Giuseppe Tipaldo, La società della pseudoscienza. Orientarsi tra buone e cattive spiegazioni, Il Mulino, 2019
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17490
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2038-3460
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Maria Carmela Agodi
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Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Giuseppe Tipaldo, The Pseudo-Science Society. How to navigate among good and bad explanations, Il Mulino, 2019
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Book Reviews
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2023-06-27
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2023-10-16
166-171
TS
Maria Carmela Agodi
2020
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17490
166
Univesità degli Studi di Napoli Federico II
2038-3460
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171
Giuseppe Tipaldo, The Pseudo-Science Society. How to navigate among good and bad explanations, Il Mulino, 2019
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166                                                            Tecnoscienza – 11 (2)

       of Health and Illness”, 32 (2), pp. 225-237.
Mol, A. (2002) The Body Multiple. Ontology in Medical Practice, Durham, Duke
       University Press.
Pinch, T. and Bijsterveld, K. (eds.) (2002) The Oxford Handbook of Sound Stud-
       ies, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Strauss, A.L., Fagerhaugh, S., Suczek, B. and Wiener, C. (1997), Social Organiza-
        tion of Medical Work, New Brunswick/London, Transaction Publisher.



                                      ***
   G. Tipaldo
La societa’ della pseudoscienza. Orientarsi tra buone e cattive spiegazioni
[The Pseudo-Science Society. How to navigate among good and bad
explanations], Bologna, il Mulino, 2019, pp. 311

Maria Carmela Agodi Univesità degli Studi di Napoli Federico II

    The red thread running through this book is the idea that sociotech-
nical controversies – where scientific and pseudoscientific knowledge
claims are clashing in the public sphere – follow a typical causal structure.
Such a structure makes recent oppositions to vaccines or beliefs in alterna-
tive cancer therapies very similar to local conflicts against big infrastruc-
tures – those well-known as exemplars of the so-called NIMBY (Not In
My Back Yard) or BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near
Anything – or Anybody) syndromes.
    According to Tipaldo, while commonalities prevail, two features distin-
guish more recent controversies from NIMBY and BANANA conflicts.
The first distinguishing feature concerns the issues at stake. Issues at stake
in NIMBY used to be undesired land uses (LULU, Locally Undesired
Land Uses, is actually a more neutral acronym than NIMBY to identify
them); recent controversies are mainly focused on collective decisions af-
fecting individual personal bodies – through public regulation/interven-
tion about health, food, personal habits. “Not in my body” (NIMBO) is
the best-suited synthesis for them.
    The second distinguishing feature concerns the role played by science.
In NIMBY or BANANA controversies, scientists used to play a secondary
role and they only came on stage when called by public administrators and
politicians to support their own decisions. In recent technoscientific con-
troversies, instead, scientific experts are positioned at the center of the
stage – as sharing with governmental bodies the responsibility of public
decisions – while opponents support the so-called fake scientific
Book Review                                                               167
knowledge. The first part of the book (Chapters 1-3) is devoted to explain
the different syndromes: NIMBY, BANANA and the new NIMBO type.
In the second and third part of the book (Chapters 4-7), the author’s de-
clared intention is to identify the vocabularies of motives underlying the
controversies to understand what kind of subjective good reasons are driv-
ing hostile attitudes against scientific expertise supporting public deci-
sions. This understanding is a necessary presupposition for any sound so-
ciological explanation of these phenomena, while at the same time being
useful to deconstruct false representations of scientific claims opponents.
It is on these misrepresentations that the choice taken by many scientists
to avoid opening overt controversies with them – as mainly not experts –
has been grounded (“science is not democratic!” is the standpoint em-
blematically made by immunologist Roberto Burioni, intending not to de-
bate with assumed not qualified speakers), as already had happened to-
wards LULU opponents.
    According to the author, prevalent explanations of opposition to expert
knowledge follow three main theoretic models: a) the deficit model of sci-
entific communication; b) the agenda-setting theory of mass media, de-
picted as spreading alarmism and sensationalism; c) the particularistic vs
universalistic values model, related to the NIMBO syndrome and extended
to pseudoscience followers.
    To deconstruct each of these models, Tipaldo uses data from official
statistics and sociological research. Comparison between the Italian con-
text and the rest of Europe is carried out using a mix of secondary data
analysis of national and international studies and of primary data analysis
of research results produced by the University of Turin's team which he
belongs to. The chapters of the book dedicated to this aim (ch. 4 and ch. 5
describing case studies and especially ch. 6, deconstructing mainstream ex-
planatory models) are rich in details and quite sophisticated in the empiri-
cal deep deconstruction of previous accounts of those cases. They are the
most valuable contribution of the book and are worth reading for anyone
interested in this field of study, based as they are on the author’s sound
research experience on the issue.
    The first explanations being discussed are those referring to the deficit
model. Tipaldo shows that in specific controversies, for which data have
been collected about people enacting anti-expert behaviors, those who de-
cided to act against experts’ advice were more educated than the rest of
the population (the cited case regards parents who didn’t vaccinate their
children because distrusting general or pediatric practitioners). Moreover,
their judgments about scientific knowledge were extremely positive. How-
ever, they didn’t trust scientists' advice as experts, considering the eco-
nomic interests of pharmaceutical companies as a structural bias of the
field, which prevail on disinterested expertise. According to the author,
what parents trusted (too) much, in their exitance towards vaccines, were
their cognitive capabilities: they were excessively confident in their ability
168                                                          Tecnoscienza – 11 (2)

