SCIENCE, ETHICS, AND THE PANDEMIC

The emergence and dissemination of a discourse which has legitimated the privileging of science over all other ways of knowing has led to a well-developed and dangerous position maintaining the superiority of science over all other modes of human inquiry, often combined with a form of excessive confidence in the power of science, identified as “scientism.” For this reason, the public discourse has been more and more controlled and dominated by the scientific discourse, with its absolute claim of upholding the truth and its prescriptive protocols based on data, evidence, and facts. This normative reference to science has been interpreted as a form of control and oppression, which has produced, as a consequence, the refusal to know and to use scientific knowledge as a guide for individual and collective actions and practices. Scientific knowledge is perceived as disconnected and separated from life itself and, for this reason, it is easily and often challenged by beliefs which are extremely powerful as they are directly connected with the living realm of practice and grounded in well-established traditions emerging from the consolidation and sharing of individual and collective experience.The acknowledgement of scientific fallibilism and the continuous tensions that engage scientific inquiry in order to find viable answers to the questions emerging within the social realm open up a new scenario, within which individuals and communities may come to trust science, understood as the matrix of shared processes of knowledge construction aimed at sustaining social development. This perspective is consistent with a pragmatist understanding of scientific inquiry, which has its deepest roots in the Deweyan vision of the scientific spirit and of the elationship between science and society. This understanding can be an effective reference to reconstruct the contemporary public understanding of science, according to a different vision of the public within a democratic society.