Why Facts Don’t Speak for Themselves
Ludwik Fleck Lecture 2025 by Naomi Oreskes

Lecture by

Naomi Oreskes

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Venue: ETH main building, HG E3, Rämistrasse 101, 8006 Zurich.

Attendance is free of charge. Please note that the event will be recorded.

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Many of us—and certainly many scientists—were raised to believe that facts speak for themselves. “Facts are facts,” it is often said. This belief typically leads scientists to assume that “the truth will out” one way or another. As a result, many believe it suffices to do science—understood as work conducted within the scientific community and published in peer-reviewed journals. In principle, interested parties can seek out this information, but disseminating scientific knowledge to the public is not traditionally seen as a scientist’s responsibility.

Historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science—including, famously, Ludwik Fleck—have long pointed out how much effort is required to establish a “fact,” even within an expert community. Moreover, significant challenges arise when facts move from the expert community where they originated into the public sphere.

For one, peer-reviewed science is rarely accessible to the general public. Most scientific journals are locked behind paywalls—often prohibitively expensive ones. Even when papers or entire journals are open access, technical jargon makes them nearly impenetrable to non-experts (including, at times, scientists from other disciplines). And even if a paper is both financially and linguistically accessible, most laypeople wouldn’t know where to find it. Instead, they rely on derivative sources—primarily social media and websites—where misinformation and disinformation are rampant.

Compounding this issue, certain industries—such as tobacco and fossil fuels—have, for decades, deliberately promoted disinformation and sowed doubt about well-established facts for economic and ideological reasons. This remains a persistent problem today.

In this context, we must acknowledge that facts do not speak for themselves; someone must always speak for them. Given this reality, scientific communities and their allies must find effective ways to communicate facts, recognizing that because facts do not inherently speak for themselves, science communication must be taken more seriously.