Beware the public backlash from ‘science triumphalism’

But what does this mean in practice?

This is where Thompson’s expertise can help. He works on the philosophy of mind, sometimes in collaboration with experimental cognitive neuroscientists, exploring topics such as perception, consciousness and the nature of the self. “The scientific study of mind in the 20th century,” he points out, “arose on the heels of behaviourism, which tried to banish anything to do with subjectivity or conscious experience.” Yet he sees this as a totally false path. In studying consciousness, emotions, attention or memory, “we need to have a much more systematic phenomenology of human experience than is typically the case in cognitive science”. One promising approach is to combine “first-person reports of emotion or memory or attention” with “second-person interviews that guide individuals to give more precise descriptions”.

It is the first-person perspective, adds Thompson, which needs to be given pride of place as “the actual source of knowledge, even when you’re trying to step outside of it and model aspects of it, as we say, objectively”.

The Blind Spot makes a rich and complex philosophical argument, but it also has major practical implications, both for how we should do science and for how it should be presented to the public.

The final section turns to how “Earth, as a ‘living planet’ with a biosphere as one of its core systems, is not the province of the geology, biology, chemistry, and physics departments taken singly or even added together”. It has also been profoundly shaped by human action. Studying it, therefore, requires what Thompson calls “a kind of complex system, network thinking which includes the political and the social”, whereby “you cannot really bracket out the observer, because the observer is involved in the network of processes that are being studied”.

This insight has led to the development of “earth system science”, Thompson explains, building on “James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis’ Gaia theory, which was a very different way of looking at life and the planet that incorporated ideas from all sorts of different domains, atmospheric chemistry and microbiology and evolutionary biology. Both of those figures were very sensitive to the larger social and philosophical and historical context.”

We urgently need, in Thompson’s view, further development of such “interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary fields that bridge the natural sciences and the social sciences – not just connect them, but weave them into each other”. Yet this requires significant “institutional restructuring”, given that universities still tend to be “organised on a 19th-century way of thinking about science, not even a 20th-century way”.

It was precisely for this reason that Gleiser created the Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Engagement at Dartmouth, in order to “bring scientists and humanists together, in front of public audiences or in workshops, to address very fundamental questions that cannot only be answered scientifically or through the humanities. You need a big connection between the two.”

He believes that ecological studies have been particularly effective at “bringing different people into the conversation” and is encouraged by “seeing more physicists talking to philosophers and biologists and ethicists”. Nevertheless, Gleiser acknowledges that career incentives and tenure committees still often discourage people from truly embracing the transdisciplinary approaches we so urgently need.

A book that weaves quantum physics, cognitive science, Gaia theory and the mysteries of space into a new paradigm certainly does not lack ambition. But it also demands new approaches to communicating science, the authors believe, which should help enthuse readers rather than cause them to despair. Writing a book that reflects the uncertainty felt by scientists should “guard science from being labelled an autocratic way of knowing”, says Gleiser, “because it’s when you become autocratic that people start to become despondent and cynical”.

Overcoming our blind spot about the human-centred nature of science also “makes science more interesting”, adds Thompson, “because now, rather than having a dead, God’s-eye view, we bring the richness of being an experiencing subject into the question. Rather than asking about the world without us, we understand that science is really about the world and us together. And that opens up a whole new range of questions.”

Some might see in such pronouncements a surrender to the anti-scientific, pick-and-mix combination of knowledge and dubious anecdote favoured by conspiracy loons on social media. But far from being anti-science, the authors of The Blind Spot all “love science”, says Frank, who regularly gets death threats for defending  the scientific method and advocating for action on climate change. “We eat science for breakfast every day – I get very upset if anybody tells me I’m anti-science.”