I recently finished Jonathan Rauch's The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. I found most of the book pretty depressing: it relentlessly examines the ways in which trolls, propagandists, well meaning activists, and shameless bullshitters have been succeeding in attacking the foundation of collective certainty that is the legacy of the enlightenment and subsequent advances. It does make the effort to end on a optimistic note with a exhortation to action in the defense of objective truth.
I recommend it; but hang onto your sense of purpose in the world: it's a rough road.
But I want to point out an oddity in the author's conception of the world (one freely admitted in the text, by the way). One of several guide-stars it the text is what Mr. Rauch calls "the reality-based community" and the rules under which it operates (which he dubs "The Constitution of Knowledge").
We should stop to note that Mr. Rauch's conception of this community encompasses a pretty broad swath including not only scientists but also many other scholars, journalist, intelligence analysts, various members of evidence-based judicial systems, and some governmental and no-governmental policy wonks. Basically everyone who approached the creation of knowledge using The Constitution of Knowledge as a foundation.
One of the key rules of the "knowledge" produced by these systems is that anyone else honestly and diligently following the same rules and using the same base of existing facts should come to the same conclusions. A condition you know you've reached when a strong consensus emerges in the community itself.1
But that leaves us in the epistemological interesting positions of having "objective" knowledge be the product of consensus (among a suitably trained set of investigators), which is at some level a subjective entity.2
The reason this doesn't bring the whole structure down in ruins is the allegation that the processes is what generates the reliability. Have trained in a physical laboratory science I have recourse to highly repeatable experiments for much of the grounding of my discipline,3 but the idea that persuasion through open, earnest, and largely no-personal argumentation is the legitimate route to authority works more broadly that the experimental sciences.
1The author presents a number of examples.
2 Indeed, the author talks about the ways consensus forming can fail or be subverted.
3 Even in physics you get into places (like quantum foundations) where interpretational issues become important in the way we teach, relate, and apply the things we know.
I don't know if this blog is alive or not. But what we could mutually agree is that "context" is what demarcates objectivity from subjectivity. Einstein's relativity represented how relative-ness could generate a befitting "context" which is some-what symbiotic. Newton's infinitesimals tell as it is up to our own to choose a "context" to work physics in.
ReplyDeleteAlive? Well, I seem to be averaging about two posts a months, but it serves to maintain a point of contact.
DeleteI'm not entirely sure I get you point about context.
There is certainly a contextual element to Mr. Rauch's "knowledge" in the sense that it represents the best guess at "truth" given the prior knowledge and available investigatory tools. New base facts or better tools could change it which makes it all contingent (scientific knowledge is this way, too, of course).
As I noted above, the field where I trained has it easy: with a sufficiently well described experiment and sufficient tools and chops on the part of both parties we can have confidence that two investigators will find the same answers. As soon as observational or biological sciences (or worse, people and money and politics) enters the picture things get harder which is really the heart of the problem.
When repeatable experiments are impossible or impractical we must find ways to demarcate proposals into those known to be wrong, those believed to be right and those still undecided. And the boundaries will be uncertain at times. Yet, somehow we describe this partition as "objective". In Mr Rauch's description it is a trick of adherence to process (with mutual policing) that makes it possible.
But once that trick has been managed the claim is that the resulting "truth" is more reliable than other forms of proposed knowledge.