Event Title
If you care about truth, fight for justice
Start Date
26-6-2010 9:00 AM
End Date
26-6-2010 10:30 AM
Description
This presentation is part of the Constructing Race and Sexuality track.
A minimal criterion for scientists’ successful communication with lay publics is that it not be irrational for members of those publics to take scientists’ claims to be credible. The importance of scientific method lies in its promise that those who comply with it will arrive at identical, or compatible, results, usually expressed in terms of discovering the truth (or, at least, moving reliably in its direction). Scientific method has grounded the rationally sanctioned response to unavoidable epistemic dependency, namely trust in testimony, specifically the testimony of experts. One cornerstone to that trust has been the institutionalization of expertise—in the training, selection, and credentialing of experts and in the oversight of their practice. To most lay publics, however, those institutions are opaque, and—lamentably—to many they appear anything but trustworthy. The rational credibility of all the research and researchers in a university suffers from practices ranging from disrespectful interactions between researchers and the communities their research bears upon, to outsourcing and other anti-labor policies regarding non-academic staff, to the unaddressed alienation of students from non-dominant cultural backgrounds. No amount of good research practice on the part of academics can rationally ground trust when that research occurs within an institution whose public face makes trust in that institution irrational. I will argue that not only the rational credibility, but also the objectivity of research demands an institutional commitment to social justice.
My aim is to make a case for the centrality to 21st century epistemology of ethically and politically engaged social epistemology. We need, I want to suggest, a fundamental reorientation of these fields away from the epistemological problems that start inside the consciousness of an individual knower and were required to ground the epistemic authority of the modern bourgeois individual, and toward the problems that confront those who would, in today’s world of irreducible diversity and unprecedented epistemic dependency, be doxastically responsible.
For Descartes and the other philosophers of epistemic modernity the trustworthiness of scientific practice rested on an appeal to generic human rationality: if your doxastic choices were deemed worthy of consideration, then you were essentially the same as those with the expertise and could trust that, if they were following the specified disciplined scientific method, the results they came up with would be the same as those you would come up with, were you to follow that same method. Those who were regarded as not essentially interchangeable with the experts (i.e., those who were not able-bodied and minded Christian heterosexual land-owning European men) were, tautologically, those whose doxastic behavior was taken to be fundamentally unreliable—precisely because of their essential difference. Thus, the progress of liberalism has been marked by more and more groups’ staking a claim to essential sameness.
As unfinished as this liberal agenda remains, it has—since at least the mid-1960’s—fallen into increasing disfavor—with post-colonial nationalisms, Black nationalism, queer theory and activism, many forms of feminism, and some disability rights theory and activism. From these perspectives, the political goal is not recognition in the ranks of the same, and diversity is not seen as either superficial or as a liability. While some post-modern theorists take the implication of such moves to be the demise of notions of objectivity, truth, and reality (or at least the irreducible pluralization of the latter two), there are good reasons for resisting such claims—reasons that are grounded in the dependency we all have on unverifiable expertise. If I need to know if it’s safe to drink the water, a playful pluralism is not very helpful—I need the truth.
Thus, there is a pressing need for practical, public, politically engaged epistemology, which starts with the recognition that what we take to be the founding work of the field in its modern incarnation—the work that gave us the conception of rational individual thought leading to universally justified belief and even knowledge—was just that: public, engaged epistemology, rather than the exercise of pure reason that we have been taught to regard it as. Modern epistemological theories were interventions into questions of enormous public moment—explicit attempts to craft both individual personhood and the (singular) public that could be its collective expression. Such discussions are once again urgently needed, since the past half-century has effectively undermined the work of our 17th C predecessors, and we have not yet found anything to replace it.
Unfortunately, current developments are moving us in precisely the wrong direction. The privatization of public universities, for example, exacerbates, on the education side, the widening wealth gap and increasing class stratification, placing public universities increasingly in the camp of social institutions associated with the contraction of democracy, rather than—as had historically been the case—with its expansion. On the research side privatization leads to the setting of research agendas in line with corporate profit rather than either human need or scientific curiosity, as well as to the explicit encouragement of marketable research, leading to well-documented conflicts of interest, and hence to the growing public distrust of scientific expertise.
I want to suggest that the embrace of diversity and a politics of social justice is a route to the restoration of genuinely public goods and the responsibility for them—and that we can best understand objectivity and truth as public goods, often dependent on expert testimony held to public—ethical and political—standards. A commitment to objectivity—to the broad trustworthiness of knowledge claims—requires a commitment to social justice, to the conditions that would make it broadly rational to trust institutions that embody socially recognized authority and privilege. Equally important is a recognition of the epistemic value of diversity, of the contributions to knowledge-creation of diversely located observers and critical commentators, including those who, for various reasons, are not at home in the economic, social, and cultural mainstream.
