Reliance on Scientific Claims in Social and Legal Contexts: An ‘HIV and AIDS’ Case Study

This chapter deals with the issue of reliance on scientific claims in contexts other than scientific ones. Both social and natural sciences are supposed to be able to provide decision-making processes with objective and neutral points of view on the natural order. Nevertheless, several factors—such as the constant evolution of scientific research, scientific uncertainty, and social implications of scientific debates—make increasingly difficult to access clearly reliable scientific knowledge. The thirty-year scientific-public dispute between the official hypothesis on HIV/AIDS and the so-called ‘AIDS denialism’ allows us to corroborate this general observation. Taking this example as a starting point and common thread, the author discusses the importance of improving experts’ communication towards society and the need to provide lay-persons with reasonable explanations. Indeed, paradigmatic comparative case-law confirm that also judges have to independently decide whether to admit scientific evidence in court, determining which claims are (more) reliable (than others). In his conclusions, the author points out that better scientific communication requires accepting complexity and constant variability characterising scientific matters. Instead, over-reliance on science might induce a lack of trust in scientific institutions, inevitably increasing relativism, confusion, and manipulation.