Heteroglossolalia 3

Two thoughts apposite for the current political-cultural atmosphere:

"Without succumbing to anti-intellectualism, a democratic society must always be suspicious of conceptions of knowledge in which the most valued forms of knowledge are the least accessible, or more sociologically, the most esteemed knowledge producers are the ones whose goods are accessible to an elite set of consumers (e.g., other professional knowledge producers and, indirectly, their patrons)"
(Steve Fuller. 1992. Social Epistemology and the Research Agenda of Science Studies. p.397).

"The myth of the scientific method, then, encourages the laity to have an unrealistic view of scientists and therefore also to have unrealistic expectations of them and of science; and it encourages scientists themselves to be unrealistic about themselves and science, and to neglect the importance of cultivating consciously ethical behavior. It leads the scientific community to assume that its public credibility is permanent and quite automatically guaranteed-which makes it shocking and inexplicable when the credibility of science is brought into question…"
(Henry Bauer. 1992. Scientific Literacy and the Myth of the Scientific Method. pp.40-41)