Away MAVE

The Distance Mode of MA in Values and the Environment at Lancaster University

Block 5: Science, Deliberation and Democracy.

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	Introduction		Judging the credibility of persons and institutions
	Background Problem		Science, authority and democracy
	autonomy, reason and mathematics		Habermas, deliberation and science
	The Problem of Authority		Can the Enlightenment ideal be salvaged?

Introduction

One of the central arguments for deliberative democracy in the policy world has been the decline of trust in scientific experts and the legitimacy of political decisions arrived at by technocratic means.

Exercise

On what grounds do the authors of this paper suggest there has been a decline of public trust in science? Is that claim defensible? If there has been a decline of trust is that decline in trust warranted or is science still worthy of trust in our deliberations? How if at all could deliberative institutions address those problems of trust?

While deliberative democracy is sometimes presented as a response to the problem of a decline in trust in scientific experts, the existence of expertise also raises a problem for deliberative theories of democracy. Public decisions in the modern world rely on claims by experts the grounds for which are often opaque to direct inspection by the citizen and indeed by other scientists. Nor is this opacity eliminable. The capacity to make and evaluate particular claims in the special sciences relies on a background of training within particular scientific practices. It relies on particular competences and know-how not all of which is open to explicit articulation. Both citizen and scientist in most matters rely on the competences of others which they lack. Habermas’s assumption of equality of competence that is built into the model of communicative rationality fails to acknowledge the existence of epistemic inequality even in the ideal conditions of his non-coercive speech community.

In this block we consider these problems in more detail.

Background Problem

I want to start by considering a typical radio phone in around issues of health or environmental risks in the UK. For example, listening to one of the many radio phone-ins that took place in the wake of the BSE scare in the UK, one standard and quite understandable worry expressed in the circumstance runs like this. Some caller had just had a weekend listening to a series of scientific experts who have argued intensely with each other about the links between BSE and CJD, some saying on the one hand that there is no proof that any relation exists and some claiming on the other that there is a major health risk which is only just beginning to unfold. The caller complains: 'I just don't know who to believe. Who do I trust?'. It is a standard response to a large number of environmental problems, which involve scientific expertise and are subject to controversy.

Exercise

How would you respond to the caller?

Consider again Kant's account of the enlightenment.

Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another. The immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of the enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding. Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why such a large portion of the men, even when nature has so long emancipated them from alien guidance, nevertheless remain gladly immature for life. It is so convenient to be immature! If I have a book to have understanding in place of me, a spiritual advisor to have a conscience for me, a doctor to judge my diet for me and son, I need not make any efforts at all. (Kant 'An Answer to the Question "What is enlightenment?"')

Given Kant's account what reply to the caller would be appropriate? Would that Kantian account differ from your own?

Modern statement: autonomy, reason and mathematics

As we noted in Block 4 Kant's ideal of maturity is closely related to the central value in Kant's moral philosophy, that of autonomy. The heteronomous character is one who lacks maturity, who is willing to let his own judgement and understanding be guided by others and who lacks the capacity, desire or courage to exercise them for himself: when the clergyman, religious or secular, announces ‘Don't argue, believe’, he believes. To be autonomous is to have maturity and courage in using one's own understanding and judgement. For Kant it is to be guided by reason: ‘For reason has no dictatorial authority; its verdict is always simply the agreement of free citizens, of whom each one must be permitted to express, without let or hindrance, his objections or even his veto.’ That account of the autonomous person remains popular.

Here is a more recent account of this ideal of the autonomous agent.

The responsible man is not capricious or anarchic, for he does acknowledge himself bound by moral constraints. But he insists that he alone is the judge of those constraints. He may listen to the advice of others, but he makes it his own by determining for himself whether it is good advice. He may learn from others his moral obligations, but only in the sense that a mathematician learns from other mathematicians - namely by hearing from them arguments whose validity he recognizes even though he did not think of them himself. He does not learn in the sense that one learns from an explorer, by accepting as true his accounts of things one cannot see for oneself. Since the responsible man arrives at moral decisions which he expresses to himself in the form of imperatives, we may say that he gives laws to himself, or he is self-legislating. In short, he is autonomous. (Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism. pp. 13-14.)

