ブックタイトルRILAS 早稲田大学総合人文科学研究センター研究誌

概要

RILAS 早稲田大学総合人文科学研究センター研究誌

WASEDA RILAS JOURNALqualified to make scientifically authoritative judgmentson BSE-related questions? Scientists who sidedwith the official government position by making publicstatement about the safety of American beefincluded medical doctors, molecular biologists, andeven nuclear physicists. There is no doubt that theyare qualified scientists in their own fields, but theytend to think that their opinions (often prompted bytheir conservative political views) should be epistemologicallyrespected simply on the basis that they are“scientists.”However, their epistemological privilegeshould not be indiscriminately applied to specializedareas such as the prion mechanism and BSE-relatedquestions. When a person has a heart problem, theywill consult a cardiologist, not an organic chemist.Likewise, it is not at all plausible that a physician isqualified to fix bugs in my computer program. Being ascientist in the general sense does not entitle a personto speak authoritatively on any scientific subjectincluding, in this case, the risk involved in Americanbeef; and yet, scientists in unrelated fields were givena voice in what was later called the American beefcrisis. In this case, the selective ascription of epistemologicalauthority to conflicting scientific claimswas not transparent and the result was a lot of socialconfusion. The same pattern of behavior was repeatedwith respect to another social-scientific controversy onthe environmental effects of the Four-River project.The second kind of uncertainty is related to thecomplex nature of risk, that is, its dependency oninterpretation by one discipline or another. The core ofthe problem is the fact that the risk of an event can bedefined in more than one scientifically respectableway. This is because each scientific discipline hasdeveloped its own way of defining, estimating, andmeasuring risks according to their own theoretical andempirical concepts and tools, which are normallyincommensurate, that is, only partially overlappingand not-entirely translatable into one another inKuhn’s sense. Consequently, in the case of the Americanbeef crisis, a different risk could have beencalculated depending on which disciplinary expert didthe calculating. Epidemiologists would have given oneanswer, while immunologists, another, as their evaluatingmethods are different (social statistics versusbiochemical pathways). Public health experts mighthave come up with an entirely different probability,partly because their concern is more preventive thananalytic. As the public was not used to this epistemologicalpluralism of scientific knowledge, manypreferred to believe that there could be only one experttelling the truth and that all other scientists were simplylying. It is ironical to observe that people’s trust inscientists was compromised mainly because theybelieved in an unrealistic, monolithic ideal of scientificknowledge. ?In sum, the Korean government made two differentmistakes in their risk management efforts duringthe American beef crisis. First, they incorrectlybelieved that the best way to manage an easily excitablepublic was to provide false information, assertingthat there was scientific consensus assuring the safetyof American imported beef, while there were in factmany uncertainties and real risks. Second, they falselybelieved that providing technical probability assessment(that is, the probability of getting BSE fromeating American imported beef was essentially negligible,while the exact value of the probability dependson the details of the questions and the models used)was sufficient to pacify the public. The first mistakeshows the failure of transparency in their informationdistribution, and the second shows the failure of thedeficit model.3. Nuclear Power Plants and theNeed of Risk-GovernanceNuclear power has been controversial at leastsince the Three-Mile Island disaster in 1979, wasexacerbated by Chernobyl in 1989, and vividlyreawakened by Fukushima in 2011. South Korea is notexempt from this controversy. At present, nuclearpower accounts for about one third of the total electricitydemand in South Korea, and the Koreangovernment wants to enlarge nuclear energy productionby building more nuclear power plants in the nearfuture. Still, the current proportion of nuclear energyin South Korea is relatively small, mainly becausenuclear energy is focused on the production of electricity.?The so-called nuclear power renaissance is energeticallyadvertised by the former government,especially the country’s first export of a nuclear powerplant to the Arab Emirates. The government emphasizesthe fact that South Korea is relatively wellpositioned in international competition for a numberof forthcoming nuclear power plant contracts. This is112