Should scientists express opinions? If so, how?

March 9, 2023

Among the top 100 most-influential scientists on Twitter—according to an early and somewhat controversial survey by Science way back in 2014—was Trish Greenhalgh (pictured). Today Greenhalgh is at Oxford, where she directs interdisciplinary research at the crossroads of social sciences and medicine. Since those early days of social media, when "sci-comm"—science communication—was exploding across Twitter and other platforms, much has changed. By now, a lot of sci-comm is geared toward defending scientific consensus against opinionated skeptics. In some ways this may have strengthened science. But in other ways it may have weakened it. As Greenhalgh herself pointed out even before the height of her social-media stardom, science often achieves its greatest advances only because skeptics challenge the established consensus.

Moreover, we might add that challenging the status quo requires practical communication skills, too—or, as we might put it at NeuWrite, a creative science-writing toolkit—for persuading resistant audiences to open their minds. But at what point does the art of persuasion start to become unscientific—too much opinion, not enough fact?

Navigating the progress of scientific paradigms

We began our workshop this month by traveling back in time to 2011, where we examined a talk delivered by none other than Trish Greenhalgh. In the talk, Greenhalgh uses an unconventional communication style to explore why and how status quos in science do or don't get challenged—or, as she put it:

why the paper you consider your greatest contribution to the field is also the one that is most likely to get rejected by all the leading journals.

Many scientists may feel that publishing their results in journals, and sticking to the peer-reviewed objective facts, is the only appropriate way to communicate their science. Expressing one's opinions in other venues or formats is sometimes seen, by contrast, as unscientific.

Yet it's also true that many leading scientific journals encourage scientists to express opinions, in the form of commentary articles and invited editorials, in a section separate from the papers. Often, these opinion pieces are the journal's most interesting reading. They allow for a more personal communication style, and they overlap, too, with the kind of opinion essays in news media that scientists can write to reach large audiences among the general public. And then there's social media as well.

So, should scientists step outside the standard path of just publishing peer-reviewed papers, and express their opinions elsewhere, or does that break science's tidy "rules-based order"?

Greenhalgh's talk offers a perspective on this that goes pretty deep, kicking off from the philospoher of science Thomas Kuhn and his landmark book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions:

Kuhn proposed that science progresses in paradigms—a paradigm being a set of assumptions and beliefs shared by a group of scientists about what the important questions are and how they should be tackled. Most scientists, most of the time, work within an existing paradigm and build rather doggedly on what has gone before. This is what Kuhn called "systematic puzzle-solving", Wittgenstein called "the railway tracks of science" and Einstein called "99% perspiration".

Occasionally, someone (often a youngster new to the discipline or perhaps someone in a second career) questions the prevailing assumptions and methodological rules—Einstein's "1% inspiration". A fight ensues, with the newcomer typically rejected by the old school as ignorant or not rigorous, and a breakaway group forms. The most famous example of this is Einstein himself, who challenged the assumptions and methods of Newtonian physics and started playing to new rules, allowing new questions to be addressed in a whole new way.

Paradigms are not bad things. They don't just constrain our thinking, they enable us to think. Science could not progress without them. We learn the rules, apply them, argue about them, modify them. ... [By comparison,] the pre-paradigmatic research of off-road breakaway groups is typically slow, messy and characterised by wrong turnings and periodic pile-ups.

But eventually some tracks are laid and a clear direction of travel is pointed out. Yesterday's radicals become today's sticklers for procedure. Disagreement, and therefore progress, becomes possible. A new paradigm is born.

This suggests that science, at least as an establishment of experts within a society, isn't automatically self-correcting. Sometimes it needs to be prodded, perhaps uncomfortably, from outside its "rules-based order" so that scientific knowledge can advance. So if the paper you consider your greatest contribution to the field is rejected by all the leading journals, there might be no other choice but to express yourself elsewhere—even if other scientists complain that you're just being opinionated.

Meeting your audience where they are

The question remains, though: How to win over an audience—scientists or otherwise—who might be deeply invested in the status quo?

Social media tends to feature polemical pronouncements, even self-righteous ones. Our culture, overall, also seems increasingly overtaken by this combative style. This style of communication was given a name by the literary critic Wayne Booth: "win rhetoric".

Winning a fight might sometimes be worthwhile. But the problem with win rhetoric is that, typically, its combative approach alienates audiences who don't already agree. Win rhetoric may feel satisfying, but it may also completely fail to persuade. Rather than polarization being overcome, polarization is, instead, reinforced.