Answer to caller:

So how would the Kantian respond to the phone-in caller. Here is one response that looks like the kind of thing a Kantian might say:

Look don't just believe when the modern scientific clerisy tell you to. That just shows a "lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another". Show some maturity here. Remember the motto of the enlightenment. "Have courage to use your own understanding."

Thus to pursue the dietary example, Kant himself claims that it is a sign of immaturity to have 'a doctor to judge my diet for me'.

Think

How adequate is that response?

One objection might be this: The response would be heroic, but it looks quite inadequate. It is open to the quite proper response: 'I just don't have the training to use my own understanding here. This is not something I could use my own understanding about. It is beyond my competence'.

Conservatism against the Enlightenment

So far in the module we have focused on the radical response to the enlightenment. Here again is the conservative

Against rationalism:

At bottom [the rationalist] stands ... for independence of mind on all occasions, for thought free from obligation to any authority save the authority of 'reason' .... he is the enemy of authority, of prejudice, of the merely traditional, customary or habitual. His mental attitude is at once sceptical and optimistic: sceptical, because there is no opinion, no habit, no belief, nothing so firmly rooted or so widely held that he hesitates to question it, and to judge it by what he calls his 'reason'; optimistic, because the Rationalist never doubts the power of his 'reason' (when properly applied) to determine the worth of a thing, the truth of an opinion, or the propriety of an action. Moreover, he is fortified by a belief in a 'reason' common to all mankind, a common power of rational consideration, which is the ground and inspiration of argument... (M. Oakeshott 'Rationalism in Politics')

The central move in Oakeshott's critique of the rationalist is the distinction he draws between technical and practical knowledge.

• Technical knowledge is knowledge that can be 'formulated into rules which are, or may be, deliberately learned, remembered and ... put into practice; its chief characteristic is that it is susceptible of precise formulation ... '.
• Practical knowledge 'exists only in use, is not reflective and cannot be formulated in rules'.
• Practical knowledge requires capacities of judgement and perception of particular cases that can be learned only by habituation and which cannot, like technical knowledge, be found in books. Learned from an authority.

Exercise

Think of examples of technical and practical knowledge.

The problem of authority

On the conservative view the enlightenment ideal of reason against authority is mistaken.

1. To enter into a practice at all requires an acceptance of authority
Any process of education, be it in mathematics, the sciences, the arts, in language or in morals depends on the acceptance of the authority of others. There is a sense in which all teaching is authoritative (and this is quite different from its being authoritarian) and all learning requires the acceptance of epistemological authority:

The acceptance of authority is not just something which, as a matter of fact, you cannot get along without if you want to participate in rule-governed activities; rather, to participate in rule governed activities is, in a certain way to accept authority. For to participate in such an activity is to accept that there is a right and a wrong way of doing things, and the decision as to what is right and wrong in a given case can never depend completely on one's own caprice. (Winch 'Authority' p.99.)

2. Scientist rely on the authoritative utterances of others:
Against the strong account of intellectual autonomy assumed by Kantians, the best of scientists often have to rely on the authoritative utterances of others. Thus against Wolff it is often the case that one mathematician will simply accept a result proved by another on the grounds that she is a competent mathematician unlikely to make mistakes. Still more is this the way that a natural or social scientist will learn from her mathematical colleagues. They have not only limits of time, but also of capacities and abilities to follow the proofs of theorems they employ. Science is a social enterprise, in which scientists rely on the work of others.

3. Citizens have to rely upon the testimony of scientists on topics of public policy: for the most part are not in a position to make judgements. The problem is basic to role of scientific expertise in modern democracy: Series of current controversies on risk of harms: BSE, food, nuclear power, levels of pollutants etc. basic question: Hence questions 'Who do I believe?' 'How and when is scepticism justified?

Mathematicians, scientists or citizens are all forced to accept the testimony of explorers in intellectual landscapes to which we have not and could not have access.

