Modern societies rely on science more than ever, yet increasingly identify it with its technological outcomes. Both its cultural role—as a form of critical inquiry that shapes our worldviews—and its social role—as a source of democratic rationality—are overshadowed by performance alone. This reduction makes scientific authority simultaneously powerful and fragile, and calls for a reconsideration of what we mean by “trust in science.”

 

The Crisis

Contemporary societies are often described as being dominated by scientific and technological rationality. Yet this diagnosis sits uneasily beside another familiar claim: that public trust in science is collapsing. How can societies supposedly governed by scientific rationality simultaneously distrust science? The paradox is immediately solved once we realize that science is, in its turn, identified with instrumental rationality—efficiently achieving certain ends by certain means. Instrumental rationality is not foreign to science; it is one of its indispensable dimensions, but it does not exhaust scientific rationality. The problem arises when this dimension comes to define science as a whole, giving rise to a poor and incomplete representation, one in which science is trusted only as long as it functions as an efficient service provider. What has progressively lost value is science as a cultural practice of disciplined doubt, where criticism is grounded in abstraction and experiment. We continue to consume the products of scientific thought while progressively abandoning the habits of mind that made them possible. As a side effect, when science displays errors, uncertainties, or internal disagreements that temporarily undermine its practical effectiveness, it can quickly lose legitimacy and be reinterpreted as deceptive or unreliable, opening the way to public distrust.

But, again, distrust is a side effect of a deeper problem. Interestingly enough, this corresponds to a double negation of Enlightenment ideals. The first was famously articulated by T. Adorno and M. Horkheimer, who remarked that these ideals were betrayed when societies reified instrumental rationality—which has since been embraced as a new myth that suffocates all other forms of rationality. The second betrayal concerns science itself. Historically, science played a key role in the Enlightenment as a force for humanity to counter superstition and dogmatic authority. Yet, science has been flattened into a single dimension: that of a mere service provider. Although instrumental rationality is one undeniable dimension of science, and necessary for technological advancement, to borrow Herbert Marcuse’s famous expression, science itself risks being reduced to a one-dimensional existence.

Sometimes, in order to counter the drift toward a science primarily valued for its immediate economic and technological returns, we point to well-known historical cases in which foundational and philosophical speculations eventually produced transformative technologies. The development of quantum information technologies, for instance, can be traced back to highly abstract debates on the foundations of quantum mechanics, such as the 1935 discussion by Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen on the completeness of the theory. Yet appealing to later applications risks obscuring the core issue, because it reinforces the very logic it seeks to challenge: foundational research is defended insofar as it eventually “pays off.”

Therefore, it would be naive to think that the problem is only one of scientific literacy, and dangerous to focus solely on the technological value of science even when the latter is not immediate. The crisis today does not stem primarily from ignorance or misinformation, but from the progressive cultural redefinition of science as a purely technical instrument of problem-solving. Improving citizens’ technical understanding of science would address the crisis only partially.

Beyond a Technocratic Image: Science as Culture

Addressing this crisis therefore requires more than intensifying outreach; it calls for a deeper reorientation in how science is understood and narrated, one that reconnects scientific practice with its epistemic foundations and its broader cultural meaning. An enlightening perspective emerges from the popular works of major twentieth-century scientists. Figures such as Heisenberg and Schrödinger, or biologists like Monod and Jacob, presented scientific achievements as part of a broader cultural and philosophical discourse. In these accounts, scientific discovery was not separated from reflection on its conceptual, epistemic, and philosophical implications. The absence of this connection marks a key limitation of today’s dominant approach to science communication.

Attempts to overcome this limitation often take the form of highlighting analogies or intersections between disciplines—for example, highlighting connections between mathematics and art. Such interdisciplinary connections are valuable, but they do not fully address the core issue. What remains largely absent from public representations of science is its character as a historical and epistemic process to be understood as part of a wider cultural inquiry—and, in an important sense, as a democratic practice in which concepts evolve through error, controversy, and revision, and in which knowledge advances precisely because claims are exposed to systematic criticism.

Of course, the work of scientists differs from that of philosophers, both in practice and in language. Science indeed gradually differentiated itself from philosophy beginning in the early modern period in a gradual and historically complex process; yet this separation occurred precisely because of science’s philosophical nature—without which science itself would never have emerged.