to navigate the Web to catch the correct information about any field of
scientific expertise relevant to their personal and to their relatives’ health
needs.
     The second kind of accounts submitted to scrutiny entails the agenda
setting theory. Tipaldo confutes the opposition between traditional media
agenda setting theory and the theory of social media as non-mediated com-
munication platforms. The role of mass media has radically changed, as the
web 2.0 has transformed what used to be the public into several potential
influencers. Communication platforms now use to channel communica-
tions flows into echo chamber bubbles, through agenda setting and agenda
cutting strategies aimed at making people stay within the platforms longer
and longer, feeding firms’ marketing and commercial interests. Traditional
mass media re-mediate information when it spreads more diffusively than
expected so that at the end of the process cross-media echo chambers re-
ciprocally feed the information flux from social to traditional media and
from the last ones to the internet by aggregating and polarizing beliefs, at-
titudes, and vocabularies of motives. The main stage where controversies
are played is the re-mediated public sphere in which communication plat-
forms and traditional mass media set the frameworks within which oppo-
site narratives are enacted and circulated by actors. Actors’ visibility and
success opportunities are filtered by the rules of the audience and by web
reputation. On that stage, scientific experts are captured within a game
which they do not dominate, as science and pseudoscience controversies
are situated within the frame of par condicio as if they were representative
of opposite political parties.
     As his third analytical move, Tipaldo empirically dismantles the hy-
pothesis of low civic attitudes as a feature of people trusting pseudoscien-
tific knowledge. When data were purposively collected to assess its plausi-
bility – he argues – they show pseudoscience activists being concerned not
only about avoiding perceived disadvantages (as the NIMBY acronym
would suggest for LULU conflicts) but also about pursuing collective and
more general interests (as the BANANA syndrome, but also the shift to
public action in many of the controversies, reveals). What they lack is gen-
eralized trust in other people, in institutions, and scientific expertise. As
the author stresses, this result is recurrent in recent data diffused by Euro-
barometer, concerning Italy but not only. The problem with scientific ex-
pertise is that it is considered to be too much tied to big companies’ eco-
nomic interests and to political power to be considered reliable.
     Looking for alternative explanations based on perceived “good rea-
sons” and legitimated vocabularies of motives adopted by involved actors
(although sometimes the author's harsh irony – especially about the Di
Bella case – clashes against his interpretative claims), the theoretical frame-
work within which Tipaldo moves is that of the mediated public sphere.
Although the contemporary scene on which much of the controversies are
played is that of dis-intermediated social platforms, the author’s attention
Book Review                                                                169
in the seventh and conclusive chapter of the book is mainly focused on
traditional mass media. Such controversies reach traditional mass media
and pertain vocabularies of motives supporting the relationships among
the main actors moving on those mediatic scenes, as representatives of pol-
itics, scientific expertise, and pseudoscientific knowledge claims. This is
the framework that makes comparability possible among the different case
studies he refers to (going from the Bonifacio to the Di Bella and Stamina
therapies and then to the anti-vax movement). Within that framework, vo-
cabularies of motives governing relationships among Politics, Science, and
the Media are especially those implied in processes of scientization of pol-
itics – supported by the rhetoric of evidence-based policy – and politiciza-
tion of scientific expertise supported by the rhetoric of public engagement
of science.
    The mediated public sphere is the frontstage in which public contro-
versies acquire visibility and pseudoscience is legitimated according to
symmetric narrative strategies enacted by the media. Within a wider arena,
comprehensive of a relevant backstage, mutual dependency among Poli-
tics, Science and Society is crucial to understand how the struggle for dem-
ocratic consent, on the one side, and lay people’s trust in science and poli-
tics, on the other side, are caught in a vicious circle through which the first
one erodes the second. This vicious circle is, according to Tipaldo, the pro-
cess through which what was intended to be a knowledge society is trans-
forming itself into a pseudoscience society.
    Following the model of Propp’s Morphology of the folktale, the author
reconstructs the scripts through which different knowledge claims, coming
from the backstage, arrive on the frontstage through the voice of a Spokes-
person (the Protagonist) and acquire public resonance while being refuted
by official science that is their main Antagonist. The media, the public and
politics are all represented in this common narrative structure through
which public trust in science is notwithstanding eroded, while the voice of
pseudoscience is eventually defeated.
    However, many of the subtleties which the reader is introduced to in
the pars destruens of the book are left aside in the pars construens. The
representation of Politics, Science, Society and the Media as distinct – alt-
hough intersecting – systems is too simplistic to fit the STS perspective,
which the author claims to be the chosen framework for his inquiry. His
analysis may hardly be said to appear consistent with an advanced under-
standing of the distinctions either of Politics and Science or of Science and
Society as specific and never fully accomplished aims of Modernity (Latour
1993). Indeed, drawing on plenty of research and on the very same data
he refers to in chapter 6, one can say that the ground of pseudoscience is
not mistrust in science nor in scientists but in officially sanctioned experts
addressing issues of public relevance.
    Furthermore, the temptation – which Tipaldo in the end does not resist
– to discard current discourses supporting pseudoscientific and conspiracy
170                                                           Tecnoscienza – 11 (2)

