Justification reporting and the challenge of appropriate simplification

Justification Reporting as a mode of science reporting demands that, whenever feasible, science reporters should report appropriate aspects of the nature and strength of scientific justification, or lack thereof, for a reported scientific hypothesis (Gerken 2022). The benefits of such a norm are deemed to be two-fold: First, Justification Reporting is meant to give the audience direct epistemic reasons for accepting the scientific hypothesis; second, it aims at ensuring that audiences do not just absorb scientific claims but also acquire the requisite justifications, thereby promoting better collective understanding of scientific explanations. Yet, by necessity, Justification Reporting must proceed in a simplified manner and should be phrased in layperson’s terms. We argue that the assumption that appropriate simplifications are possible and can be routinely achieved in contexts of science reporting is optimistic and requires further substantiation. In particular, we look at the issue of oversimplification and its epistemic dangers, and argue that, if attempts to render the presentation of scientific justification appropriate to a given target audience overshoot the mark (due to oversimplification or a misleading framing of the issue at hand), Justification Reporting may fall flat and collapse into one of its competitors, Deficit Reporting and Consensus Reporting.