Can we Trust Science and, if so, Why?

Abstract

The trustworthiness of scientific findings is at the center of current scholarly and public debates. The contestation of scientific knowledge claims is reason to take a break from our every-day tasks as scientists and to reflect upon our doing as professional truth-seekers. This essay reviews two recent books on foundational and practical questions on the scholarly generation of knowledge. 'Why Trust Science' (Oreskes) is an intellectual expedition into the epistemological foundations of science. 'Transparent and Reproducible Social Science Research' (Christensen, Freese, Miguel) is the first book-length primer on contemporary Open Science debates in the social sciences. Together, these books demonstrate the range of what we can learn from the new wave of ‘research on research’, both as curious citizens and as academic scholars.