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Part of
Science and Democracy: Controversies and conflicts
Edited by Pierluigi Barrotta and Giovanni Scarafile
[Controversies 13] 2018
► pp. 71–86

Chapter 4
The expert you are (not)

Citizens, experts and the limits of science communication

Considering any democratic government, it goes without saying that the more knowledgeable the citizens are, the better the democratic process will work. Therefore, leveraging scientific information among laypeople is intuitively linked to the growth of an educated population; some factors, though, taint this positivist account. Amateurization as an explicit stance on the one hand, “edutainment” matched with the ever-growing complexity of scientific matters on the other. In this paper we argue that while encouraging the diffusion of a general “love for science” should inspire an appetite for more robust scientific knowledge, it also foster the emergence of problematic cognitive situations, as the propagation of the so-called epistemic bubbles or the progressive belittlement of the role of experts in society.

Keywords: science communication, democratic culture, amateurization, expert epistemology, epistemology of ignorance, on-line communities, cognitive niches, affordance, epistemic bubble, black box arguments
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • 1.The golden age of electoral democracies?
  • 2.The asymmetry of science communication
  • 3.Scientific facts as black box arguments
  • 4.Discovering information on-line: Produsers, filter bubbles, and self-made experts
  • 5.The appeal of ignorance and the epistemic bubble
  • 6.Desultory scientific information
  • 7.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 23 May 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cvs.13.06arf
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Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Arfini, Selene
2022. How Do We Become Ignorant? Affording Ignorance Through Epistemic Actions. In Embodied, Extended, Ignorant Minds [Synthese Library, 463], ► pp. 209 ff. DOI logo

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