Contribution
It names a pair, technologies of hubris and of humility, that became a standard frame in science-and-technology studies for the limits of expert prediction in governance. Its argument is that participation, already accepted in principle by 2003, is not enough: what must change is the substance of what is asked, through four focal points that bring the unknown, the normative and the distributive into deliberation.
Key insight
Predictive methods fail in a patterned way. They “focus on the known at the expense of the unknown”, so “they downplay what falls outside their field of vision, and overstate whatever falls within”; they hide judgment behind claims of objectivity; and they learn from disasters only what fits their initial assumptions. The answer is not better prediction but a standing practice of asking, of any enterprise that would alter society, what it is for, who will be hurt, who benefits, and how we can know.
Assumptions
- The ‘Mode 2’ account of science (Gibbons et al. 1994) is taken as broadly right: knowledge is produced in contexts of application and quality control has merged with accountability.
- Regulatory science’s credibility rests on accountability, its probity, representativeness and transparency, more than on peer judgment of quality (Jasanoff 1990, restated pp. 233–234).
- Risk is a condition of modernity (Beck), not a set of probabilities to be calculated away (p. 224).
Key results
The paper is an argument, not a study.
- The post-war contract has broken down (pp. 227–235): fraud cases, charges of interest and bias, the collapse of the basic–applied distinction, Funtowicz and Ravetz’s post-normal science.
- The participatory turn is insufficient (pp. 235–238). Formal participation can come too late, be ad hoc, or deepen controversy; the Shelby Amendment of 1998 turned transparency into a means of attacking findings; participation inside a risk-assessment frame “may not admit novel viewpoints”. “Participation alone, then, does not answer the problem.”
- Three limits of the technologies of hubris (pp. 238–239): peripheral blindness to uncertainty; pre-emption of political discussion; inability to internalize challenges outside their framing (single-chemical toxicity testing; Bhopal).
- Four focal points (pp. 240–242): framing (a problem framed wrongly gets a solution with the same defect); vulnerability (classifications by physical and biological indicators overlook “history, place, and social connectedness”); distribution (ethics committees as “end-of-pipe legitimation devices”; the end of OTA in 1995); learning (experience is “polysemic”; the cause of a failure may look different “to the marginal or the excluded”).
Claims
| id | claim | strength | support |
|---|---|---|---|
| C1 | Predictive policy methods systematically understate what lies outside their frame | moderate | cited literatures (Perrow, Irwin and Wynne, Porter) and examples; no systematic evidence |
| C2 | Formal participation does not by itself democratize technical decisions | moderate | examples (Shelby Amendment, consensus conferences, RAFI against Monsanto) |
| C3 | Framing, vulnerability, distribution and learning are the right focal points | weak | proposed; the author calls them “pebbles thrown into a pond, with untested force” |
Concepts
- Technologies of hubris: predictive methods (risk assessment, cost–benefit analysis, climate modelling) that achieve power through claims of objectivity and serve management and control.
- Technologies of humility: “methods, or better yet institutionalized habits of thought, that try to come to grips with the ragged fringes of human understanding — the unknown, the uncertain, the ambiguous, and the uncontrollable”.
- Civic epistemology: scattered and private knowledge “amalgamated, perhaps even disciplined” into a dependable public form (p. 240).
Connections
It builds on Jasanoff’s The Fifth Branch (1990) on regulatory science, on Gibbons et al. (1994) and Nowotny, Scott and Gibbons (2001) on Mode 2 and socially robust knowledge, on Funtowicz and Ravetz on post-normal science, and on Beck and Perrow. Longino’s account of the critical organization of a scientific community (THEORY-151), beside which this is filed, is about how a community’s knowledge is made objective; Jasanoff’s is about how a polity should decide under the uncertainty that knowledge leaves.
Bearing on the record
- CASE-172. The case uses the paper for the breadth of harms that are hard to quantify in advance. That fits, with one adjustment. Jasanoff writes about assessing a technology before it is adopted, not about counting the harm of a policy after it. Her first limit is directly the case’s “success described at one level”: a saving reported by a predictive, accounting frame overstates what falls within its field of vision and leaves out what falls outside, which is CLAIM-348’s point that the description adequate to one target does not settle another. Her vulnerability point, that “history, place, and social connectedness” fall out of population-level indicators, names what the case says a reinstated grant does not restore: the cohort and the local research tradition. She gives no method for measuring either, so she supports the case’s “what it shows” and not any size of loss.
- THEORY-151. Not a rival: Longino is about the social conditions of objectivity inside a community; Jasanoff is about governance between experts and publics. Her claim that regulatory science’s credibility rests on accountability rather than peer quality is a point where the two meet and could be compared.
No instruction for machine-learning practice; nothing for the anthology.
Limitations
- An essay. It proposes a frame; it does not test it, and says so.
- US and European examples of 1980–2002, mostly biotechnology, chemicals and BSE. Whether the focal points work as institutions is not shown; no technology of humility in operation is described.
- Participation is argued to be necessary and insufficient, but who participates and how disagreements are settled is left open.
- Errors and slips. Note 39 numbers the environmental-justice order “Executive Order 12298”; Executive Order 12898 is the order of 11 February 1994 on environmental justice that the text describes.
Open questions
- What would a technology of humility look like as a standing procedure rather than a habit of thought, and how would one tell whether it had changed a decision?