theories by introducing logical counterarguments is, at best, useless and
misleading, especially if contextualized within his refutation of the deficit
model and his claim of adhering to the STS perspective. STS classical stud-
ies (by Collins & Pinch, Wynne, Gieryn) shed light on the apparent diffi-
culty in resolving controversies between established scientific knowledge
and knowledge claims refuted by science as coming from outside its
boundaries. Recent analyses point to the necessity to elaborate, new strat-
egies of inclusion in order to face the complexity of conflicts concerning
environmental issues, among others - that cannot be solved only through
logic argument and communication policy (Sarewitz 2004; Pellizzoni
2006).
    The tale of the battle between Science and Pseudoscience is a metaphor
for what Tipaldo apparently thinks is the real battle: the one between De-
mocracy, on the one side, and Populism, on the other.
    However, recent results from survey and interviews data on Italian an-
tivax and vaccine hesitant parents (Lollo 2020) apparently challenge the
interpretative ground of a perspective reducing to populism the whole
spectrum of positions going from antivax, to vaccine hesitancy and trust in
alternatives to mainstream bio-medicine, while suggesting the need for an
articulated and more nuanced insight of these movements.
    As Fuller (2018) remarks about post-truth, pseudoscience cannot be
equated to anti-science. It rather indicates the overarching acknowledg-
ment that if science plays a crucial role in one’s life, hence it cannot be left
entirely in the hands of others. In this view, science is undergoing a sort of
Protestant Reformation. It is becoming “Protoscience”, that is science
“taken personally […] as a life-shaping form of knowledge”, whereby self
and world are rearranged “to enable one to live – or die, as the case may
be – with whatever one happens to believe” (Fuller 2018, p. 107). As a
result of its “increasing visibility in public affairs, [which] coincid[es] with
the ability of people to access the entire storehouse of scientific knowledge
from virtually any starting point on the Internet”, and their increased edu-
cation, science is now becoming “the target rather than the agent of secu-
larization” (p. 108). Consistently with these attitudes, science is actually
becoming “customized”, being transformed in “idiosyncratic interpreta-
tions and appropriations of scientific knowledge that, to varying degrees,
contradict the authority of expert scientists” (p. 7), building on the distinc-
tion “between what one ‘knows’ (that is, has learned), and what one ‘be-
lieves’ (that is, acts upon)” (Fuller 2018, 184; see also Pellizzoni 2019).
    As convincingly argued by Tipaldo, NIMBO movements settle them-
selves at the convergence of the avoidance of feared individual negative
consequences of public health choices, on the one hand, and, on the other,
the perceived denial of the opportunity for citizens to freely access prom-
ised (although yet not validated) therapeutic alternatives (“my body, my
choice”), through the monopolistic closure imposed by public policies and
legitimated science and expertise. It is then necessary to admit that what is
Book Review                                                                    171
actually at stake is not science but the scientization of the implied value
controversies as a way of concealing them, while using science to legitimize
value choices. Maybe this would be a more intriguing path to suggest to
Tipaldo for next time, along with looking for the vocabularies of motives
underlying hostile attitudes against scientific expertise supporting public
decisions.

References
Fuller S. (2018) Post Truth: Knowledge as a Power Game, London, Anthem Press.
Latour, B. (1993) We have Never Been Modern, Boston, Harvard University Press.
Lollo E. (2020) Populismo anti-scientifico o nodi irrisolti della biomedicina? Pro-
       spettive a confronto intorno al movimento free vax, in “Rassegna Italiana
       di Sociologia”, 41 (3), pp. 481-508.
Pellizzoni L. (2006) Decidiamo insieme! Conflitti tecnologici e deliberazione poli-
        tica, in "Quaderni di Sociologia", 41, pp. 91-114.
Pellizzoni, L. (2019) Innocent, Guilty or Reluctant Midwife? On the Reciprocal
        Relevance of STS and Post-Truth, in “Tecnoscienza”, 10 (1), pp. 115-130.
Sarewitz, D. (2004) How science makes environmental controversies worse, in “En-
       vironmental Science & Policy”, 7 (5), pp. 385-403.



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