The continuing appeal of the deficit model
In 2016 the journal Public Understanding of Science¹ published six pieces chosen as the winners of an essay competition to answer the question “Why does the ‘deficit concept’ not go away?”. What follows is my own attempt to answer that question, using ideas from Serge Moscovici’s social representations theory and my own ongoing research in the field of ideology studies. I was prompted to write this by being left with a feeling of dissatisfaction, after reading the six winning essays, that the results didn’t go far enough. So much so that I thought I could probably do better myself. And when you catch yourself with such a hubristic conceit, it’s only fair to put your money where your mouth is and make the attempt. If only to show yourself up and learn some humility.
The ideological fallout from the covid-19 pandemic has demonstrated incontrovertibly that the field of science communication and the topic of the public understanding of science is not some fusty academic backwater, but increasingly dragged into the centre stage of public discourse and ideological and culture wars around central questions of state policy and public behaviour. Controversies over lockdown, mask wearing, vaccination, even the virus’s origin itself, not only took off during the height of the crisis itself, but continue to reverberate to this day. In that context, the question the Public Understanding of Science journal posed back in 2016 is more important than ever. Why is science communication still stuck on overcoming the hurdle of the deficit model? Why, however many times scholars debunk it, does it keep returning like a boomerang?
Due to the relative newness of science communications as a field, its connections to similarly novel and as yet somewhat disorganised fields like communication studies, together with the general dysfunctional dynamics of inter-disciplinary coordination, it was perhaps not a big surprise that none of the six winning essays made any reference to Social Representations Theory (henceforth SRT) or Serge Moscovici’s work (or that of any of the other scholars in the SRT field). Social psychology generally is a somewhat stigmatised and marginalised corner of psychology. And even within social psychology, those research projects that venture out of dominant cognitive psychology paradigm, to pay attention to historically and culturally specific social phenomena, are the margin of the margin. Falling into the inter-disciplinary no mans land between the ditch and ramparts erected to separate psychology and sociology over a century ago. Nonetheless, SRT is specifically about the public reception of science, so it is a pity that scholars working in the field that has that as its object, appear blissfully unaware of it.
Let’s start then with a brief sketch of the overall idea of social representations and its key concepts.
Moscovici and social representation theory
The best way to introduce Moscovici and his work in the 1950s is to take a piece from a retrospective interview, decades later (1998)², on what initially motivated him on looking into the public reception of science.
IM: So, what did Marxists think about the effect of science on ordinary people? Did you accept the Marxist position?
SM: No, I did not. Let me explain. My experience during the war made me wonder about the impact of science on ordinary culture, how it changes the minds and behaviour of people, how it becomes a part of our belief system, and so on. At that time there were two quite clear positions about that problem. First, the Marxist position, with which I was familiar because as a young man in Romania I was a communist. The Marxists — or, more precisely, Lenin! — were mistrustful about the spontaneous knowledge of ordinary people. They were convinced that spontaneous knowledge was to be stripped of its ideological, religious and folk irrationalities and replaced by scientific knowledge. […]. Marxists didn’t believe that diffusion, the communication of knowledge, was something that could increase the level of public knowledge, that is, of common knowledge, of common thinking. Instead, they always believed that scientific thinking, through propaganda, would eventually replace common thinking.
The second position was a more general one, one can perhaps call it a position of the enlightenment. To put it briefly, scientific knowledge dispels the ignorance, fantasies or mistakes of non-scientific knowledge by means of communication and education. So in a way, its goal was to transform people into a mass of scientists. At the same time, everybody regarded the diffusion of scientific knowledge — vulgarisation is the right French word — as a devaluation, or a deformation, or both, of scientific knowledge. In other words, when science spreads into the social arena, it becomes something polluted and downgraded because people are unable to assimilate it. You see, there was a convergence between the Marxist and the non-Marxist point of view: Common knowledge is infectious and wrong. So in a way, I reacted against this attitude and wanted to rehabilitate common knowledge which is grounded in our language and in daily life. But deep down, I reacted against the underlying idea which had pre-occupied me for a long time: namely, against the idea that people do not think rationally. In fact, one could say that it is the intellectuals who do not think rationally, having produced such irrational theories as racism and nazism. Believe me, the first anti-semitic violence took place at colleges and universities, not in streets.
[IM is the interviewer, Ivana Marková, SM is Serge Moscovici]. The lengthy quote is worthwhile here because it think it makes it quite evident why Moscovici’s work on the social psychology of public discourse on science should be a matter of interest to any student of science communications. The convergent consensus between Marxists and establishment press of the era, that Moscovici describes in order to reject it, is clearly a crude form of the deficit model. That public or common knowledge is somehow lacking or deficient in comparison to scientific modes of enquiry, that it can only lessen or degrade any knowledge passed from the latter to it.
Moscovici’s research, which took place in the France of the 1950s as part of his doctoral thesis, consisted of a relatively conventional combination of questionnaires and face to face interviews with a cohort of respondents selected from a number of defined social groups. The results of research, after being presented as his thesis, was then published (in French) as book in 1961, “Psychoanalysis, Its Image and Its Public”³, republished in an updated edition in 1976, but not translated into English until 2008. This delay of nearly five decades in getting the work translated has no doubt contributed to the relative lack of awareness of Moscovici and SRT. That, and perhaps also the relative eclipse of psychoanalysis from public awareness or interest, certainly in the English-speaking world, being progressively replaced by non-Freudian psychology. However, while Moscovici’s specific topic of study was the public apprehension and reception of the then relatively novel “science” of psychoanalysis. A novelty which attained sudden currency, even notoriety, in immediate post-war France. His investigation of the process of “vulgarisation” (to quote from above) applies equally to the reception of other topics such as evolution or AIDS, to use examples Moscovici later proffered.
