Reconstructing Epistemic Authority: Reflexive Public Engagement and the Experimental Validation of Public Facts

Contemporary debates on science-society relations increasingly suggest that epistemic authority is undergoing profound reconfiguration. Rather than interpreting this shift as a crisis of trust alone, this paper argues that the conditions under which epistemic authority is enacted, recognised, and sustained in democratic societies are being transformed. Building on Marres’ (2018) notion of the experimental validation of public facts, the paper examines how scientific knowledge can remain publicly relevant without either compromising scientific autonomy or depoliticising the value conflicts inherent in societal issues. It conceptualises reflexive public engagement formats as arenas in which epistemic authority is not presumed but experimentally negotiated, thereby offering a contribution to ongoing discussions about how valid and trustworthy knowledge can be produced and maintained within contemporary governance arrangements. Classical narratives of epistemic authority – ranging from Weberian ideals of value-freedom to constructivist and situated epistemologies – have themselves become destabilised in the public sphere. Appeals to epistemic humility risk being read as fragility, while renewed invocations of objectivity are increasingly mobilised to defend technocratic closure. The result is a symbolic oscillation between relativist scepticism and neo-positivist revival, an oscillation that obscures the underlying question of how epistemic claims can be communicated under democratic conditions of plurality and contestation. Against this backdrop, the paper advances Marres’ argument that contemporary calls to “get our facts back” rely on nostalgic reconstructions of epistemic order that are no longer adequate. Digital infrastructures, algorithmic curation, and polarised publics transform the very genre of what counts as a fact. In this context, facts require forms of experimental validation that occur not in insulated expert arenas, but within the public domain. Combining Marres’ politics of fact with the participatory turn in Science and Technology Studies (Chilvers & Kearnes 2020), the paper develops a relational understanding of participation as an epistemic practice through which publics, issues, and knowledge claims are co-produced. Empirically, the paper draws on public engagement formats developed at the Research Institute Social Cohesion (RISC). These examples illustrate recurring practices through which social scientists navigate accusations of politicisation, address the multiplicity of values, emotions, and forms of affectedness, and maintain independence while engaging directly with publics. Such settings function as arenas of experimental validation: knowledge claims are probed for their communicability, normative robustness, and credibility under conditions of plurality and disagreement. The paper concludes by advancing the clarification of the normative conditions under which the public negotiation of epistemic authority remains legitimate – namely, when it preserves scientific autonomy while ensuring democratic accountability. Rather than retreating behind demarcation lines or collapsing into political advocacy, social science must design arenas in which epistemic authority can be publicly performed, tested, and revised. Public engagement, thus conceived, becomes a reflexive space in which researchers engage closely enough to matter, yet remain sufficiently independent to question the very processes through which their authority is constituted.