The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth by Jonathan Rauch
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

In Praise of Method

This book says many sensible things. That knowledge is something social, that truth is a matter of agreement, that such agreement has been compromised by modern technology, that error and uncertainty is what produces new knowledge, and that the only way in which we will be able to re-capture a communal appreciation of the truth is through the creation of appropriate institutions of inquiry that respect this error and uncertainty. The author’s recognition that what appears to be an issue of factuality in society is really a political problem is absolutely correct. But his proposal for how to address this problem is neither institutional nor political but rather personal and psychological. So, seriously short of anything serious.

Rauch’s focus is on what is traditionally called method, those things we need to do in order to distinguish the correct from the bogus. The adjective ‘scientific’ is usually applied in order to indicate a concern with the material rather spiritual, and to suggest an intellectual rather than technical programme. Scientific method has been an esoteric topic of discussion among philosophers and theoretical scientists for centuries. The emergence of Trump and his Politics of the Lie has made scientific method a much more popular subject. The issue at stake is what constitutes a valid result or statement, something that can (loosely) be called the ‘truth.’

It turns out that there is no such thing as a unique scientific method. There are, instead, many different methods proposed and accepted over time and across disciplines to establish normative rules for research and to verify and validate the results of inquiry. The rules of inquiry that apply to mathematicians are not the same as those of biologists, for example. Hegel had very different rules than Kant or Hume in philosophy. And the rules for what is considered good physics today are not the same as those of 100 years ago. The fact that methods vary and change is a hint at their political origin.

Rauch traces the the issue of method to Plato. But I think the 17th century philosopher, Gottfried Leibniz, was arguably the first person to suggest that all personal knowledge is fragmentary, incomplete, and likely misleading. And it was the American, Charles Sanders Peirce, who took the implication of this insight and proposed that authentic knowledge was a communal affair among those expert in their fields. For Peirce, the expert community sets the standards to judge not just the competence of individual researchers but also what constitutes a fact produced through their inquiry.

More recent thinkers like Jürgen Habermas have extended the scope of Peirce’s thinking to include not just science but all inquiry, including the larger community of non-experts as well. In doing so, these thinkers inevitably conclude that inquiry of any kind at all is initiated, guided, and judged in a political process. In the ideal, this process should be accessible - in terms of both information and influence - by all those affected by decisions of the community. In other words the argument about the rules of inquiry must be as close to universal as we can make it.

Universal participation in inquiry is a tall order. The issue involves not just governmental politics but also participation in all the specialised expert communities. How is it possible for non-physicists, who know nothing about quantum mechanics, for example, to participate in decision-making of the discipline? In fact, of course, such participation is already commonplace as any politician on a national scientific research appropriations committee already knows. Because of problems that are all too well known in democratic societies - political expediency, pork-barrelling, lobby-funded campaigning, as well as direct and indirect fraud - this sort of participation doesn’t approach Habermas’s ideal. The main impediment is the asymmetric power relationships that permeate society, especially in typical politics.

The rise of the internet was looked upon by many as a way to allow just the sort of enlarged participation that people like Habermas had in mind. The internet was, it was touted, a way to level the playing field so that authority of all types - governmental, scientific, and professional - could be made more ‘transparent’ and more accountable. What has come as a surprise to many in recent years is that the new communications technologies - social, transactional, and research-oriented - have created a tension and ultimately a rift between the Peircean expert communities and the larger, really universal, community of a Habermas.

The politics of these two types of communities are entirely different. Expert communities - of scientists, doctors, lawyers, business people, engineers, information specialists, journalists and so on ad infinitum - are formed through credentials and a process of accreditation, and maintained by institutions which enforce standards of membership. The ‘social’ communities of the internet are, on the other hand, only marginally institutionalised. They are generally open to anyone who desires to participate without restriction except for egregious flouting of general social norms (Rauch calls them “insurgencies”). Put in slightly different terms, the hierarchies of authority in existing institutions (and they almost always are hierarchical, with someone at the apex with whom the buck stops) are being challenged by newly forming political associations, many with their own hierarchies and all with their own politics of method and truth.