Alongside the presentation of the data of the results, Moscovici interweaves a theoretical model of the reception of novel sciences or scientific discoveries into the public domain which is broken down into two investigations. The first is an inquiry into the ‘product’ itself — i.e. the social representation and how it is construed by the different groups. The second is a study of the role of media discourse by the organs of different social sections or groups in the ‘production process’ that resulted in that product. Subsequent summaries of social representations theory have tended to focus on the first part — the social representation as cognitive construct in social psychological theory — to the expense of the second, which is perhaps seemed to fall more under the remit of communications theory rather than social psychology. Moscovici was always insistent that he saw these two parts as an inseparable whole within social representations theory.
The final overall note that needs to be registered before we dive into the processes themselves, is a distinction Moscovici made between Durkheim’s collective representation concept, and social representations. In Moscovici’s view, Durkheim’s collective representations were shared by all members of a society and had their genesis in the relatively long time span of social evolution. By contrast social representations had a much more short term genesis in that they were public reactions to novel developments, a cultural factor that Moscovici saw as specifically a part of the modern lifeworld, with its rapid pace of technological innovation and social change. The second contrast to the Durkheimian conception, was that social representations, in part due to their novelty, were born in an essentially contested environment, where different social interest groups argued out the ultimate meaning (and acceptability) of these new social objects. This social context was, by design, specific to modern, technologically advanced societies with the relatively free media and space for argument of liberal democratic ideologically pluralist societies. Not that Moscovici wasn’t painfully aware of the reality of fascist and Stalinist dictatorship having survived the first and witnessed the second in his native Romania. But science communication and studying the social psychology of the public understanding of science is a bit moot in one-party regimes where the party tells you what to think and you either pretend to think it or go to the gulag.
Moscovici splits the formation of the social representation of the new science and the concepts proper to it, into two processes: objectification and anchoring.
Objectification for Moscovici is not just a response to the cognitive challenge of making the unintelligible intelligible for the general public, but also a psychological need to defend from the perceived threat of the novel element. That threat is twofold. On the one hand the generic threat of any unfamiliar or strange new element to destabilise the existing worldview and behavioural consensus of the group. On the other, the specific threat that dependency on the expert poses to the autonomy of the group. Moscovici notes
We saw in the previous chapter how the diffusion of a science calls into question the integrity of the collectivity because it escapes its control, and how it creates a link of dependency on the group that represents it. If a scientific conception is to be harmonized with behaviours with which we can identify, it must become detached from this group of ‘experts’
Objectification not only disconnects terms of art from the scientific research programme³ and conceptual structures that give them their original situated meaning (a process Moscovici refers to as “decentralisation”) it reifies them, making them into ‘things’ “…because we cannot talk about ‘nothing’”. He uses the example of the Oedipus complex which for Freud “designates as specific way of organising relations between parents and children”, which “certainly does not imply the presence of a complex”. But when stripped from its context, “…what was a symbol comes to look like a sign. It is then quite natural to try to find out what it is a sign of and to make it correspond to some ‘reality’”. In other words, what was a term of art symbolising a whole system of ideas about relations and tendencies becomes a sign for a real object. That object can be given characteristics and it can be “had” by people, so that we can say that such and such a person “has a complex” or is “complexé” (this is still common parlance in colloquial French by the way, witness to the lasting effect of the process observed in the 1950s study). But, in addition, by making it an object that laypeople can understand and use in conversation, independent of any recourse to ‘experts’, the threat of social dominance by a new class of priests or Brahmins is averted. We have taken their ball away so we can play with it according to our own rules.
In theorising the component processes of objectification, Moscovici goes on to discuss — with continual referring back to research findings — the role of naturalisation and classification and the importance of the formation of an imagined visual representation of the new object — a figurative representation — in materialising and crystallising the representation. Over half a century before the invention of the internet meme, he anticipates the role of stereotyped images in framing attitudes and shaping the narrative in public reception of new ideas and developments. For Freudian psychoanalysis there is of course the sofa or couch. For the social representation of “science” itself, we have the lab coat and the laboratory bench. And so on. I will not try to lay out the entire theorisation of objectification here. Suffice it to say that, regardless of the specific details, it presents the way in which concepts and ideas are inevitably transformed into becoming objects of public discourse in the process of making the unintelligible intelligible and the unfamiliar familiar.
Anchoring is the other aspect of the process of forming a social representation. It is not a separate process that either precedes or follows objectification, rather it is part of the same process, working in parallel but according to a different contexts of needs.
Anchoring designates society’s insertion of a science into a hierarchy of values and into its operations. In other words, society uses the process of anchoring to change a social object into an instrument it can use, and to insert that object into existing social relations on a preferential basis. We might also say that anchoring transforms a science into a framework of reference and a network of meanings…
NB that the “preferential basis” here refers to the varying preferences of different groups. To epitomise the distinction between the two processes of objectification and anchoring, Moscovici encapsulates it like this
To cut a long story short, objectification transposes science into the domain of being, and anchoring defines it within the domain of doing…
So, to extend my slightly clunky metaphor from before, we not only take the ball off the experts, so we can play according to our own rules, but we also need to feel we’re getting some achievement out of this, doing something to make our lives better — according to our existing hierarchy of values about what better lives look like.
Moscovici goes on to talk about the role of different groups in society having different sets of values and how this results in a kind of counter-tendency to objectification, which on its own might produce a homogenised average social object across all groups, in diversifying the representations so that slightly different versions of psychoanalysis are presented to the Catholics, the Communists, the French or Americans and so on.