For this reason, scientific outreach and education should operate on two distinct but complementary levels. The first level presents science as a continuation of philosophy, as a fundamental mode of human inquiry that shapes our worldview, grounded in a distinctive use of reason—one that combines theory and experiment, not reducible to immediate practical goals; a form of inquiry that is inherently heretical, in that it challenges common sense before possibly reaffirming it; and a mode of constructive skepticism, where doubt is not nihilism but a disciplined form of inquiry rooted in careful observation and powerful abstraction. The second level narrates science through the historical evolution of its concepts, methods, and procedures that mark a discontinuity with philosophy while also revealing science’s deep entanglement with technology.

Today, these two levels are often underestimated, or even hidden, in science education and communication, and the development of scientific concepts is rarely presented as a genuinely problematic process. When a historical-critical approach is adopted, it is frequently oversimplified, missing the opportunity to show how these developments are deeply connected to the nature of rationality itself. The result is a tendency to display science—much like displaying a model—without actually telling its story. Yet telling the story of science is a far more complex endeavor.

Physics provides a useful illustration of science as a continuation of philosophy. It is worth remarking that it did not merely add experimentation and quantification to philosophy; it also altered the very structure of inquiry itself. Explanation shifted from a search for the intrinsic essence of things toward an investigation of the relations, mechanisms, and lawful connections through which phenomena become intelligible. This entailed a profound transformation in the very nature of observation, demanding systematic experimentation and quantitative analysis, thereby giving rise to what is called the scientific method.

The intertwining of quantification and intervention also marks the point where science and technique become inseparable, giving rise to what is often described as the science-technology nexus. Crucially, this technological dimension is not a mere tool for the utilitarian domination of nature; rather, it functions as a cognitive prosthesis—a rigorous testing ground that forces human reason to confront its own limits and biases against the unyielding resistance of what we call reality. This has profound cultural value. By making phenomena measurable, science does not merely increase precision; it also reshapes the conceptual categories through which reality itself becomes intelligible. The trustworthiness of science is grounded not only in its practical successes nor in an alleged algorithmic scientific method, but in a distinctive intellectual practice that makes such successes possible.

The cultural significance of this form of rationality, which includes instrumental rationality as one of its dimensions, becomes evident when one considers how scientific revolutions repeatedly reshape broader conceptual frameworks. Since Georg Cantor, any serious exploration of the infinite—whether in theology, philosophy, art, or literature—can scarcely ignore the mathematical conception of the infinite. Similarly, the twentieth-century redefinition of space and time radically altered our understanding of reality, prompting major philosophical re-evaluations of Kant’s conception of space and time as a priori categories. These are not merely technical developments; they are paradigmatic instances of physics and mathematics reshaping the broader cultural matrix. Such breakthroughs do more than expand our objective knowledge of the world; they also contribute to a broader project of human self-understanding, recalling the Socratic ideal of care for the soul. Science alone is certainly not enough—poetry, art, literature and philosophy remain indispensable—but it is a vital partner in this humanistic endeavor. Can this profound dimension of science survive within a framework that increasingly reduces it to a mere tool for practical purposes?

Science and Democracy

Yet, if the cultural and epistemic role of science is eroded, what becomes of its role as an example of democratic rationality? Science is not democratic because every opinion carries equal weight. It is democratic because no claim is, in principle, immune from criticism. It provides structured and powerful ways for such criticism to be exercised. These features cannot be reduced to science’s practical success alone. What is ultimately lost is “scientific rationality” and its relevance for democratic societies.

Indeed, scientific rationality cannot be reduced to the use of logic and experimentation alone. Considered in isolation, these may appear as instruments of merely calculative or instrumental reason. Their distinctive scientific character emerges only when they are understood as tools of critical inquiry within a self-correcting process.

For this reason, scientific rationality can be fully appreciated only from a historical and cultural perspective, encompassing not only the development of science itself but also its role in shaping the evolution of ideas, worldviews, and critical rationality. Without this perspective, the nature of “scientific rationality” remains only partially visible.

When science communication and education focus mainly on the uncritical and a-cultural presentation of results, they fail to nurture this critical mindset, leaving citizens ill-equipped to navigate the counter-intuitive nature of scientific inquiry.

If scientific rationality requires sustained intellectual practice, the question immediately arises: where is this practice cultivated? Increasingly, the answer lies in a troubling direction—in the transformation of science education itself.

