Evidence in Action between Science and Society: Constructing, Validating, and Contesting Knowledge

This volume is an interdisciplinary attempt to insert a broader, historically informed perspective into current political and academic debates on the issue of evidence and the reliability of scientific knowledge.

The tensions between competing paradigms, different bodies of knowledge and the relative hierarchies between them are a crucial element of the historical and contemporary dynamics of scientific knowledge production. The negotiation of evidence is at the heart of this process. Starting from the premise that evidence constitutes a central, but also essentially contested concept in contemporary knowledge-based societies, this volume focuses on how evidence is generated and applied in practice―in other words, on “evidence in action.” The contributions analyze and compare different evidence practices within the field of science and technology, how they interlink with different forms of power, their interaction with and impact on the legal and political domain, and their relationship to other, more heterodox forms of evidence that challenge traditional notions of evidence. In doing so, this volume provides much-needed context and historical background to contemporary debates on the so-called “post-truth” society.

Evidence in Action is the perfect resource for all those interested in the relationship between science, technology, and the role of knowledge in society.

Chapter 6 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

Sarah Ehlers is a postdoctoral researcher working on the global history of medicine, science and the environment at the Institute for the History of Science and Technology at the Deutsches Museum and an affiliated researcher at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

Stefan Esselborn is a postdoctoral researcher at the Professur für Technikgeschichte at the Technical University of Munich. He is writing and teaching on topics in the fields of global and colonial history, the history of science and technology, the history of knowledge and expertise, and the history of risk and safety.