To a certain extent, we are still talking about the same psychoanalysis. The social object has not been dissolved. Whilst not every group has its psychoanalysis, there is a sense in which psychoanalysis does belong to it (this does away with anything that might directly contradict the obvious signs of its identity). The group therefore generates its own set of broad collective meanings and that inverts the tendency towards objectification. Thanks to the process of objectification, society’s task of selection and organisation is concealed in the texture of the environment, and the social is recuperated in a substantialized form. The network of meanings that is established around a science transforms scientific objectivity into a social fact.
But those social facts may be slightly different for each group, depending on the network of meanings their anchoring creates around the concept — given the need for this new network of meanings to be compatible with their existing hierarchy of values. That last sentence does take a slight twist in segueing from the objectification in creating social representations to the scientific praxis of objectivity in research, which is almost the opposite process, in some respects, to anchoring. The coincidence of the root word “object” could lead to confusion, at least within the limitations of the English translation. To continue the quote from that sentence
The network of meanings that is established around a science transforms scientific objectivity into social fact. It is as though everything that looks provisional and approximate to science became solid and materialized at the level of society, whereas everything that was solid and materialized at the level of science came to look relative and fluid to society
The idea here is that anchoring inverts or, more precisely, reverses the results of scientific objectivity. Whereas scientific objectivity strips social meaning and ideological connotations from the object of study, anchoring restores them by embedding the social object back into a “network of meanings”, albeit one that can be particular to different social groups, according to their normative beliefs and ideological positions.
As with objectification above, I can’t summarise every aspect of Moscovici’s presentation of anchoring here, given the constraints of an introductory essay. But hopefully, with the help of a few quotes, more grasp of the overall shape of the idea is available than what you can get from a few gnomic sentences on a wikipedia page or an encyclopaedia entry. Also some more recent summaries by SRT practitioners have tended to subsume anchoring under objectification⁴, which is somewhat neutering to the overall framework in my opinion.
Having given so much space to the ‘product’ side of social representations and their unfolding through objectification and anchoring, a very brief sketch of the ‘process of production’ side of things in the role of media communications is necessary.
According to Moscovici’s survey of the media coverage, the style of communications could be broken down into three basic modes — diffusion, propagation and propaganda. Crudely put, diffusion was the main style of coverage in the mainstream bourgeois media, propagation that of the Catholic media and propaganda that of the Communist party. In the period of study the French Communist Party (PCF) were adamantly opposed to psychoanalysis as an American bourgeois plot, so the goal of their propaganda was rejection of the object. Ironically, within a decade the PCF had done a complete 180 on the topic, and fronted by the acceptably French Jacques Lacan, the party was now in favour of psychoanalysis and the communications mode shifted towards the propagation model. The propagation model, which at the time of the study was more associated with the Catholic church, was distinct from the diffusion model in that it sought to diffuse the potential threat of the new “science” by harmonising it with the existing worldview of the faithful. The diffusion model, by contrast, was a more neutral mode of communication that ideally sought to pass on information on the new developments, leaving the audience to draw their own conclusions and form their own opinions, according to their individual wont.
A recent (2022) paper⁵ by Fabrice Buschini and Élizabeth Guillou has summarised the three different modes far better than I ever could, so I’ll take the liberty of just quoting them directly
Diffusion is used to convey information about a social object to as many people as possible. Since the objective of diffusion is to convey content of general interest as quickly as possible, it tries to blur the social differences of the target audience. The main objective of this mode of communication is not to exert influence or use open persuasion, but to inform, so that individuals can develop their own opinions. This may create opportunities for behaviour. Scientific popularization could be the prototype of this mode of communication that is widespread in the news media.
Propagation is a different mode of communication that addresses a specific group to show members how to integrate new, potentially disturbing, information, in a way that it becomes compatible with the group’s reference framework and values. Propagation is thus part of an authority relation and must take into account the different group dimensions: values, beliefs, practices, and history. Transmitted information is chosen according to these aspects and organized into a system so as to reinforce or generate attitudes among group members, thereby enabling them to adopt appropriate behaviours. Moscovici used the Catholic press of the time to illustrate this mode of communication.
Propaganda also targets a specific group to show its members how to integrate new information in line with group interests. The authority relation in which propaganda is applied constantly underlines the group’s opposition relation with other groups, therefore responding to the two functions identified by Moscovici: regulation (allowing for the affirmation and strengthening of group identity), and organization (setting up a representation of opponents and ideologies to combat). Propaganda must be omnipresent to guide group members and obtain automatic reactive behaviour from them; its purpose is to produce and maintain opponent stereotypes. Moscovici used the Communist press of the 50s as an example of this mode of communication.
In one sentence: diffusion is aimed at producing opinions, propagation at producing attitudes and propaganda, (oppositional) stereotypes. Each of opinion, attitude and stereotype are concepts that are common currency in the social psychology paradigm, with attendant definitions, theorisations and so on. For now we’ll have to take that as read and move on.
Anchoring and the double-disarticulation of science
In a summary chapter at the end of the first of the two sections of his study, “Natural Thought: Observations Made in the Course of the Interviews”, Moscovici attempts to theorise his findings on the shift between scientific and common sense thinking, in general. In pursuit of his overall objective of giving “natural thought” — his term for ordinary people’s everyday thinking within common sense and common knowledge — back its own reason, in contrast to charges of irrationality, he posits that all forms of thinking combine two modes. Again I’m lifting Buschmi and Guillou’s summary
“Two cognitive systems are at work in the reflexive effort characteristic of science, philosophy, or any form of thought whose goal is the ‘apprehension’ of categories” (Moscovici, 2008, p. 167) and likewise, the same systems are at work in common sense and social representations. “The first is an operational system that works with associations, inclusions, discriminations and deductions; the second is a sort of metasystem that reworks the material produced by the first” (Moscovici, 2008, p. 167). However, even if “natural thought, like any form of thought, implies a system of operational relations and a metasystem of relations that provides checks and validations and that maintains the system’s coherence” (Moscovici, 2008, p. 168), this “metasystem or the relations that constitute it are usually and primordially normative relations” (Moscovici, 2008, p. 167).
