Thursday, 21 April 2011
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12th Swiss Global Change Day
On Tuesday, 19 April 2011, most of the MRI office staff participated in the 12th Swiss Global Change Day, an event sponsored by ProClim, the Swiss Academy of Science's platform for climate change. This event brings together in Bern nearly all the Swiss researchers working on global change and so is the premiere networking event for our community in Switzerland. It is definitely a "be-there-or-be-square" event!
As ProClim has not yet published the presentations made at this Swiss GC Day, I can't direct you to them. I don't want to give any of the speakers short shrift, so I will focus on just one presentation, that of Ilan Chabay.
Ilan Chabay, an expert in the communication of science, as evidenced by his early involvement in the Exploratorium in San Francisco, a ground-breaking experiential museum in San Francisco, kicked off the meeting with a talk focused on how people come to understand scientific knowledge and how that understanding changes their behavior. It seems abundantly clear now that the rules of evidence that govern the production of knowledge within the scientific community are not at all those that govern the acceptance of that knowledge within the larger society. He stressed the role played by models, metaphors and narratives in understanding. All people employ models, dense distillations of how the world works, even if they are incapable of stating what those models are. Metaphors are ways of extending already understood reality into unfamiliar realms, and narratives are story lines using models and metaphors that hook into emotions and values. In this sense, science provides just one class of narrative, while other institutions (religion, markets, political parties, etc.) provide alternative and in some cases competing narratives, narratives that are frequently much more compelling than those habitually developed by research. The challenge for science is understand this process and to learn how to engage people more effectively. Chabay announced a new IHDP core project, Knowledge, Learning and Societal Change, that focuses on this challenge, with a specific sub-text of "coping with complexity through computational modeling".
I think that this new project is a step in the right direction and that fundamentally a greater scientific literacy among the population is a necessary element in moving toward a sustainable world. But it would be a mistake to assume that the difficulties we are experiencing in moving toward a more sustainable society are due to ignorance alone. Societal change inevitably involves a struggle between competing narratives. This struggle may be within a narrow subset of elites or within the broader society, but it is a struggle, one that we recognize as politics. And this struggle between narratives is not conducted as a debate or a trial, formal contexts with rules of logic and of evidence meant to establish the truth, but rather as a no-holds-barred contest that uses all models and metaphors, credible or not, to gain the allegiance of those who matter in societal decision, or in other words, to consolidate power. In this contest, science is just one of the sources of narrative and it competes with others. This process is not bad. In fact, it seems unavoidable, a part of the life history strategy of the social Homo sapien. But it is "where the rubber meets the road" on societal change, and any project that looks at knowledge and learning must look them within the context of politics.
If you want to see presentations from previous editions of the Swiss Global Change Day (and if your interested in Ilan Chabay's work you might also be interested in Naomi Oreskes' presentation for the 10th edition), go to the ProClim events page and then scroll down to the relevant Day. Presentations are posted therein.
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