The discussion of Levellers and Diggers in recent STS community base their roots on the Lippmann-Dewey Debate in 1920s. The main question they were circling around was that “how to locate the roles of expertise in a functioning democracy”. The one thing they agreed upon was the problem of public and its definition. Dewey advocated that the public must get organized and educated to deal with the problems emerged in the state. In contrast, Lippmann considered the public as an abstract entity and paved the way for the modern neoliberal aphorisms about irrational citizens. The contemporary fellow of Dewey would be Jasonoff as a Leveller and the fellow of Lippmann would be Oreskes as a Digger.
Referring to the second Dewey-Lippmann debate, the key concept appearing on Dewey was a bottom-up democracy with educated citizens while Lippmann insisted on that citizens do not have time, energy, intellect, or individual incentive to become sufficiently well-informed political participants and therefore he suggested election among elites and constitutional checks and balances to prevent them abusing their power (Curtis, 2020, p.287). The necessity or role of experts is the crucial separation point between Levellers and Diggers. Levellers, in general, advocated experts as enemies of democracy and that is why peer review process itself is skewed. They endorsed citizen scientists and open science movements. Jasonoff believed expertise should be challenged more like in trials, litigations, or allegations by public in a democracy. Nonetheless, Levellers fail to diagnose that equating democratic community with scientific practices never revealed a practical political program and in fact, war times separated science from public promoting apolitical science, such as during the Cold War.
On the other hand, Diggers accepted the drawbacks of expertise, but they suggested reforms in the process. Oreskes believed in scientific consensus as in a jury coming up with a decision. She and Eric Conway claimed in their famous book Merchants of Doubt that peer review can offer a strong solution to science debates, such as for the tobacco case, since the process revises evidence not just opinions. However, one can ask that if we believe in experts and their consensus on critical subjects, then what are we doubting for really?
Following up the above question, I would like to express my own tendencies in this debate. My position would be close to the Diggers because enemies of the public are not experts (RIP Feyerabend) but corrupted administrations who hire corrupted experts. I believe the right combination of sticking with the scientific method (background knowledge-hypothesis-test-accept/refuse) and value-judgment inherited to the whole process could make experts’ work easier in evaluating ‘good science’ because the offered semi-mechanistic process would not allow experts’ tricks in post-production. Secondly, the method strengthened with values could help public to live in a better natural environment supported with scientific practices if we agree on that climate change is and will be the hot topic by far for the next 50 years. The reasoning behind that promise is that the long-term scientific projects driven by neoliberal purposes are circling around geoengineering on Earth and terraforming on Mars as a new colonization attack. While cultivating well-educated and informed citizens is not an attainable goal, raising well-behaved scientists would be worth to try.
References
Curtis, W. M. (2020). Democracy versus Neoliberalism: The Second Dewey-Lippmann Debate. American Political Thought, 9(2), 285–316. https://doi.org/10.1086/708391
Mirowski, P. (2020). HPS 93772 Politics of Science Panopto lectures. Agnotology, University of Notre Dame.
Mirowski, P. (2020). HPS 93772 Politics of Science Panopto lectures. Lippmann-Dewey debate, University of Notre Dame.
Mirowski, P. (2020). HPS 93772 Politics of Science Panopto lectures. Post-truth in STS Part-1, University of Notre Dame.