I want to pause for a moment and look at the transition in the opposite direction from the one Moscovici’s study focuses on. That is the movement from common knowledge towards the practices and disciplines of scientific research. I propose that this movement consists of two parallel disarticulations. The first disarticulation is that of specialisation — i.e. taking not the natural and social world as an immense totality as the object of study, but some subset of that, whether it’s fluid dynamics, entomology or comparative linguistics. Specialisation in research disciplines is such a matter of established fact that it seems hardly worth remarking on, at first sight anyway. The second disarticulation is what we already mentioned above, in terms of scientific objectivity. It is part of the epistemically normative metasystem of scientific practice that we try, as far as humanly possible, to strip away social beliefs and ideological assumptions that have clustered around the object of study in common sense views.
This double dis-articulation of science is both a precondition for and intrinsically part of the strength of scientific practice. In making the journey from common knowledge to scientific investigation it is both necessary and desirable. The possibility for error arises when we carry over habits of thought from that movement to the reverse journey back from specialist research into public discourse and common knowledge.
The necessity for the kinds of summarising and simplifying processes required to make scientific findings accessible to the general public and debate, of the kind that Moscovici cognitively dissects as “objectification” is (grudgingly) accepted by all. The part where the metaphorical toys come out of the pram, however, is the second process of re-articulation, the anchoring bit. That is to say, the re-integration of the findings of science into the normative and ideological frameworks of existing groups. Its in relation to this last process that we encounter socially normative views from some quarters that society would be a much better place if we could socially absorb the findings of science without having to go through ideological re-articulation. This utopian view I attribute to scientism and positivism, which, despite their characteristic hostility to ideology are themselves ideological views — albeit epistemic ideologies, rather than political ideologies — which we will look into in the next section
But first we need to come back to Moscovici’s notion of the cognitive metasystem acting on the product of the primary operational system in order to maintain a form of coherence. And that different types of thinking — scientific, natural, etc — are mainly differentiated by the particular form of coherence they are aiming to maintain or restore. Anticipating our next section a little, one of the characteristics of scientism is a prejudice that the only form of coherence that is meaningful is the one proper to science. By contrast then, natural thinking can only be incoherent. But applying a different metasystem of coherence does not amount to the same thing as incoherence. Coherence then is not a thing in itself, but a contextual principle that can fulfil different needs according to different imperative frameworks.
To concretize what I mean by a more relational or contextual image of coherence: each of the branch of sciences — natural sciences, formal sciences and social sciences — have their associated forms of implementation as applied science. Natural sciences are applied via engineering, formal sciences via software engineering and social sciences via public policy, or other social engineering. In each case we are moving from a theoretical coherence — within the theoretical framework of the originating research programme — to a technical coherence of practical goals and outcomes, via the associated engineering discipline. In science communications we are also attempting a form of social engineering, only via outreach to the public, rather than mobilising the resources of the state apparatus and publicly-accountable institutions via policy. If public policy is a top-down model of social engineering, then public outreach is an attempt to mobilise voluntary behavioural change from the bottom up (or more precisely, transversally⁶). In science communication like in applied science we are moving from theoretical coherence to another field of coherence — in this case the social coherence of the various group worldviews and networks of meanings that govern the voluntary behaviour of free citizens.
But lets look at why such a perspective might appear strange or unfamiliar.
Scientism and positivism
Scientism and positivism are ways of thinking about the world that implicitly incorporate an underpinning of norms and values that their bearers may be more or less conscious of. Any way of thinking about the world, our place within it and/or society that embeds norms and values is often labelled as ‘ideological’, in the sense of going beyond the merely factual. It’s an unfortunate fact that ideology, as a term, although in common, everyday use, is a bit of a garbage can of a concept. A range of different, often mutually incompatible, phenomena and ideas have ended up under this label. So it’s important to be clear what we are not talking about, in relation to scientism and positivism. We are not talking about ideologies in the sense of political ideologies like conservatism, liberalism, etc. Scientism and positivism do not sit on any left right spectrum or anything like that. They are ideologized ways of thinking about epistemic rather than political questions.
The most useful entry point into the non-political kind of norms and values we are talking about is to start with Michel Foucault’s idea of an “episteme”. For Foucault the episteme is the way of looking at the world, in a given cultural and historical society, such that…
In any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one épistémè that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice.
Translated, roughly, that basically means the set of ideas or assumptions that lead to normative judgements on what constitutes real knowledge. The example, directly relevant to scientism, is the paradigm shift from the (allegedly⁷) Aristotelian scholastic worldview to the Cartesian episteme of the 17th century. As the story goes, the Aristotelian worldview was one in which all motion and change was governed by teleology — the movement of things according to their inner essences which determined the end goal to which they were directed. Acorns growing upwards into oaks, objects falling to earth because it was their goal to reunite with their element, and so on. And there were as many accounts or “sciences” of dynamics and behaviours as there were different categories of things with their different essences and telos (goals). So for example the motion of heavenly bodies, like the planets, was one domain and the motion of earth-bound objects, like cannon balls and artillery shells, was another. Even more alien to our current views, Aristotle’s teleological account of the dynamics of something like a thrown spear (the artillery of its day) had no role for inertia. In the teleological view, the thrower imparted a set of vibrations into the spear and then the air pushed to spear to where it was going, in response to these vibrations.
