor, Knowledge and
Social Imagery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976); Bruno Latour, Science in Ac-
tion (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987); Donald MacKenzie, Inventing
Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1990); Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1985); and Brian Wynne, Rationality and Ritual: Participation
and Exclusion in Nuclear Decision-Making, 2nd ed. (Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge Earth-
scan, 2011 [1982]). See also Jasanoff, The Fifth Branch.

20 Yaron Ezrahi, “Science and the Political Imagination in Contemporary Democracies,”
in States of Knowledge: The Co-production of Science and the Social Order, ed. Sheila Jasanoff
(London: Routledge, 2004), 254–273.

21 Alan Irwin and Brian Wynne, eds., Misunderstood Misunderstandings: Social Identities and

Public Uptake of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

22 Paul R. Gross and Normal Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with

Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).

23 Stephen Hilgartner, Sheila Jasanoff, and J. Benjamin Hurlbut, “Was ‘Science’ on the Bal-

lot?” Science 371 (6532) (2021): 893–894.

24 David Michaels, Doubt is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); and Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway,
Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke
to Global Warming (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010).

25 Robert Zaretsky, “The Trumpian French Doctor Behind the Chloroquine Hype,” Slate,
March 30, 2020, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/03/didier-raoult-hydroxy
chloroquine-plaquenil.html.
26 Jasanoff, ed., States of Knowledge.
27 David Demortain, The Science of Bureaucracy: Risk Decision-Making and the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2020); and Daniel Carpenter, Reputation
and Power: Organizational Image and Pharmaceutical Regulation at the FDA (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 2010).

28 Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. See also Charles E. Rosenberg, The Cholera
Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962,
1987); Richard E. Benedick, Ozone Diplomacy: New Directions in Safeguarding the Planet, 2nd
ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998); Ronald Brickman, Sheila Jasa-
noff, and Thomas Ilgen, Controlling Chemicals: The Politics of Regulation in Europe and the Unit-
ed States (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985); Paul N. Edwards, A Vast Machine:

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151 (4) Fall 2022Sheila Jasanoff

Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 2010); and Thomas Piketty, A Brief History of Equality (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2022).

29 See references in endnote 19 above.
30 Doctors for Life International v. Speaker of the National Assembly, 2006 (6) SA 416 (CC) (South

Africa).

31 Stephen Skowronek, Stephen M. Engel, and Bruce Ackerman, eds., The Progressives’ Century:
Political Reform, Constitutional Government, and the Modern American State (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 2016). For a useful listing of mechanisms of knowledge
aggregation, see Stephen Turner, “Political Epistemology, Experts and the Aggregation
of Knowledge,” Spontaneous Generations 1 (1) (2007): 36–46.

32 Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (Brooklyn and Cambridge, Mass.: Zone

Books and MIT Press, 2007).

33 The idea of the “view from nowhere” is often attributed to Thomas Nagel’s book of
the same name. See Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1986). In STS usage, however, this is not an idealist position of objectivity but rather
the sought-after endpoint of social practices that aim to shear away perspectival bias so
that only detached truth is left standing in the end.

34 James S. Fishkin, When the People Speak: Deliberative Democracy and Public Consultation (New

York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

35 J. Benjamin Hurlbut, Experiments in Democracy: Human Embryo Research and the Politics of Bio-

ethics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).

36 Jasanoff, Designs on Nature.
37 Christian Paz, “Anthony Fauci’s Gen Z Cred,” The Atlantic, April 22, 2020, https://www
.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/04/how-anthony-fauci-made-himself-meme/
610330/.

38 Daxia Rojas, “America’s Love Affair With an Elderly Epidemiologist,” The Jakarta Post,
April 19, 2020, https://www.thejakartapost.com/life/2020/04/19/americas-love-affair
-with-an-elderly-epidemiologist.html.

39 These comparative observations are drawn from an ongoing and still incomplete study of
responses to COVID-19 in sixteen countries that I am co-leading with Stephen Hilgartner
of Cornell University under grants from the National Science Foundation and Schmidt
Futures. For an interim report from January 2021, see Sheila Jasanoff, Stephen Hilgart-
ner, J. Benjamin Hurlbut, et al., Comparative Covid Response: Crisis, Knowledge, Politics–
Interim Report (Cambridge, Mass., and Ithaca, N.Y.: Harvard Kennedy School and Cor-
nell University, 2021), https://compcore.cornell.edu/publications/.

40 Introduced by law on May 31, 2021, and later replaced by the passe vaccinal, the app pro-
vided proof of vaccination and was required for entry into such spaces as museums,
restaurants, and certain forms of public transport.

41 The Editorial Board, “Science, Not Politics, Should Dictate School Mask Mandates,”
The Washington Post, February 12, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/
2022/02/12/science-not-politics-should-dictate-school-mask-mandates/.

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