If you care about truth, fight for justice
This presentation is part of the Constructing Race and Sexuality track.
A minimal criterion for scientists’ successful communication with lay publics is that it not be irrational for members of those publics to take scientists’ claims to be credible. The importance of scientific method lies in its promise that those who comply with it will arrive at identical, or compatible, results, usually expressed in terms of discovering the truth (or, at least, moving reliably in its direction). Scientific method has grounded the rationally sanctioned response to unavoidable epistemic dependency, namely trust in testimony, specifically the testimony of experts. One cornerstone to that trust has been the institutionalization of expertise—in the training, selection, and credentialing of experts and in the oversight of their practice. To most lay publics, however, those institutions are opaque, and—lamentably—to many they appear anything but trustworthy. The rational credibility of all the research and researchers in a university suffers from practices ranging from disrespectful interactions between researchers and the communities their research bears upon, to outsourcing and other anti-labor policies regarding non-academic staff, to the unaddressed alienation of students from non-dominant cultural backgrounds. No amount of good research practice on the part of academics can rationally ground trust when that research occurs within an institution whose public face makes trust in that institution irrational. I will argue that not only the rational credibility, but also the objectivity of research demands an institutional commitment to social justice.
My aim is to make a case for the centrality to 21st century epistemology of ethically and politically engaged social epistemology. We need, I want to suggest, a fundamental reorientation of these fields away from the epistemological problems that start inside the consciousness of an individual knower and were required to ground the epistemic authority of the modern bourgeois individual, and toward the problems that confront those who would, in today’s world of irreducible diversity and unprecedented epistemic dependency, be doxastically responsible.
For Descartes and the other philosophers of epistemic modernity the trustworthiness of scientific practice rested on an appeal to generic human rationality: if your doxastic choices were deemed worthy of consideration, then you were essentially the same as those with the expertise and could trust that, if they were following the specified disciplined scientific method, the results they came up with would be the same as those you would come up with, were you to follow that same method. Those who were regarded as not essentially interchangeable with the experts (i.e., those who were not able-bodied and minded Christian heterosexual land-owning European men) were, tautologically, those whose doxastic behavior was taken to be fundamentally unreliable—precisely because of their essential difference. Thus, the progress of liberalism has been marked by more and more groups’ staking a claim to essential sameness.
As unfinished as this liberal agenda remains, it has—since at least the mid-1960’s—fallen into increasing disfavor—with post-colonial nationalisms, Black nationalism, queer theory and activism, many forms of feminism, and some disability rights theory and activism. From these perspectives, the political goal is not recognition in the ranks of the same, and diversity is not seen as either superficial or as a liability. While some post-modern theorists take the implication of such moves to be the demise of notions of objectivity, truth, and reality (or at least the irreducible pluralization of the latter two), there are good reasons for resisting such claims—reasons that are grounded in the dependency we all have on unverifiable expertise. If I need to know if it’s safe to drink the water, a playful pluralism is not very helpful—I need the truth.
Thus, there is a pressing need for practical, public, politically engaged epistemology, which starts with the recognition that what we take to be the founding work of the field in its modern incarnation—the work that gave us the conception of rational individual thought leading to universally justified belief and even knowledge—was just that: public, engaged epistemology, rather than the exercise of pure reason that we have been taught to regard it as. Modern epistemological theories were interventions into questions of enormous public moment—explicit attempts to craft both individual personhood and the (singular) public that could be its collective expression. Such discussions are once again urgently needed, since the past half-century has effectively undermined the work of our 17th C predecessors, and we have not yet found anything to replace it.
Unfortunately, current developments are moving us in precisely the wrong direction. The privatization of public universities, for example, exacerbates, on the education side, the widening wealth gap and increasing class stratification, placing public universities increasingly in the camp of social institutions associated with the contraction of democracy, rather than—as had historically been the case—with its expansion. On the research side privatization leads to the setting of research agendas in line with corporate profit rather than either human need or scientific curiosity, as well as to the explicit encouragement of marketable research, leading to well-documented conflicts of interest, and hence to the growing public distrust of scientific expertise.
I want to suggest that the embrace of diversity and a politics of social justice is a route to the restoration of genuinely public goods and the responsibility for them—and that we can best understand objectivity and truth as public goods, often dependent on expert testimony held to public—ethical and political—standards. A commitment to objectivity—to the broad trustworthiness of knowledge claims—requires a commitment to social justice, to the conditions that would make it broadly rational to trust institutions that embody socially recognized authority and privilege. Equally important is a recognition of the epistemic value of diversity, of the contributions to knowledge-creation of diversely located observers and critical commentators, including those who, for various reasons, are not at home in the economic, social, and cultural mainstream.