Classical mechanics put an end to all this. Both by incorporating the idea of inertia (so engrained in our worldview today that it appears to us as innately obvious) and by asserting the universality of the laws of motion and gravity, so that they applied to cannon balls and planets both, and everything else besides. The separate spheres of celestial and terrestrial mechanics are united in one unitary system of laws of motion. This notion of universality — physical laws applying equally to all domains — is one element of the Cartesian episteme, the others being the rationality of the real and that “mathematics is the language of the universe” as it is often lyrically put. The corollaries of this episteme are that real knowledge can be expressed as systematically as Euclid’s Geometry (the paradigmatic text for Descartes, Spinoza and the other rationalists), that knowledge can be expressed as a set of universal laws which are comprehensive (nothing is outside them), coherent (the system is internally consistent, containing no contradictions), and they are systemic and as timeless as mathematics.
Although the physical sciences have moved far beyond classical mechanics, for various reasons (not least physics being split between two incommensurable field theories — general relativity and the standard model) no newer episteme has so far emerged to take the place of the Cartesian one. And its worth re-emphasising how productive and successful this episteme has been in guiding scientific practice, not just in the physical and life sciences, but also in new fields of social science, as yet unforseen in the 17th century.
If the scientific revolution of the 17th century inspired the Enlightenment of the 18th, then the American and French revolutions at the turn of the 18th and 19th century (further) inspired the vision of adapting the scientific method to the perfection of society itself. The Frenchman Auguste Comte coined the term positivism for his version of this science-inspired social utopianism. He also coined the term sociology and codified and systematised the idea of applying scientific method to the study of society that is part of the birth of the social sciences as a family of disciplines.
But Comte’s 19th century positivism was a consciously political ideology and movement, whose acolytes clashed with the followers of Marx and Bakunin within the First International. That is not the kind of positivism I want to talk about in relation to scientism. Nor is it the type of positivism associated with the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle. The differences between Comte’s positivism and that of the Vienna Circle were many and varied. But what they had in common was that they were both explicit doctrines. Doctrine comes from the Latin for teaching and I use it for ways of thinking that are explicitly codified for the purposes of formal instruction.
The kind of positivism I want to talk about comes in the form of what the classical Greeks called doxa. The contrast between doxa and doctrine is best summed up in Pierre Bourdieu’s phrase “that which goes without saying, because it comes without saying”. That is to say a way of thinking or belief that when asked, you admit to knowing but can’t remember when or how you learnt it or have any memory of ever having questioned it — mostly because you’ve never needed to. “Sure, everyone knows that”. Of course in reality ideas don’t just fall from the sky, they all had to come from somewhere originally. But doxa represents those knowledges that are no longer taught as explicit doctrines — because they don’t need to be, because they have soaked into the cultural furniture and we absorb them by osmosis. Similarly they piggy back on contemporary doctrines that convey them as presuppositions rather than explicit teachings. So you don’t need to have ever heard of August Comte or Rudolf Carnap to have absorbed positivism in its form of culturally prevalent doxa, any more than you need to have attended lectures in “Positivism 101” at school or college.
In a nutshell, what I mean by positivism as doxa, is not the attempt to strip away socio-cultural moral and ideological presuppositions in scientific practice. That is part and parcel of the capacity of scientific practice to move knowledge closer towards objective reality⁸. What I mean by positivism is the belief that what is possible and good in one direction of travel — from common knowledge towards scientific study — must also be both possible and good in the other direction — back from scientific findings to common knowledge and public discourse. Which does not follow. But before we go any further, we need to pin down this problematic term, ideology.
Ideology is the problem child of the social sciences that virtually no discipline will admit responsibility for. Despite Michael Billig’s impassioned appeal that social psychology will not really progress as a field until it incorporates ideology in its theory, that discipline as a whole refuses to do so. Sociology dismisses it as “psychologism” and anthropology prefers to deal with myths and rituals. An unwanted, unacknowledged orphan it was eventually picked up by political science in the pioneering work of Michael Freeden. But then, understandably, with a focus restricted to political ideologies (doctrines) — which excludes our discussion of positivism and scientism as non-political ideological doxas. While Freeden is incontrovertibly correct that the term ideology is itself an “essentially contested concept” — i.e. one where you’re never going to get cross-partisan consensus — the sociologist Göran Therborn has given us one possible starting point:
‘Ideology’ will be used here in a very broad sense. It will not necessarily imply any particular content (falseness, miscognition, imaginary as opposed to real character), nor will it assume any necessary degree of elaboration and coherence. Rather it will refer to that aspect of the human condition under which human beings live their lives as conscious actors in a world that makes sense to them to varying degrees. Ideology is the medium through which this consciousness and meaningfulness operate. The consciousness of every new-born human being is formed through largely unconscious psychodynamic processes, and it functions in and through a symbolic order of language codes. Ideology, however, is not reducible to either of these.
Thus the conception of ideology employed here deliberately includes both everyday notions and ‘experience’ and elaborate intellectual doctrines, both the ‘consciousness’ of social actors and the institutionalized thought-systems and discourses of a given society. But to study these as ideology means to look at them from a particular perspective: not as bodies of thought or structures of discourse per se, but as manifestations of a particular being-in-the-world of conscious actors, of human subjects. In other words, to conceive of a text or an utterance as ideology is to focus on the way it operates in the formation and transformation of human subjectivity.
