My colleague Jason Leddington and I are thrilled to have received a one-year, $100,000 grant from the Varieties of Understanding Project — a Templeton Foundation funded project led by Stephen Grimm at Fordham University — to enable us to study the nature and production of public understanding of science. Here’s the short description of our project:

In a democratic, industrialized society, a scientifically literate public is critical to the possibility of good policy-making. However, recent science communication has failed to generate a level of public consensus sufficient to inform rational action on important public initiatives. We propose that reorienting our epistemic goals in education, advocacy, and communication from Public Knowledge to Public Understanding might dramatically improve this situation. As it stands, however, “public understanding” is poorly understood. Social-scientific models for its promotion typically leave ‘understanding’ unexplained and fail to adequately distinguish it from knowledge. Moreover, relevant philosophical literature generally focuses on individual, rather than public understanding. Our project thus combines philosophical study of the nature of public understanding with case studies of critical science outreach efforts to: (a) develop a viable philosophical theory of public understanding alongside (b) strategic recommendations for social scientists, journalists, and policy-makers to devise better means for producing public understanding of science.

The Varieties of Understanding Project itself has a lot of great people approaching understanding from some really interesting (different) angles. Here’s the list.

From now through the end of the year (Stage 1), we’ll be working primarily on the theoretical side of things to develop  a philosophical theory of public understanding. Stage 2 (roughly January–June 2015) will apply the lessons of Stage 1 in the context of three case studies of science outreach efforts: climate change, childhood vaccine safety, and neuroscience. As part of our grant, we’ll be hosting several events and meetings at Bucknell. Please check back here for more updates and announcements going forward. And feel free to contact us if you’d like to get involved somehow.

More to come. . . .