Truth and Trust in Democratic Epistemology

This is an archived MS. The version of record is in Does Truth Matter? Democracy and Public Space, ed. by Raf Geenens and Ronald Tinnevelt (Springer 2009) Truth and Trust in Democratic Epistemology Matthew Festenstein, Department of Politics, University of York Matthew.Festenstein@york.ac.uk Abstract: Recent arguments for an epistemic conception of democracy have moved away from arguing that democracy possesses epistemic power by virtue of effectively aggregating the preferences or opinions of participants and toward the claim that these powers flow from deliberation, viewed as a constitutive element of democracy. This chapter reviews a version of this perspective, drawing on sources in pragmatist political philosophy, and tries to develop it, focusing on frequently overlooked issues of trustworthiness and the place of testimony in democratic theory. In Sect. 6.2, I briefly review the claim that the epistemic power of democracy derives from processes of deliberation and experiment, not merely from judgement aggregation, and go on to outline a pragmatist account of this, drawing on recent work in this area. In Sect. 6.3, I develop this account by introducing the notion of democratic testimony: a key epistemological problem in the process of democratic deliberation is that of credibility or trustworthiness; this is not a problem to be eliminated, but only one whose possible pernicious consequences must to be checked. In Sect. 6.4, I argue that the pragmatist conception of democratic epistemology outlined in Sect. 6.2 1 successfully captures what is distinctive about this problem. In Sect. 6.5, however, I go on to outline a residual problem for this approach to the epistemic character of democracy, and to offer some tentative solutions. Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Paul Gilbert, Cheryl Misak, Glen Newey, Noel O’Sullivan, and Robert Talisse, as well as the editors, for valuable comments on an earlier version. 1. Introduction Recent arguments for an epistemic conception of democracy have moved away from arguing that democracy possesses epistemic power by virtue of effectively aggregating the preferences or opinions of participants and toward the claim that these powers flow from deliberation, viewed as a constitutive element of democracy. This chapter reviews a version of this perspective, drawing on sources in pragmatist political philosophy, and tries to develop it, focusing on frequently overlooked issues of trustworthiness and the place of testimony in democratic theory. In §2, I briefly review the claim that the epistemic power of democracy derives from processes of deliberation and experiment, not merely from judgement aggregation, and go on to outline a pragmatist account of this, drawing on recent work in this area. In §3, I develop this account by introducing the notion of democratic testimony: a key epistemological problem in the process of democratic deliberation is that of credibility or trustworthiness; this is not a problem to be eliminated, but only one whose possible pernicious consequences must to be checked. In §4, I argue that the pragmatist conception of democratic epistemology outlined in §2 successfully captures what is 2 distinctive about this problem. In §5, however, I go on to outline a residual problem for this approach to the epistemic character of democracy, and to offer some tentative solutions. 2. Pragmatism and the epistemology of deliberation An attractive but elusive theme in democratic theory is the thought that democracy possesses epistemic powers. It is tempting to take an optimistic view of democracy as, in John Dewey’s words, a ‘method of organized intelligence’ (Dewey 1935: 56), a way of using information spread across the populace in order to make better informed decisions on matters of public interest, and to link this to the difficulty that undemocratic institutions often have in being truthful. There are well-known sources of doubt about such a project. Yet even among its supporters, it remains far from obvious how democracy should be understood as a means of gathering information and improving decision-making. The pragmatist view that I want to discuss locates the epistemic power of democratic procedures in the deliberative or communicative dimension of democracy. For this perspective, public discussion, a free press, mutual influence, persuasion, debate are constitutive and not merely accidental features of democracy (Anderson 2006: 12). For this pragmatism, the active search for well-grounded beliefs about how to deal with social and political problems entails a set of non-discretionary commitments on the part of anyone who wants such beliefs. The search for true beliefs involves pragmatist canons of inquiry. This entails affirming a pragmatist commitment to fallibilism. No belief is held to be a priori certain or beyond the reach of criticism and 3 revision. Any belief is vulnerable to revision – but only by reference to other beliefs that are held to be ‘settled’ or ‘stable’ for the purposes of judging this belief: ‘that one can be both fallibilistic and antiskeptical is perhaps the unique insight of American pragmatism’ (Putnam 1994: 152; cf. Larmore 1996: 59-60). Fallibilism is not a doctrine which casts a miasma of doubt over all beliefs or any particular belief; rather, it insists that when we question a belief we must do so for specific, justifiable reasons, stimulated by actual doubts.1 This rests on what Cheryl Misak calls a ‘low profile’ conception of truth, not as correspondence, but (in Peircean terms) as belief that is indefeasible in a process of inquiry – ‘if a belief is indefeasible, it would stand up to whatever could be thrown at it, by whatever community of inquirers’ (Misak 2004: 10; cf. Misak 2000: 49). Truth is the aim of specific practices of inquiry, but is one that we achieve only by meeting the more local aims of those practices: by arriving at beliefs that have explanatory and predictive power, are fruitful, are consistent with other well-grounded beliefs, and so on. If a belief can successfully meet all of these local aims, then it is true – there is nothing more we can ask of it (Misak 2004: 14). The search for well-grounded belief involves testing claims against as wide a range of different experiences as possible. In particular, it requires us to seek out and attend to different perspectives and arguments, in order to test and, if necessary, revise our current conceptions. Our beliefs and judgements aim at being true, and being true, on this account, means fitting with reasons and experience. This apparently innocuous condition has critical bite: 1 The classic statements of this are to be found in the following essays by C. S. Peirce: ‘Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man’ (CP 5: 213-63); ‘Some Consequences of Four Incapacities’ (CP 5: 264-317); ‘Grounds of Validity of the Claims of Logic: Further Consequences of Four Incapacities’ (CP 5: 318-57); ‘The Fixation of Belief’ (CP 5: 358-87). The presentation of the pragmatist argument here is ecumenical, and glosses over differences that are worth bringing out in different contexts: for example, see Festenstein (1997; 2004; 2007). 