Scientific Knowledge in a Pandemic

Abstract

AbstractDuring the Covid-19 pandemic, billions of people urgently wanted, and needed, answers to questions concerning scientific knowledge. One thing lacking was a clear account of how the individual could identify the future-proof scientific claims (the ‘facts’), distinguishing them from other types of scientific claim, such as ‘promising hypotheses’, or ‘useful speculations’. Looking to the criteria for future-proof science put forward in this book, a worry arises that nothing scientists were saying, in 2020, about the pandemic could responsibly be called ‘future-proof’, since in 2020 so little time had passed for relevant scientific claims to be internationally scrutinised. But scientists did in fact have some relevant future-proof knowledge, even only a handful of weeks after the onset of the pandemic. This chapter explains how this is possible, given that usually absolute confidence in scientific claims depends upon extensive international scrutiny, often taking many years.