Conférence départementale, vendredi 13 mars 2020, 15h-17h, W-5215
Michael Weisberg (Professor and Chair of Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania)
Philosophy of Science and Public Acceptance of Science
Why do people sometimes reject scientific claims? People’s views about scientific topics might be fully explained by their political or religious identities, and their knowledge about science might play no role. To challenge this conclusion, we administered two new assessments of people’s thinking about science to a demographically representative sample of the US public (N=1500), along with questions about the acceptance of evolution, climate change, and vaccines. Participants’ political and religious views predicted their acceptance of scientific claims, as did a greater understanding of the nature of science and a more mature view of how to mitigate scientific disagreements. Importantly, the positive effect of scientific thinking on acceptance held regardless of participants’ level of political ideology or level of religiosity. Increased attention to developing people’s understanding of how science works could thus mitigate resistance to scientific claims across the political and religious spectrum.
La conférence est co-organisée avec le Réseau Montréalais de philosophie des sciences