Abstract: This presentation explores the tensions between technical experts and lay citizens in risk assessment from the perspective of socio-cultural reason. Rather that emphasizing the role of technical analysis in such judgments, the focus here is on the ordinary language reason of the citizen. Much of the discussion of the politics surrounding the acceptance or rejection of technologies such as nuclear power or biotechnology has focused on the purported irrationality of lay citizens. Citizens are said to be unable to understand scientific findings and their implications for rational policymaking. By comparing the formal logic of technical inquiry and the practical logic of cultural reason, the discussion reverses the contention and interrogates the rationality of the scientist in judgments pertaining to public decisions. Employing the example of GM foods, the explication shows the ways that ordinary citizens rationally apply their everyday cultural logic to practical situations, a perspective typically ignored or neglected by scientific risk investigation. Geared to local knowledge and cultural norms, the citizen’s cultural reason is seen to be more attuned to normative realities inherent to policymaking than is the scientific understanding of the process. Demonstrating the scientific expert’s need to take this situational logic into account, the lecture offers an approach for bringing together these two different modes of reasons in life-science related policy deliberations.

Biography: Frank Fischer is Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Public Policy, and Faculty Fellow of the Center for Global Change and Governance at Rutgers University. In addition to teaching in the Ph.D. Program in Public Administration on the Newark Campus, he is a member of the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy and the graduate program in political science on the New Brunswick campus. His books include: Politics, Values and Public Policy (1980), Critical Studies in Organization and Bureaucracy (1994), co-edited with Carmen Sirianni, Confronting Values in Policy Analysis: The Politics of Criteria (1987), co-edited with John Forester, Technocracy and the Politics of Expertise (1990), The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis and Planning (1993), co-edited with John Forester, Evaluating Public Policy (1995), Greening Environmental Policy: The Politics of a Sustainable Future (1995), co-edited with Michael Black, Living with Nature: Environmental Politics as Cultural Discourse (1999), co-edited with Maarten Hajer, Citizens, Experts and the Environment: The Politics of Local Knowledge (Duke University Press, 2000), Reframing Public Policy: Discursive Politics and Deliberative Practices (Oxford University Press, 2003).

Frank has taught and lectured in many countries, including Germany, Austria, Holland, England, Hungary, Sweden, Canada, Yugoslavia, India, Brazil, South Africa, China, Japan and South Korea. He is on the editorial board of numerous academic journals, including Organization and Environment, Administration and Society, International Journal of Public Administration. Frank Fischer is also winner of the 1999 Harold Lasswell Award of the Policy Studies Organization, given to “outstanding scholars for contributions to the understanding of the substance and process of public policy.”