Framing science

Chris Mooney and Matthew C. Nisbet have written a piece for Science in which they try to convince scientists that they need to reframe their research depending on their audience.

I haven't read the piece (if someone has it, I would appreciate getting a copy of itgot it, and will read it tomorrow), but going from what they have written on their blogs, and from what people have written in response to the piece, the basic message is that it doesn't help using science-speak, when talking with people who don't understand (or beleive) the basics. Instead, research should be cloaked in terms that appeals to the audience. The example given is to talk about "stewardship of the Earth" when talking to Evangelists about global warming.

Greg Laden has a long post about why this is the wrong use of the theory of framing: Framing Science “Paper” Is Deeply Flawed.
Still, even if they are misusing, or misunderstanding, the concept of frames, it's worth to debate if the ideas have merit.

Obviously, as Thorbjörn Larsson has commented on several blogs, the authors are focusing on the US, and ignoring the rest of the world (a point that both Mooney and Nisbet have ignored so far). So this is obviously the "frame" (sorry Greg) we should consider the ideas in.

First of all, I'll say that I think Nisbet and Mooney have some worthwhile ideas, and that they are right that scientists should tailor their presentations to the audience. However, I think they are missing some very important points.

As Abbie, of ERV, points out, it can be very hard to get to the audience in the first place. Even if that happens, then there is the simple problem of explaining science to someone whose entire world view is based upon ideas that flies against everything we know about science.

How do you convince someone of the evidence of global warming or evolution when they believe that the world is only 6000 years old? Much of the evidence for these things is deeply connected to the fact that we know the age of the Earth (or a fitting approximation of it).
When people like Jerry Falwell can cite the Bible as evidence for global warming not being a problem, how can we counter that? If we share the same basic premises as such people, or if we recast the science to reflect those premises, the science becomes meaningless.

And then there is the simple fact that casting science in non-scientific ways will defeat the whole purpose of science. As someone (PZ?) said, we don't want them to believe in evolution (or whatever other subject we're talking about), we want them to understand it. There is a very big difference between those two things.
Of course, we don't want people to understand every nuance of it, but we do want people to understand the basic principles behind the scientific theories, and what it means. Evolution as a concept is quite simple to understand, any child can do it, but as soon as you mix in conflicting notions (like the creation of man), there is a fundamental contradiction between the scientific theory and the basic premises of understanding.

So, what I am leading up to, is the simple fact that while I agree with Mooney and Nisbet that it helps if the scientists can speak the same language as the audience (something that Coturnix goes into in this post: Framing Science - the Dialogue of the Deaf), I think they are missing the point somewhat.

As Buridan explains, scientists shouldn't be used in the role that Mooney and Nisbet seems to envision them in. Instead scientists should do or teach science, and science communicators should try to communicate the science in a way that suits the audience. Science communicators can certainly be scientists, as the many great science bloggers out there show, but the average scientist is not a suitable communicator for the type of audience as Mooney and Nisbet describes (something that Cotournix also gets into in his post).

In other words, as PZ says, it seems a bit strange that it's the scientists that's the target of that Science piece. Instead it should be the science communicators - the science journalists like Chris Mooney or Carl Zimmer. They are the ones who can take science and put it into a framework that suits the audience, not the scientists. And as Carl Zimmer says, he doesn't want the scientists to tell him what his story should be.

Now, stepping out of a US-centric context, and looking at how the US differ from the rest of the Western World, I would say that it seems to me that the US seems to have a higher degree of science illiteracy. So, perhaps the best way of solving the problem is to ensure a better standard of science teaching. This needs to be done to give people a basic understanding of what is and isn't science. This won't do anything for the people too wedded to their non-science worldviews, but it will hopefully help the future average citizen in understanding when something flies in the faces of everything we know about science.