Hazards: Technology and Fairness (1986)

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SCIENCE AND ITS LIMITS: THE REGULATOR'S DILEMMA 17 original typesetting files. Page breaks are true to the original; line lengths, word breaks, heading styles, and other typesetting-specific formatting, however, cannot be About this PDF file: This new digital representation of the original work has been recomposed from XML files created from the original paper book, not from the retained, and some typographic errors may have been accidentally inserted. Please use the print version of this publication as the authoritative version for attribution. The Delaney Clause is the worst example of how disregard for an intrinsic limit of science can lead to bad policy by overenthusiastic politicians. Physicist Harvey Brooks has often pointed out that one can never prove the impossibility of an event that is not forbidden by a law of nature. Most will agree that a perpetuum mobile is impossible because it violates the laws of thermodynamics. That one molecule of a polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) may cause a cancer in humans is a proposition that violates no law of nature: hence, many, even within the scientific community, seem willing to believe that this possibility is something to worry about! It was this error that led to the Delaney Clause. THE ATTACK ON SCIENCE FROM THE SOCIOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE When is an event so rare that the prediction of its occurrence forever lies outside the domain of science, that is, within the domain of trans-science? Clearly we cannot say. Perhaps as science progresses, this boundary between science and trans-science recedes toward events of lower frequency. But at any stage the boundary is fuzzy, and much scientific controversy revolves around deciding where that boundary lies. One need only read the violent exchange between Edward P. Radford and Harald H. Rossi (National Research Council, 1980) over the risk of cancer from low levels of radiation to recognize that, where the facts are obscure, argument—even ad hominem argument— blossoms. Indeed, Alice Whittemore (1983), in an article entitled "Facts and Values in Risk Analysis for Environmental Toxicants," has pointed out that at this "rare event" boundary between science and trans-science, facts and values are always intermingled. A scientist who believes that nuclear energy is evil because it inevitably leads to proliferation of nuclear weapons (which is a common basis for opposition to nuclear energy) is likely to form judgments about the data on induction of leukemia from low-level exposures at Nagasaki that are different from the judgments of a scientist whose whole career has been devoted to making nuclear power work. Cognitive dissonance is all but unavoidable when the data are ambiguous and the social and political stakes are high. No one would dispute that judgments of scientific truth are much affected by the scientist's value system when the issues are at or close to the boundary between science and trans-science. On the other hand, as the matter under dispute moves away from that border into the domain of science, most would claim that the scientist's extrascientific values intrude less and less. Soviet scientists and American scientists may disagree on the effectiveness of a ballistic missile defense, but they agree on the cross section of uranium-235 or the lifetime of the pi-meson. This all seems obvious, even trite. Yet in the past decade or so, a school of 

SCIENCE AND ITS LIMITS: THE REGULATOR'S DILEMMA 18 original typesetting files. Page breaks are true to the original; line lengths, word breaks, heading styles, and other typesetting-specific formatting, however, cannot be About this PDF file: This new digital representation of the original work has been recomposed from XML files created from the original paper book, not from the retained, and some typographic errors may have been accidentally inserted. Please use the print version of this publication as the authoritative version for attribution. sociology of knowledge has sprung up in the United Kingdom, claiming that "scientific views are determined by social (external) conditions, rather than by the internal logic of scientific tradition and inherent characteristics of the phenomenal world" (Ben-David, 1978), or that "all knowledge and knowledge claims are to be treated as being socially constructed: genesis, acceptance, and rejection of knowledge [are] sought in the domain of the Social World rather than . . . the Natural World" (Pinch and Bijker, 1984). The attack here is not on science at the border, in particular, the prediction of the frequency of rare events. At least the more extreme of the sociologists of knowledge claim that the traditional ways of establishing scientific truth—by appealing to nature in a disciplined manner—are not how science really works even in situations very far from the border between science and trans-science. Scientists are seen as competitors for prestige, for pay, and for power, and it is the interplay between these conflicting aspirations, not the working of some underlying scientific ethic, that defines scientific "truth." To be sure, these attitudes toward science are not widely held by practicing scientists at the center of scientific activity; however, they are taken seriously by many political activists who, though not in the mainstream of science, nevertheless exert important influence on other institutions—the press, the media, the courts— which ultimately influence public attitudes toward science and its technologies. If one takes such a caricature of science seriously, how can one trust an expert? If scientific truth, even at the core of science, is decided by negotiation between individuals in conflict because they hold different nonscientific beliefs, how can one say that this scientist's opinion is preferred to that one's? And if the matter at issue moves across the science/trans-science boundary, where all we can say with certainty is that uncertainties are very large, how much less able are we to distinguish between the expert and the charlatan, between the scientist who tries to adhere to the usual norms of scientific behavior and the scientist who suppresses facts that conflict with his or her political, social, or moral preconceptions. It will not do to define a new brunch of science, "regulatory science," in which the norms of scientific proof are less demanding than are the norms in ordinary science. A far more honest and straightforward way of dealing with the intrinsic inability of science to predict the occurrence of rare events is to concede this limitation and not to ask of science or scientists more than they are capable of providing. Regulators, instead of asking science for answers to unanswerable questions, ought to be content with less far-reaching answers; where uncertainty bands can be established, they should regulate on the basis of uncertainty; where uncertainty bands are so wide as to be meaningless, they need to recast questions so that regulation does not depend on answers to the unanswerable. And, since these same limits apply