Communication by scientists with policy makers and attentive publics raises ethical issues. Scientists need to decide how to communicate knowledge effectively in a way that nonscientists can understand and use, while remaining honest scientists and presenting estimates of the uncertainty of their inferences. They need to understand their own ethical choices in using scientific information to communicate to audiences. These issues were salient in the Fourth Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change with respect to possible sea level rise from disintegration of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. Due to uncertainty, the reported values of projected sea level rise were incomplete, potentially leading some relevant audiences to underestimate future risk. Such judgments should be made in a principled rather than an ad hoc manner. Five principles for scientific communication under such conditions are important: honesty, precision, audience relevance, process transparency, and specification of uncertainty about conclusions. Some of these principles are of intrinsic importance while others are merely instrumental and subject to trade-offs among them. Scientists engaged in assessments under uncertainty should understand these principles and which trade-offs are acceptable.

Can ordinary citizens in a democracy evaluate the claims of scientic experts? While a denitive answer must be case by case, some scholars have offered sharply opposed general answers: a skeptical "no" (e.g. Scott Brewer) versus an optimistic "yes, no problem" (e.g. Elizabeth Anderson). The article addresses this basic con-ict, arguing that a satisfactory answer requires a rst-order engagement in judging the claims of experts which both skeptics and optimists rule out in taking the issue to be one of second-order assessments only. Having argued that such rst-order judgments are necessary, it then considers how they are possible, outlining a range of practices and virtues that can inform their success and likelihood, and drawing throughout on ancient Greek insights as well as contemporary social psychology and sociology of knowledge. In conclusion the ethics of democratic judgment so developed is applied to the dramatic conviction of the members of an Italian scientic risk commission in L'Aquila. introductionCan ordinary citizens in a democracy evaluate the claims of scientic experts? 1 This problem often arises in multiple contexts, as when we choose our doctors or hear their diagnoses, when we evaluate evidence on juries, or when we assess scientic claims that bear on our votes in elections or our replies to opinion polls. This means that a detailed answer to my opening question will have to be given case by case, depending on specic institutions, historical circumstances, and political 1 The debates in this area generally presuppose denitions of a kind proposed by Scott Brewer: "An expert is a person who has or is regarded as having specialized training that yields sufcient epistemic competence to understand the aims, methods, and results of an expert discipline. An expert discipline is a discipline that in fact requires specialized training in order for a person to attain sufcient epistemic competence to understand its aims and methods, and to be able critically to deploy those methods, in service of these aims, to produce the judgments that issue from its distinctive point of view. A non-expert is a person who does not in fact have the specialized training required to yield sufcient epistemic competence to understand the aims, methods, and judgments of an expert discipline, or to be able critically to deploy those methods, in service of the discipline's aims, to produce the judgments that issue from the discipline's distinctive point of view" (Brewer 1997-98: 1589, emphasis added). I will generally use layperson in place of non-expert, and will eventually suggest that Brewer's type of sharp distinction between expert and non-expert is mistaken. Episteme, 11, 1 (2014) 97-118

In the original publication of "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas," Quentin Skinner enjoined that when it comes to seeking "answers" to questions, "we must learn to do our own thinking for ourselves." In this article, I focus on one of the most recent turns in Skinner's work, to a practice of genealogy. By disentangling various claims too often bundled together under the heading of "contingency," and by distinguishing Skinner's practice of genealogy from Nietzsche's, I argue that that Skinner's genealogical turn is at once less novel, more modest, and more productive than his own characterization of it makes it appear.

This introduction to a special issue of Climatic Change argues that it is timely and welcome to intensify historical research into climate change and climate as factors of history. This is also already an ongoing trend in many disciplines. The article identifies two main strands in historical work on climate change, both multidisciplinary: one that looks for it as a driver of historical change in human societies, the other that analyzes the intellectual and scientific roots of the climate system and its changes. In presenting the five papers in this special issue the introduction argues that it is becoming increasingly important to also situate Bhistoricizing climate change^within the history of thought and practice in wider fields, as a matter of intellectual, political, and social history and theory. The five papers all serve as examples of intellectual, political, and social responses to climate-related phenomena and their consequences (ones that have manifested themselves relatively recently and are predominantly attributable to anthropogenic climate change). The historicizing work that these papers perform lies in the analysis of issues that are rising in societies related to climate change in its modern anthropogenic version. The history here is not so much about past climates, although climate change itself is always directly or indirectly present in the story, but rather about history as the social space where encounters take place and where new conditions for humans and societies and their companion species and their life worlds in natures and environments are unfolding and negotiated. With climate change as a growing phenomenon historicizing climate change in this version will become increasingly relevant.

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