Science as Algorithm: The Mechanization of Education

This technocratic image of science does not emerge in a vacuum; it is systematically cultivated within our classrooms through the very way scientific disciplines are taught. Physics and mathematics are increasingly taught as a collection of algorithms: a “give me the rule and I will solve the problem” approach. Although problem-solving is important, it does not exhaust all the dimensions of science and education. It is becoming rare to find classrooms where students are shown what it actually means to prove a theorem or to grapple with the conceptual architecture of a theory. We continue to teach the outputs of scientific rationality while neglecting the intellectual disciplines that produced them. Driven by the demands of the market for efficiency and speed, schools and universities have pursued a “mechanical” ideal of knowledge. This has led to a paradoxical decline in our capacity for critical thinking. While “critical thinking” has become a ubiquitous buzzword in educational policy, it has simultaneously vanished from the actual experience of the classroom. Critical thinking requires a capacity for abstraction: the heretical act of stepping outside a given problem or framework and examining it from a broader or different perspective. Today, this abstraction ability is more than ever replaced by the solution of concrete problems in a given and unchangeable framework, in the conviction that abstraction is unhelpful or, even worse, not within reach of our students.

Today, the rise of artificial intelligence has brought us to an example of the heterogenesis of ends: AI has shown us that it can outperform humans in many forms of algorithmic processing and instrumental problem-solving. In doing so, it has inadvertently revealed that what society truly requires from us is not more “machinic” processing, but the very capacity for abstraction, critical judgment, and philosophical depth that we have spent decades purging from our curricula.

Ultimately, this algorithmic reduction is precisely what renders scientific authority so fragile when faced with doubt or uncertainty: a mind trained mainly to follow rules is ill-equipped to navigate the self-correcting and often messy process of actual scientific discovery.

Trust in What?

It is at this point that the very notion of “trust in science” begins to look less straightforward than it appears. Today, trust is often grounded in a simple expectation: science works. It delivers vaccines, technologies, and predictions. But this form of trust—based primarily on past success—is inherently fragile, as noted above.

At the same time, this notion of trust is too narrow. It reduces science to performance—to a system valued for its outputs rather than for its “way of thinking.” In this view, science becomes something to rely on, but not something to understand.

This creates a tension at the heart of modern societies. Citizens are asked to trust science, yet they are rarely invited to see what makes it different from pure efficiency.

A more resilient relationship would rest not on trust in outcomes alone, but on engagement with science as a cultural and epistemic practice essential to democratic life. The role of science as a guardian of democratic rationality—a value it has preserved for centuries—needs to be more explicitly emphasized in science communication and education. Is this not a profound social value?

This issue becomes particularly visible when one considers contemporary debates on the democratization of science. The problem is not only to involve citizens in the scientific endeavor and emphasize its social nature, but also to explain the rationale behind such an endeavor. This requires a robust retrieval of its philosophical nature and its radical departure from common-sense rationality.

On the other hand, this is not a re-proposal of the deficit model. It is indeed clear that the real deficit lies in what scientists and educators deem relevant to communicate to students and citizens. The other deficit—scientists’ own lack of training in communication—might paradoxically hold a hidden benefit, as long as mainstream communication remains trapped within a technocratic paradigm.

Conclusions

One might argue that focusing on a ‘cultural’ crisis of science’s image is anachronistic at a time when, particularly in the United States, the pragmatic survival of science is under threat from drastic funding cuts. The science–society social contract appears to be dying if not already dead. Yet these crises are two sides of the same coin. If science were valued not merely for its utilitarian output but as an essential public good for democracy, its social contract would not be so easily rescinded.

The current crisis in the public image of science cannot be addressed solely through increased funding or more efficient communication. Science policy and education must explicitly recognize the cultural and democratic value of scientific knowledge. This entails sustained support for foundational research and an educational approach that integrates historical and philosophical perspectives into scientific training. Without such a shift, science risks remaining socially powerful—shaping policy and technology—yet epistemically fragile in the public sphere, trusted for what it delivers rather than for “how it knows”.

An uncomfortable question remains: Is this fragility merely a communication problem, or does it reflect a shift in how scientists themselves conceive their discipline? The gravest threat to science may not come from its enemies, but from its success. For in triumphing as technology, science risks forgetting itself as culture. If the scientific enterprise has come to see itself primarily as a technical profession, then we must reintegrate the history and philosophy of science into its core curricula. Future scientists must be equipped to see their work not merely as a specialized profession, but as a cultural and epistemic enterprise essential to the health of reflective democratic societies. Without this shift, we risk sustaining a science that is technologically productive and socially indispensable, yet culturally hollow—a science without “Science.”