The question of the role of testimony in the justification of knowledge claims is one that has been at the centre of a deal of recent discussion.

Caller's problem:

The phone-in caller's problem is not one of addressing the arguments offered but making a judgement about who is credible and trustworthy - who should be believed. The problem of who to believe becomes central. But it is not clear how one is to make judgements.

Judging the credibility of persons and institutions

The importance of judgements of credibility to knowledge claims is one that is recognised by Aristotle in the Rhetoric. He notes that credibility has both epistemological dimensions - the speaker must have good sense and be reliable in the formation of judgements - and ethical dimensions - the speaker must have the moral character that allows us to trust their utterance and there must be grounds for believing that they are not inclined to impart falsehoods to their audience:

False statements and bad advice are due to one or more of the following three causes. Men either from a false opinion through want of good sense; or they form a true opinion, but because of their moral badness do not say what they really think; or finally, they are both sensible and upright, but not be well disposed to their hearers...

The recognition of the role of authority, credibility and testimony in the justification of knowledge claims is one that is central to some recent sociology of science.
Shapin for example characterises the sociology of scientific knowledge as involving the rejection of the following view.

The credibility and the validity [sic.] of a proposition ought to be one and the same. Truth shines by its own lights...Once upon a time...students of sciences...believed that truth was its own recommendation, or if not that, something very like it. If one wanted to know, and one rarely did, why it was that true propositions were credible, one was referred back to their truth, to the evidence for them, or to those methodical procedures the unambiguous following of which testified to the truth of the product. (Shapin, S. 1995 'Cordelia's Love: Credibility and the Social Studies of Science' Perspectives on Science, 3, 255-275)

Once it is admitted that the issue is one of credibility of knowledge-claims and not their truth, then it is quite proper to point to the variety of social causes of credibility or even, if one wants to use the language, their social construction.

It does not follow that truth or knowledge are thereby social constructions unless one already accepts a naive cognitivist identification of credibility and truth.

Neither does it follow that credibility is a sufficient condition of knowledge or that it is a necessary condition - that 'no credibility, no knowledge'.

Shapin also defines truth to mean 'warranted assertability' or 'accepted truth' (Shapin A Social History of Truth 4) Shapin allows that there is a 'restrictive notion of truth' beloved by philosophers that insists on a distinction between locally accepted belief and truth.
This is not a restrictive philosopher's concept but a basic requirement of any defensible account of truth. Shapin's book A Social History of Truth is mis-titled: it as an excellent social history of credible belief.

Latour and Woolgar in Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts also note that reference to character has a place in science: data in science is accepted or rejected on the basis of evaluation of those who produced it:

reference to the human agency involved in the production of statements was very common. Indeed, it was clear from participants' discussions that who had made the claim was as important as the claim itself. In a sense, these discussions constituted a complex sociology and psychology of science engaged in by the participants themselves. (Latour and Woolgar 1979, 164)

This is I am sure true. However, none of the anti-realist and strong constructionist conclusions that Latour and Woolgar take to follow from that observation do so.

What recent work in the sociology of knowledge does highlight is the institutional dimension to judgements of credibility in science. Classical discussions of credibility, like that of Aristotle, focused on judgements about the epistemic and moral virtues and vices of individuals. We live in a world in which testimony is offered to us by strangers, by ‘spokespersons’ and ‘experts’, who call upon us to believe what they say on the basis of certification from institutions - academic, industrial, commercial and political. The different institutional dimensions of evaluation are of significance here. What institutions deserve epistemological trust in what conditions?

