We are planning a radically new teaching program to bolster democracy and counter the erosion of truth. This is an ambitious project, with science being considered as a form of knowledge alongside arts and humanities knowledge; science students will be taught alongside their arts and humanities colleagues, with interdisciplinary debate being a central pedagogical resource.

The way in which science has been understood by historians, sociologists and philosophers has changed markedly over the last half century. The major change has grown out of detailed field studies of how truth is ‘constructed’ by scientists, probably triggered by the huge success of Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published in 1962, said to be the best-selling academic book of the Twentieth Century.

The major political impact of this re-assessment of science, which started in earnest in the early 1970s, was to level science down from its elevated position above society. Those who continue to draw this conclusion from the work of the 1970s onward believe that science and social values should be drawn into alignment. But science has to find universal truths that stand above politics and this becomes still clearer when politics are malign.

Since the turn of the century, a group of scholars have argued for a renewed understanding and endorsement of the special position of science as a generator of knowledge, based on an analysis of scientific expertise and the truth-seeking of science as an institution. Scientific values are an object lesson for all decision-making including political decision-making, because truth is the key aspiration of science as it should be understood and a key contributor to democracy. This means that teaching about science has to move from a purely technical matter to become an example of knowledge-making that is a vital contributor to democracy.

In spite of the demotion of science from its once elevated position standing above society as a provider of certain and applicable knowledge, the key aspiration of science remains the same: it is the search for correspondence truth (how the observable world works), which in turn leads to the imperative of moral truth (scientists’ commitment clearly to tell the truth about their individual work and findings so that the collective project can be achieved): these values can be a bastion against the erosion of truth in societies and their decline into populism and fascism. The tactic of dictators from Hitler to Putin is to erode truth because it constrains their interpretations of the national will; dictators want to destroy truth so they can be in a position to redefine it as whatever they want and thus redefine ‘the will of the people’ as whatever they want.

By way of example, our new teaching program would require students to consider the different ‘loci of legitimate interpretation’ in science and the arts and humanities. In science the locus lies close the producer of new knowledge, but in the arts and humanities it lies much closer to the consumer. The criteria for excellent work in the arts and humanities include the possibility of new and varied interpretations, while in science sound research reports must aspire to only one interpretation.

The InSECT Project Team
(Harry Collins, Ryan Batkie, Elizabeth Zodda, Patrick Fullick, Michael Reiss)
September 2025

*Atlas supports the world which scientists aspire to describe. Atlas’s elephant stands on a turtle and then it’s turtles all the way down. The bottom turtle is truth and just above it is science. Science is imperfect but more obsessed with the truth about the observable world than any other institution. So, science is the way to bet.