Reply to ‘Society’s needs cannot be met by applied science alone : A response to Cochrane et al. (2019)

We welcome discussion on our paper on science in the service of society but find the response by Glassom et al. to be weak and frequently flawed. We can only cover some of the more important disagreements we have in the words available to us.Glassom et al. misinterpret our paper in their title: ‘Society’s needs cannot be met by applied science alone’: a statement of the obvious and unrelated to any of our arguments. Another misinterpretation occurs in their comment: ‘It makes no sense to sacrifice strong disciplinary research because of a perceived imperative for interdisciplinary work’. We actually wrote that ‘Disciplinary science should therefore not be discouraged but much greater emphasis must be placed on….interdisciplinary science’ and other statements recognising the role of disciplinary science. They wrote ‘they assume an unrealistic linearity in the way that science translates to policy and management’. We make no such assumption and the stakeholder model, our recommended scientific approach, encourages an interactive, evolutionary and non-linear approach in addressing problems and searching for understanding and solutions.