There are two contrasts to be drawn between this view of ideology and Moscovici’s use, on the one hand, and the view of scientism itself. Moscovici uses the term, within his 1950s work, to map out the political affiliations of study group — whether they vote for or are members of Gaullist, socialist or communist parties, or ones affiliated to the Catholic church —in this way, much like Freeden’s later work, restricting the term to political ideology. And this is a popular common usage of the term which is why it bears repeating that when I say the doxas of scientism and positivism are ideological, I don’t mean it as having any link to the political affiliations of the bearers. You will find upholders of positivism and scientism from both left and right wings of the political spectrum and within all sides of the culture war.
The other contrast is to scientism’s prejudicial view of ideology as essentially an “anti-science” outlook, false and erroneous by definition — very much a “deficit model” of ideology, you might say. And I use the term deliberately, because it is part of my thesis that the persistence and eternal return of the deficit model of science communication is at least partly based on the unexamined assumption of the deficit model of ideology that positivism and scientism entail.
Therborn’s tying of ideology to the collection of beliefs, norms and values that guide the layperson’s practical choices in everyday life and their search for social and personal meaning, link very much into what Moscovici is talking about in the process of anchoring. Social representations answer practical questions of “what is to be done?” and “how should I change how I live my life?”. That is, questions of behaviour. Positivism is the idea that the findings of scientific research can be reintegrated into the common knowledge of society, without being at the same time reintegrated into its common sense of right and wrong.
But we need to take one more diversion into an aspect of ideology before we can fully map out the relation between positivism and scientism. Back to Therborn for a moment:
Ideologies subject and qualify subjects by telling them, relating them to, and making them recognize:
1. what exists, and its corollary, what does not exist: that is, who we are, what the world is, what nature, society, men and women are like. In this way we acquire a sense of identity, becoming conscious of what is real and true; the visibility of the world is thereby structured by the distribution of spotlights, shadows, and darkness.
2. what is good, right, just, beautiful, attractive, enjoyable, and its opposites. In this way our desires become structured and norm-alized.
3. what is possible and impossible; our sense of the mutability of our being-in-the-world and the consequences of change are hereby patterned, and our hopes, ambitions, and fears given shape.
Don’t worry too much about the first line above — Therborn is talking about ideology in relation to a conceptual process of “interpellation”, first devised by Althusser, which doesn’t concern us right now. The crucial thing here is that a common view of ideology is that it is limited to item 2 — what is good — alone, and assumes that item 1, what exists, is not an ideologically-mediated question. In the tradition of French historical epistemology, this is termed “empiricism”. Confusingly, this is not to do with the sense of empiricism in the anglophone philosophical tradition of Bacon, Locke, Berkley and Hume. Or the empiricism of the scientific method, in testing theory against empirical findings from experimentation. Rather it refers to the ontological assumption of what exists being a question that can be extracted directly from reality itself via the scientific method. While this seems less controversial in the physical and life sciences, when we move to the domain of the social sciences, it becomes more obvious that the delineation of the selected objects of study — say social groups — are to some extent created by the researcher. Following the pre-existing theoretical framework of their discipline or research project, in a way that’s inevitably mediated by cultural and ideological assumptions. This intuition that the objects of study in the social sciences are not pre-given by nature itself, like in the physical and life sciences, leads to the common prejudice associated with scientism, that social sciences are “soft sciences” (or at the limit not “proper science” at all) in contrast to the “hard science” of physics, chemistry and biology.
Because we are focusing on the ideological aspects of beliefs about science specifically, rather than the more political field of society more generally, we’ll skip item 3, what is possible and impossible, although its ties to notions of ‘pragmatism’ and ‘political realism’ in the wider discourse should be fairly evident.
Having taken that detour via “empiricism” and Therborn’s three modes of ideology, we can return to the relation between positivism and scientism. Scientism incorporates positivism’s “deficit model” of ideology along with its social vision of using science to resolve all social questions while side-stepping ideological questions over what is ethical and socially desirable. In addition, it is the ideological reflection of the Cartesian episteme in valorising universalism, coherence and systematisation as the ne plus ultra of the kind of knowledge that society should uphold as superior and sufficient. However where it really marks itself as an ideology — a framework of normative beliefs about science (and society), rather than the epistemic values necessary to do science, is over the vexed question about what to do about the clash between the Cartesian episteme’s norms of universality and internal coherence, and the real world situation of the incommensurability and particularity of the diverse theoretical models of all the various sciences — natural and social.
Scientism responds to this contradiction by flat out ignoring it. The problem is simply passed over in silence. And as Derrida said, you should always listen for the silences. Its this silence that confirms that scientism is an ideology not a methodology. By contrast, in scientific practice, the discovery of contradictions and inconsistencies is a spur to further investigation and new conversations. Within scientific praxis contradictions drive new thought, whereas in ideological scientism they block further discussion.
This overarching irony of scientific practice driven by an episteme whose core value is rationality in the form of coherence, reproducing an incoherence at the level of all the sciences in concert (akin to Freud’s “return of the repressed”), was first noted by Georgy Lukács in his “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat”. A dense philosophical text encoded in Lukács’ contradictory amalgam of Marxist materialism and Hegelian idealism, it made little to no impact on philosophy of science. However in the post-war period, Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” made a much bigger splash. Not only did scientists and the public have to revise the incremental model of expanding scientific knowledge progressively chomping away at the knowledge deficit frontier in a smoothly linear way. An even bigger scandal was the idea that different research paradigms were “incommensurable” to each other. This was effectively the same problem Lukács had pointed to earlier, in a now more legible and accessible form.
