The fact of uncertainty, the uncertainty of facts and the cultural resonance of doubt

• Published in: Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series A: Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences physical, and engineering sciences, 2015-11, Vol.373 (2055), p.20140455
• Main Author: Oreskes, Naomi
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Agnotology; Doubt; Electricity; Ignorance; Propaganda; Uncertainty
• ISSN: 1364-503X; 1471-2962
• DOI: 10.1098/rsta.2014.0455

Sixty years after industry executives first decided to fight the facts of tobacco, the exploitation of doubt and uncertainty as a defensive tactic has spread to a diverse set of industries and issues with an interest in challenging scientific evidence. However, one can find examples of doubt-mongering before tobacco. One involves the early history of electricity generation in the USA. In the 1920s, the American National Electric Light Association ran a major propaganda campaign against public sector electricity generation, focused on the insistence that privately generated electricity was cheaper and that public power generation was socialistic and therefore un-American. This campaign included advertisements, editorials (generally ghost-written), the rewriting of textbooks and the development of high school and college curricula designed to cast doubt on the cost-effectiveness of public electricity generation and extol the virtues of laissez-faire capitalism. It worked in large part by finding, cultivating and paying experts to endorse the industry's claims in the mass media and the public debate, and to legitimatize the alterations to textbooks and curricula. The similarities between the electric industry strategy and the defence of tobacco, lead paint and fossil fuels suggests that these strategies work for reasons that are not specific to the particular technical claims under consideration. This paper argues that a reason for the cultural persistence of doubt is what we may label the 'fact of uncertainty'. Uncertainty is intrinsic to science, and this creates vulnerabilities that interested parties may, and commonly do, exploit, both by attempting to challenge the specific conclusions of technical experts and by implying that those conclusions threaten other social values.