Alex WellersteinVerified account

You could imagine a barrage of alternative questions that might have given alternative data (e.g., "if a scientific study reported that X was bad for you, would you give it up?" — and then compare that to, say, a priest or your local doctor or whatever).

One of the other questions is about confidence to act in the public interest, where science rates highly too (I could see STSers responding in the negative here...). Also note they distinguish science from medicine, which has experienced declining trust.

I suspect people privately divvy up “science” such that you would have a lot of people who have confidence in science but not in certain fields to live up to what they regard as scientific standards.

Yeah. I have had a lot of conversations that have led me to think that when people say "science" they mean a radically different set of ideas depending on the context (even STSers). It's not the best-defined term despite it being invoked frequently.

It’s not even definable as a term.

Well, sure, but I mean, not in a demarcation-problem sense, just "what people mean when they talk about science more generally" sense. I think one could parse out maybe 4-5 common "meanings" that are separate from the demarcation problem issues.

Separately: I recently read Collin's "Are we all scientific experts now?" and was kind of amazed that after what I thought was a pretty good taxonomy of "expertises," in the end he literally just goes to Merton to solve the demarcation problem at the heart of his question.