Scientism’s defenders fought back by charging that Kuhn’s incommensurability entailed radical relativism — by allegedly removing any rational mechanism of choosing between rival theories. Even though Kuhn was subsequently took pains to respond that that was not what he meant and lay out the various criteria that predicted when one paradigm was going to lose out to another, this defence strategy of denouncing the critics of this core problem of interdisciplinary (and sometimes even intradisciplinary) incoherence as being stooges for Big Relativism, has never entirely gone away. But it’s important to register that scientism’s recourse to charges of relativism is a diversion away from talking about the central problem of aggregate level incoherence between the mutually incommensurable theoretical frameworks of the different specialised sciences.
Before we move on to looking at alternatives to scientism and positivism I want to make one more effort to differentiate the cartesian episteme from scientism. For an illustration of the power of the episteme to inspire strong feelings about how the natural universe should be, the classic example would be the discomfort of most physicists with the current state of affairs. That is, that there is currently no single unified theory that encompasses all four fundamental forces of physics (gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces).
The incompatibility between general relativity and the standard model has resisted all attempts to subsume them within a unified theory for over a century now. There’s no doubt, on a practical level, that a unitary theory — so long as it wasn’t too insanely complex to understand — would be a very useful thing. Physics students would only have to learn one theory instead of two, you wouldn’t have to choose which model to apply in different cases, and of course there’s the hope of new explanations solving current mysteries like dark matter, dark energy and dark flow (so much dark, you could say we are living in the new dark ages). But those are just reasons why a unitary theory would be “nice to have”. The feeling that not having a unitary model is not just inconvenient but somehow “wrong” on some profound ontological level, is different. It is based on the idea of the “rational of the real”, that somehow the natural universe should be structured according to our structures of thought that, per the cartesian episteme, sees universality, non-contradiction and internal consistency as natural — not just psychologically but “really”.
But even though this strong feeling that the reality of the natural universe “should” be a certain way, is clearly a normative position that is not based on scientific findings, and is even, arguably, unfalsifiable. That does not make it an epistemic ideology in the way that scientism is. Firstly, the Cartesian episteme is about the nature of reality itself, while even epistemic ideologies are more about the nature of society. Even when in the case of scientism, they don’t always admit it up front. Or at all. Secondly, scientism is eminently falsifiable in a way that the dominant episteme is not. Thirdly, as already discussed, scientism requires “silences” produced by actively ignoring obvious problems. Fourthly, scientism uncritically accepts a “Science”, which is not a symbol but a reified social representation in its own right⁹. Epistemes are not mediated by social representations but are directly axiological. Finally, its entirely possible to not only criticise scientism but also to propose alternative approaches. Whereas not only do I not have any alternative to propose to the cartesian episteme (that would still be recognisably scientific) but I don’t see any evidence that an alternative could emerge from anywhere, except, possibly, from internal contradictions uncovered by scientific praxis running under the current paradigm.
Notes towards a post-positivist approach to science communications
In the first instance, practitioners of science communications need to become critically aware of the epistemic hubris of scientism’s prejudice that only scientific thinking is coherent or rational. This is not just a matter of accepting Moscovici’s starting position that dismissing common sense thinking as irrational, incoherent and inferior is ethically repugnant. On a pragmatic level, its easy to see that approaching an audience with such prejudices is unlikely to win them over. Shouting at people for being stupid never changed anybody’s mind on anything.
As a second corollary we need to become aware of the potentially obstructive role of scientism in castigating the worldviews and networks of values of social groups, particularly minoritarian or marginalised social groups that are resistant to “the message”, of being obstructive due to their “unscientific worldview”. To take a concrete example, the current vaccine hesitancy or outright refusal of the MMR vaccine amongst certain Hasidic communities in New York. It is not the role of science communications to confront or challenge the overall worldviews of the communities they are supposed to be serving. The alternative to scientism’s epistemic ideology is not a “better” ideology, it is to refrain from ideologizing knowledge communication as far as humanly possible. To refrain from judging the worldviews of the communities and groups with whom practitioners are attempting to communicate and be prepared to listen and understand the processes of anchoring that have led to rejection in the first instance, so as to better envision strategies to renegotiate those understandings towards a better outcome. Scientism’s epistemic supremacist reflexes need to be challenged and disarmed for effective community outreach.
Conclusion
The deficit model, like any well-anchored ideology, is like Japanese knotweed. No matter how often the outer visible growth is cut back, through refutation or critique, it will always regrow as long as its deeper roots, its anchor-points are not unearthed and removed. In summary, the root cause — the anchor-point — of the persistent appeal of the deficit model is the positivism wrapped up with scientism and its lack of preparedness to face that an unavoidable part of popularising scientific findings is dealing with the challenges of what Moscovici called anchoring. The core issue here goes beyond whether to accept or reject social representation theory as a specific model, but the ideological resistance of the physical and life sciences towards accepting the findings of the social sciences more generally, when it comes to public communications and the creation of shared meanings in popular lay discourse.
As the “The lure of rationality” paper¹⁰ pointed out, the attachment to the deficit model is not merely ideational but also concretely institutional. Science communication, particularly around matters of public policy, like public health measures around the covid-19 pandemic, for example, is strongly mediated by the preferences of state departments and public institutions which are under pressure to appear as politically non-partisan. This pressure for a “stick to the science, don’t be political” position on these public bodies is aggravated in a political conjuncture where significant elements of the mainstream centre-right have adopted populist anti-expert positions and anti-scientific conspiratorial tropes.