Science, authority and democracy

'Democracy...is a continual struggle between the expert... and the common man...Our life is connected more and more with experts, but on the other hand, we are less prepared to accept other people’s judgements, when making decisions' (Otto Neurath 'Visual Education')

Habermas, deliberation and science

Habermas's account of discourse ethics and public deliberation belongs to the Kantian tradition. To engage in reasoned dialogue is to aim not at compromise but on convergence in judgements. The activity of argument presupposes an ideal of free agreement in judgement founded on good reason: in ideal discourse ‘no force except that of the better argument is exercised’. Habermas echoes Kant's account of the role of reason in public life: ‘For reason has no dictatorial authority; its verdict is always simply the agreement of free citizens, of whom each one must be permitted to express, without let or hindrance, his objections or even his veto.’ That account assumes in the background an assumption of epistemic equality. In the ideal speech situation all participants are equally competent to make and assess validity claims for different speech acts.

A potential problem with Habermas's account is that the assumptions of epistemic equality even in an ideal speech situation might look too strong. Given the division of knowledge in society, different groups of individuals will not have the same competence to judge the validity of claims. Different individuals enter debates with distinct competences. Without a great deal of training in special sciences, I will not be in a position to make any judgement about the details of evidence in a scientific dispute. Habermas’ account is forced to gloss over some of the real difficulties about the role of science in modern public life, in particular that of simultaneous reliance on expertise coupled with proper scepticism about its claims. This failure borders on the paradoxical in that the application of Habermasian account of communicative rationality are often in just those areas where this problem is most acute.

The Habermasian model of communicative rationality has had particular influence in the recent revival of the theory of deliberative democracy and the practice which it informs. However, experiments in deliberative democracy inspired by it highlight a problem in the model’s account of the role of science in public life. Many of the experiments in various new deliberative institutions such as citizens’ juries and citizens’ panels have had their application in areas of public policy which involve scientific expertise which is the subject of internal and external controversy. Indeed what is taken to be a problem of a decline in public trust in scientific expertise forms the starting point of many practical applications of deliberative institutions, particularly those applied to risk.

In actual citizens' juries in which scientific evidence is introduced, participants - like members of actual juries in court cases - do not consider the evidence directly. They judge the credibility of the persons who present that evidence. Are there good reasons to believe those persons? It might be that on this judgement, we can assume a rough equality of competence at least in ideal conditions. It may be that we need some less intellectualist account of what our competences in democracy need to look like.

Can the enlightenment ideal be salvaged?

I introduced the problems that testimony and authority in the context of conservative criticism of the enlightenment ideal. However, there is no reason to assume that any of the points we have been considering have a necessary relation to conservatism or that the enlightenment ideal cannot be rescued. Can the ideal be salvaged?

1. A radical inversion of conservatism

One possible response is to perform a radical inversion of the conservative view which undermines the enlightenment model from the more radical side of the critics of the enlightenment.

The fact that all practices rely upon authority shows that all appeals to reason independent of social authority are simply disguised ways of enforcing social power. The appeal to reason is just the way another group realises power. Hence the rhetorical analysis of science that aim to deflate the appeals to reason.

Problems for caller: leads to generalised scepticism that is unable to make any distinction about who is to believed.

2. In defence of the enlightenment

An alternative is to redefine our account of the enlightenment ideal that allows for less heady picture of maturity that is more akin to the skills an agent in a public forum requires.

a) Distinction between epistemological authority and social authority - being an authority and being in authority (In Ecology, Policy and Politics I make the distinction between internal and external authority.)

'But I hear on all sides the cry: Don't argue! The officer says: Don't argue, get on parade! The tax-official: Don't argue, pay! The clergyman: Don't argue, believe!...The public use of man's reason must always be free, and it alone can bring enlightenment among men...' (Kant 'What is Enlightenment?')

Given an imperative 'Do X', there are two answers that a person might make to the response 'Why?':
(1) 'Because I am your teacher, your manager, your priest, paying you, etc';
(2) 'Because X would be the right thing to do, is the best thing to do, is a valid inference, etc.'

The first set of responses make essential reference to the individual's occupancy of a particular institutional position or status. Call on social authority.

