Aerosols, masks, infectiousness: Coronavirus myths debunked

Politicians facing the spread of coronavirus, which causes Covid-19, lay claim to “following the science”, conferring a Rosetta Stone-like quality on the discipline: a monolithic key to indisputable facts. But as the philosopher Mary Midgley observed, the value of science lies not in how we store facts but how we interpret them. And interpretations are “always shaped by background world-pictures”. “Following the science”, therefore, entails navigating a labyrinth of multiple “world-pictures” freighted with tensions between language and meaning. As the biologist Dr Justin Pruneski notes: “Overcoming the complex and technical language used in science is a major barrier to scientists being able to communicate their work with the general public.”