And yet the message of Moscovici’s work in the 1950s is this is not a new phenomena, some novel ‘epistemic crisis’ brought about by the internet age and the advent of social media. The introduction of the ideas of psychoanalysis to 1950s France was the subject of a fierce culture war over its meaning by the bourgeois press, the Catholic church and the Communist party, fought out in printed media and the wireless. As Moscovici pointed out, the same can be said for the reception of evolution or AIDS in the US in the pre-internet age. While controversy over vaccinces goes back to Jenner and cow pox in the late 18th century, in the 21st century we are still in the middle of the public debate currently raging around the objectification and anchoring of neurodiversity conditions like ADHD and autism. From bleach-peddlers to “autie rights” advocates, the debate rages and is caught up in political, ideological and culture wars on many other fronts, including public health and vaccination programmes.
The introduction of novel sciences and scientific findings into the public sphere finds relevance and motivation to the extent that there are stakes around the potential for change of public behaviours, public policy and reallocation of state resources. In that context there will always be a conflict around the acceptability and social meaning of the new knowledge by existing social groups with different perceived interests, both material and ideological. In short, there is never a vacuum in public opinion and common sense, that new scientific knowledge can simply flow into un-opposed. Science communications based on the deficit model of public understanding of science, the diffusion model of media management and the linear model of communications, is often going to run up against concerted ideologically-motivated opposition in the cases where it really matters. Being able to map out potentially opposed ideological positions already staked out in the sphere of public discourse, is going to be a necessary task for effective science communication, going forward. And studying the lessons to be learned from social psychology approaches like social representations theory and other contributions from the social sciences is going to be a necessary part of the discipline for the foreseeable future.
Footnotes
[¹] https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/pusa/25/4 Volume 25 Issue 4, May 2016, Public Understanding of Science, Sage.
[²] “Presenting Social Representations: A Conversation”, Serge Moscovici and Ivana Marková, Culture Psychology 1998 4: 371, DOI: 10.1177/1354067X9800400305.
[³] “Psychoanalysis, Its Image and Its Public”, Serge Moscovici, translated by David Macey, Polity Press, 2008.
[³] I admit I’m playing a bit fast and lose with the concepts of episteme (Foucault), scientific paradigm (Kuhn) and research programme (Lakatos). To avoid overburdening the article with ‘framework talk’, let’s say the cartesian episteme is (mostly) common to all science, that paradigms define “which things and phenomena exist and are meaningful for scientific inquiry”* (empirical consensus, cf Therborn) within a particular scientific community (e.g. psychology and sociology are different paradigms) and that research programmes refer to distinct, rival theoretical frameworks within a particular paradigm. So social identity theory and social representations theory are distinct research programmes within the social psychology paradigm that shares an attachment to the cartesian episteme with all sciences. One could get a bit more subtle than that and say, for e.g., that the cognitive model is the current dominant paradigm within social psychology and that “heterodox” research programmes like social representations, cultural-historical action theory, etc are outside that paradigm. But the general idea of a hierarchical organisation of episteme -> paradigm -> programme is the main takeaway.
* lifted verbatim from https://doi.org/10.1093/hepl/9780198850298.003.0049
[⁴] e.g. “Theory and method of social representations”, Wagner, Duveen, Farr, Jovchelovitch, Lorenzo-Cioldi, Marková, Rose. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, April 1999.
[⁵] “Diffusion, Propagation, Propaganda: And Then Came Effusion. A New Mode of Communication for Social Representations”. Fabrice Buschini, Élizabeth Guillou. Papers on Social Representations, 31 (2), 11.1–11.21 (2022) https://psr.iscte-iul.pt/index.php/PSR/article/view/613
[⁶] The distinction between bottom-up (vs top-down) and transversal approaches is too involved to get into here. Like the lessons of the organiser model for community organising, it is part of the project of evolving a more effective science communication practice, beyond the limits of the deficit model. But that’s another essay altogether.
[⁷] In fact the ‘origin story’ of Cartesianism as a break with the then dominant Aristotelian teleological worldview of Scholastic realism, turns out to be a bit of self-mythologizing fiction. Historians of thought note that in contrast to this self-serving myth, the dominant form of scholasticism in the universities of the time was actually nominalism, which was a lot more continuous with the thought of the Reformation and the rationalist ‘scientific revolution’ of Newton, Leibniz, Descartes, Spinoza et al.
[⁸] People of a philosophical bent tend to react badly to phrases like “objective reality”. For justifiable reasons, in many cases. Not to derail, my position is I accept scientific naturalism, ontologically — that there really is a non-subjective “there” out there. But that’s not the same thing as accepting “objectivism” which is an epistemological ideology, not unrelated to empiricism, distinct from ontological naturalism.
[⁹] “Science” is itself a social representation. We are told that science has opinions, it tells us things, we should listen to it, and so on and so forth. As an objectified (even anthropomorphised!) social representation it has a supplementary ideological aspect beyond that found in the objectivist “metasystem” of scientific practices. Unlike other social representations of individual sciences or scientific findings, the objectified image of science uniquely does not divide the public into scientists and laypeople, because outside of their own narrow speciality all scientists are laypeople, not some epistemic elite apart. The reification and objectification of “science”, not only silences the incoherence between the specific sciences, it leads to the ideological assumption that scientific practicioners have better epistemics than the general public. An assumption that is countered daily by the evidence of any number of past Nobel prize winners and eminent scientists publicly promoting the worst kind of unscientific reactionary prejudices or conspiratorial brain rot.
[¹⁰] “The lure of rationality: Why does the deficit model persist in science communication?”, Simis, Madden, Yeo. Volume 25 Issue 4, May 2016, Public Understanding of Science, Sage. [https://doi.org/10.1177/0963662516629749](https://doi.org/10.1177/0963662516629749)