Booth outlined several alternative forms of rhetoric in his book The Rhetoric of Rhetoric: The Quest for Effective Communication, especially a style that could win over audiences more effectively by doing something more profound. He called this "listening rhetoric". Booth described the most sophisticated, and most difficult, form of listening rhetoric like this:

Here both sides join in a trusting dispute, determined to listen to the opponent's arguments, while persuading the opponent to listen in exchange. Each side attempts to think about the arguments presented by the other side. ... Both sides are pursuing not just victory but a new reality, a new agreement about what is real.

One of the goals of this approach to argumentation is to uncover everyone's underlying assumptions—including one's own. This would include, for example, digging into the assumptions that underlie old and new scientific paradigms.

To study a modest recent example of this, the next text we discussed was exactly the sort of commentary article that scientists can try writing in a professional journal. In this case, a Finnish medical researcher challenged conventional wisdom on shoulder surgery. The article employed  a degree of "listening rhetoric" to identify with the audience's perspective, while at the same time interrogating the underlying assumptions of an outdated paradigm and of a possibly better approach—see "Telling a SAD Story about Public Trust". There's opinion in there, to be sure, but it's tied to a growing body of scientific findings.

Using yourself as a character to dramatize tension

As in the shoulder surgery article, in the last opinion article we looked at, the author used himself as a character, and described his own journey of discovery. In this article—"Freelancer" by NeuWrite Nordic advisory board member Howy Jacobs, a biologist at Tampere University—the author has a firm opinion and this opinion challenges the status-quo consensus. However, he describes the conflict partly as a function of his own quirky life circumstances and renegade disposition. The author thus comes across to the reader as a kind of curious misfit.

This is the opposite of the sort of self-righteous "win rhetoric" delivered with authority that is so common on social media. Instead, by letting himself appear peculiar and unthreatening to the audience, Jacobs lowers the reader's defenses and lets them feel comfortable tagging along for his peculiar and unthreatening opinions—which turn out to be very well backed up by rigorous evidence and thinking.

With this kind of approach, the status-quo reader is more likely to be open to the tension between their own position and the author's opinion, because the reader is not personally implicated in the fight—the tension is safely contained, instead, inside the story of the quirky author's own inner conflict. In the end, this allows the reader to practice a kind of listening rhetoric themselves—maybe without even realizing it.

—Trevor Corson

Bonus: Which kind of rhetoric do you use?

The literary critic Wayne Booth named three major styles of communication:

  1. Win rhetoric
  2. Bargain rhetoric
  3. Listening rhetoric

Within these three styles, Booth identified altogether ten specific types. Can you identify the type or types that you to tend to use? Have you been using them automatically or even unconsciously? Would you want to try a different type?

1. Win rhetoric

Rhetoric whose goal is to defeat the opposition at any cost. Three types:

  1. The honest kind. "My goal is to win because I know that my cause, my case, my convictions are ... right, my opponent's cause absolutely wrong, and my methods will be totally sincere and honest."
  2. "Since my cause is absolutely justified, I will win at all costs, including the cost of my integrity, if necessary."
  3. "I know that my cause is unjust, but winning will be profitable to me, and I'm so skillful that nobody will realize my deceptions. I will employ rhetrickery that appears to be honest."

2. Bargain rhetoric

"The intent is to pursue diplomacy, mediate, find a truce." Three types:

  1. "I want to avoid violence by achieving productive compromise."
  2. "I will compromise even if I know that the result is evil. I won't stand up to my enemy."
  3. "I want to bargain, but I don't know how to do it; I'll simply say yes, while concealing my actual hopes."

3. Listening rhetoric

Four types:

  1. "I am not just seeking a truce. I want to pursue the truth behind our differences. ... Here both sides join in a trusting dispute, determined to listen to the opponent's arguments, while persuading the opponent to listen in exchange. Each side attempts to think about the arguments presented by the other side. ... Both sides are pursuing not just victors but a new reality, a new agreement about what is real." This approach focuses on underlying assumptions.
  2. "Though I am quite sure that my opponent is determined to ignore my case, I will listen to his, hoping to discover some way to engage him in genuine dialogue."
  3. "A shoddy version of win-rhetoric: I know that only by listening closely to my opponent can I hope to outsmart her—and thus gain what I want, no matter what it costs her."
  4. Surrender rhetoric or self-censorship: "Unless I give in and pretend to have been persuaded. I will suffer this or that bad consequence—the loss of a job, of money, or even of life."
  5. "I will be so committed to my listening dogma that I will insist on it even when I can see that the result will be disastrous, both for me and for others."

Resources & references

The following came up in our discussion or were relevant to the workshop texts or theme:

Image: Trisha Greenhalgh, Measuring Impact public lecture, Cognitive Decline Partnership Centre

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