So the so-called epistemological crisis - a fundamental uncertainty about what constitutes a fact - arises because of this political divergence. Whatever social, economic, or cultural conditions cause such political expressions are another matter. Our status quo at the moment is a battle between relatively non-institutionalised, technologically assisted populism (of the Left as well as the Right) versus the established institutions of epistemic power. This is not news. It is a re-run, for example, of the Protestant Reformation and its reliance on the technology of printing, an event at least as profound in its creation of uncertainty and social division.

And just as in the 16th century, the issue now is one of who has the ultimate authority over language? Who can claim their words are more than words, that they refer to things that are not words unambiguously? Historically, the resistance movement against those with the power to control the relation between words and non-words has shifted. The Enlightenment pushed authority away from religious institutions toward scientific ones. But the war never ended with a few cultural wins by science. Today’s Evangelicals, for example, are carrying out a strategy to regain control over language in every field from biology to the law. Meanwhile the Left is practising their own version of anti-Enlightenment language control with the fervour of a secular fundamentalism.

Rauch thinks that the problem of epistemological insurgency can be effectively addressed by (re)establishing what he calls our Constitution of Knowledge: “… liberalism’s epistemic operating system: our social rules for turning disagreement into knowledge.” And he is rather specific in the method he thinks appropriate. He believes that there are

“… two rules on which the modern liberal epistemic order—what I call “liberal science”—is founded: no final say and no personal authority. I argued that wherever people adhere to those rules, they will form a community of error-seeking inquirers accountable to each other but never to any particular authority, and knowledge will arise from their hive-like, largely self-organizing activities.”

These two rules are not dissimilar to those of Habermas in their obvious intention to broaden participation and to mitigate asymmetries of power. And arguably they are rules that are involved in some of the best scientific inquiry, which is always tentative and always subject to the scrutiny of one’s peers rather than of one’s superiors. In fact, the two rules probably imply one another.

But to whom are these methodological proposals being made? Certainly not to the head of the National Science Foundation contemplating this year’s research grants. Or to the head of the American Medical association considering some additions to the code of medical ethics. Or to a politician whose first rule of existence is the maintenance of her/his power and authority. Or to a civil servant who has a legal obligation to use authority to enforce conformity with the law.

The proposals not only ignore the reality of institutional life, their execution would also destroy the institutions in which they’re adopted. Isn’t this obvious without further need for argument? No corporate organisation, no official entity, no political party, no professional body could maintain its existence if these two rules were adopted, voluntarily or not.

But the rot goes even deeper. Just think of the examples - in science, in government, in corporate life - in which both decisiveness and personal authority are essential for survival not just a better political result. The rapid development of the COVID-19 serums around the world were a highly directed R&D undertaking. As are governmental responses to natural disasters. Yet their effectiveness is dependent upon breaking the rules Rauch wants in place universally.

And what about the poor man in the street whom Rauch thinks will benefit by these methodological principles? Do they in any way whatsoever help him distinguish between Trumpian pseudo-facts and the latest news of Chinese economic growth? Joe Average is at the base of the epistemological pile. He/she is already subject to a barrage of unfinished/contradictory/impenetrable stories. And certainly she/he has no personal authority to speak of in the matter.

Finally, Rauch seems oblivious to the logical paradox of self-referentiality in which his Constitution is entrapped. When his two rules are applied to his own thoughts, it should be apparent to him that he cannot abjure authority and take it simultaneously. Neither can he claim finality for these rules and advocate a continuing search for the ways to find truth. His thesis is inherently contradictory, and most of what he has to say is a sort of hand-waving to prevent the rest of us from noticing.

At best, therefore, what Rauch is recommending is an attitude of intellectual humility. His rules might just as well be stated in euphemistic exhortations like “Keep an open mind,” “Don’t rush to conclusions,” and “Be doubly sure of things before you drink the hemlock.” Certainly not the kind of insight sufficient to reveal Trumpian mendacity much less promote institutional transformation.

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