Socratic Dialogue

BRUNO LATOUR PANDORAS HOPE ESSAYS ON THE REALITY OF SCIENCE STUDIES Pg.240-241

 

SOCRATES: Now, you claimed a while back [456b] that a rhetorician would be more persuasive than a doctor even when the issue was health.

GORGIAS: Yes, I did, as long as he’s speaking in front of a crowd.

SOCRATES: By “in front of a crowd” you mean “in front of non-experts don’t you? I mean, a rhetorician wouldn’t be more persuasive than a doctor in front of an audience of experts, of course. 

GORGIAS: True. (459a) 

Socrates triumphs. Yet again, Gorgias is insisting on the very problem that still besets us today and that no one has ever been able to solve, certainly not Plato and his Republic. Politics is about dealing with a crowd of “non experts”, and this situation cannot possibly be the same thing as experts dealing with experts in the inner recesses of their special institutions. 

I think that this may be a good quote to put before the dissertation, like how people put some poems into their books before it starts. It perfectly sums up the importance of communication in scientific issues, the centrality of it as although the sciences crate the knowledge as a discipline it is not equipped to share that knowledge.