Veritocracy: Truth, Science, and How to Preserve Democracy

Western democracies are suffering from populism, verging on fascism, because of the erosion of truth. This book argues that truth can grow out of citizenship education in how science really works, allied with an explicit culture of truth among politicians. While science operates outside the timescale of politics, it can serve as an object lesson for political decision-making under democracy. Using the examples of disease prevention and climate change, Harry Collins and Robert Evans show why citizens would be wise to trust the substantive findings of science as well as its moral culture. They also present demarcation criteria for distinguishing between real expertise and populist claims and also for distinguishing between real science and contenders for that title that do not deserve the moniker. For example, they argue that the discipline of economics, as currently constituted, does not deserve the title of science because it does not seek correspondence truth but instead works in a circular way within its own models without concern for how those models with their assumptions actually map onto reality. The solution the authors propose – veritocracy, a democracy with truth at its heart – is incompatible with either left or right totalitarianism and with meaningless slogans. To establish veritocracies we must start with a new approach to science education.