The second set of responses make no call on institutional positions of authority, but, rather, on standards independent of institutional positions and personal qualities. The responses call only on such impersonal standards. One accepts the answers only if one believes the person has the capacities of judgement to make such a call on these standards. Call on standards independent of institutional. position

Restatement of the enlightenment ideal: Deference to the judgements of a person the grounds of which one is not oneself able to appraise is rational only if there are good reasons to believe they meets some standards independent of institutional position. Or to make the same point in a negative way, persons' possessions of external goods as such - their occupancy of institutional positions, their possession of wealth - are never good grounds for yielding one's own judgement to theirs. (Compare Habermas's ideal speech situation)

Two qualifications:

I. In practice the distinction is less clearly distinct: some institutional positions are granted in recognition of a persons competence in an activity by peers in that activity e.g. doctors, scientists etc. But the only grounds for accepting judgements is the belief they could be redeemed by the standards themselves. Their mere occupancy of those positions cannot count.

II. Appeal to standards that are independent of institutional position is a necessary condition of rational deference to an authority. However, it is not a sufficient condition. Some practices themselves are 'bogus'. They issue in claims which are false, develop ways of 'seeing' which are forms of blindness, develop dispositions of character which are vices. It is this that provides the component of the enlightenment legacy that ought to be accepted. That the enlightenment theorist might have appealed to individual reason does not entail that much of the enlightenment critique of superstition and of the bogus forms of authority it supported was not in order. This enlightenment critique of particular social practices and traditions is itself proper. So also are some of the tools and skills of suspicion it employed, not least their universal tools of logic and the analytical skills required for their employment. Practices themselves form quite proper objects of criticism. They can, and often do, act as masks for particular interests - for arbitrary power and unfounded barriers to professions.

3. Social conditions for trust: Distancing knowledge and power

a. Independence of knowledge and political and economic power - worries about the commercialisation of science

b. Epistemic case for social equality: a rough equality in power and wealth is a condition for rational acceptance of authoritative judgements

4. Tools of suspicion and scepticism:

These need to be wider than those of 'pure reason' to which Kantian models of the enlightenment sometimes appear to appeal. As we noted above in the modern world the issue of credible testimony has an institutional and political focus. We live in a world in which testimony is offered to us by strangers, by 'spokespersons' and 'experts', who call upon us to believe what they say on the basis of certification from institutions - academic, industrial, commercial and political. The different institutional dimensions of evaluation are of significance here. What institutions deserve epistemological trust in what conditions? What is required as an answer is not a series of decision rules but a political epistemology concerning conditions of trust, and a corresponding social and political theory about its institutional preconditions. The association of evaluative practices with positions of social power and wealth for example induces quite proper scepticism about its reliability. Indeed, there is I believe a good epistemological argument for social and political equality founded upon conditions of trust. In the absence of ideal conditions we require tools to scrutinise institutions.

Back to the caller

Caller: one actual reply to caller worried about who to trust on BSE:
Don't trust those who have an axe to grind those who are tied to the food industry and attempt to reassure you. Seek those who are independent. And remember there is a difference between not proving there is a connection between BSE and CJD and proving there is no connection.

The arguments make no mention of evidence for or against the connection. They give good rules of thumb about who to trust and how to interrogate arguments with some general principles of good reasoning. It calls upon an understanding of the conditions in which trust in the authoritative utterances of others is rational and tools of proper scepticism. They are the tools of scepticism that are employed in citizens’ juries where they interrogate the testimony of experts.

The problem with Kantian picture of the mature agent does not lie in the values of the enlightenment, in particular that of autonomy. It lies in a particular conception of reasoned deliberation and epistemological maturity which denies that there is ever an occasion for accepting claims on testimony or authority (O’Neill, 1998a, ch.7). In its place one has a less heady picture of maturity that is more akin to the skills an agent in a public forum requires. She is able to reason well for herself, but knows when her own reason is insufficient; she is not credulous nor willing to accept all and any propositions put to her by putative authorities; she is able to judge whose testimony is reliable, whose is not; she knows when and how to be suspicious - she is versed in the practical art of suspicion. The skills of the mature autonomous agent are not, on this account, merely those of the good logician - although these are necessary. They are those of the person who knows when and where it is reasonable to trust claims that call on epistemic authority.

Web notes by John O'Neill March 2004