Follow *the* science? On the marginal role of the social sciences in the COVID-19 pandemic

Simon Lohse; Stefano Canali

doi:10.1007/s13194-021-00416-y

Follow the science? On the marginal role of the social sciences in the COVID-19 pandemic

Eur J Philos Sci. 2021;11(4):99. doi: 10.1007/s13194-021-00416-y. Epub 2021 Oct 22.

Authors

Simon Lohse^{1

2

3}, Stefano Canali⁴

Affiliations

¹ Institute for History of Medicine and Science Studies, University of Lübeck, Lübeck, Germany.
² Centre for Ethics and Law in the Life Sciences, Leibniz University Hannover, Hannover, Germany.
³ African Centre for Epistemology and Philosophy of Science, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa.
⁴ Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering and META - Social Sciences and Humanities for Science and Technology, Politecnico Di Milano, Milan, Italy.

Abstract

In this paper, we use the case of the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe to address the question of what kind of knowledge we should incorporate into public health policy. We show that policy-making during the COVID-19 pandemic has been biomedicine-centric in that its evidential basis marginalised input from non-biomedical disciplines. We then argue that in particular the social sciences could contribute essential expertise and evidence to public health policy in times of biomedical emergencies and that we should thus strive for a tighter integration of the social sciences in future evidence-based policy-making. This demand faces challenges on different levels, which we identify and discuss as potential inhibitors for a more pluralistic evidential basis.

Keywords: Evidence-based policy; Interdisciplinarity; Pluralism; Public health; Scientific expertise.