4 Engaging in genuine moral inquiry – searching for principles and for particular judgements which will not be susceptible to recalcitrant experience and argument – requires that we take our beliefs to be responsive to new arguments and sensibilities about what is good, cruel, kind, oppressive, worthwhile, or just. Those who neglect or denigrate the experiences of others because of their gender, skin colour, or sexual orientation are adopting a very bad means for arriving at true or rational beliefs. They can be criticised for failing to aim at truth properly. (Misak 2000: 104) This general methodological principle provides support for democratic political deliberation: ‘[d]eliberation is justified because it is the best way of exposing and communicating the reasons that matter and democratic deliberation is justified because we need to expose all of the reasons that matter not just a subset of them’ (Misak 2004: 15). We test our political principles and judgements by exposing them to as wide a range as possible of different arguments, reasons, and experience. This is relevant to how we should consider democracy as a procedure and as an ethos. The importance of testing beliefs, including both specific proposals and more fundamental standards of inquiry, against different points of view and recalcitrant experiences means that this pragmatist conception of democratic inquiry attaches great importance to fostering the conditions for dissent and critical feedback (Anderson 2006). The values of diversity, free discussion, and criticism need institutional embodiment, in elections, a free press, fora for public protest, as well as 5 in the variety of designs for more specifically deliberative institutions such as citizens’ juries.2 The expression of disagreement during discussion is important in drawing attention to asymmetrically distributed information and diverse problem-solving strategies that may be relevant to the solution of a public problem (Anderson 2006: 16). Dissent prior to decision-making is a necessary condition for the formulation of a genuinely collective will consistent with the autonomy of each member. Pure deference to a leader or a majority who claims to represent the collective will is incompatible with the autonomy of individuals (Anderson 2006: 17). Majority decisions in democracy are not consensual decisions. Holding that democratic procedures must be compatible with reliable methods of belief formation does not entail making the unwarranted and distinct assertions that there will always be convergence on a single point of view on every issue, or that decisions will not sometimes have to be made in the absence of conclusive reasons pointing one way or the other on some contested issue (cf. Misak 2000: 136-154). So there is no assumption that each member is committed to or agrees with the particular outcome. As a result, continuing opposition, questioning are not at odds with the view that the source of the epistemic capacity of democracy lies in this form of deliberation. On the contrary, since we want to expose our arguments and reasons to as wide a range as possible of reasons and experience, they are part and parcel of deliberation itself (Manin 1987; Festenstein 2002; Anderson 2006). To the extent that we are genuinely seeking to deal with practical questions in a way oriented toward truth, we should be governed by these standards, and not accept any particular consensus as the truth. Our 2 The importance of the ‘contestatory’ or ‘agonistic’ dimension of democracy has been stressed from different directions, from writers who build on the importance of non-domination (Pettit 2004; Shapiro 2002) rather than epistemic capability. 6 standards may be corrupt but democracy provides means to correct by preserving conditions for future inquiry, scrutiny and revision. As well as viewing these procedural features of democracy as indispensable to its working , this approach also requires a certain ethos or sensibility on the part of participants. In particular, it requires a reflexive critical openness of the right sort, or the cultivation of epistemically responsible habits by participants.3 In particular, the commitment to expose one’s own beliefs to a range of arguments and experiences requires a capacity to appraise sources of information and to draw appropriate conclusions. I explore these requirements further in what follows. But the point to emphasise here is that whatever content we give to this notion of critical openness the stance itself is justified as part of epistemic responsibility. This is not the place for a full articulation or defence of this position. On one side, it is confronted by views of democracy that locate its epistemic power in the way that a majority decision rule aggregates the judgements of members.4 On another side, it is confronted by views of deliberation that decouple its normative pull from any epistemic value that it may have (e.g. Christiano 1997; Cooke 2002).5 In the rest of this chapter, I will not adjudicate on these disputes but focus on the intramural matter of how to understand the epistemic content of deliberation. 3 Talisse adopts a slightly different and more ambitious set of ‘deliberative virtues’. These include honesty, defined as the disposition to follow and respond to evidence; modesty, viewed as a preparedness to treat political proposals as ‘workable ameliorations’, rather than panaceas; charity, in listening to and responding to opposing views; and integrity, viewed as a commitment to continue working cooperatively despite difficulties and failures (Talisse 2005: 112-3; and see Talisse, this volume). Some of these, it seems to me, appear to flow from the epistemic starting point identified here, but others do not. The notions of reflexive critical openness is owed to Fricker (2003). 4 The most famous example of this is the Condorcet Jury Theorem: for its influence on political theorists, see Barry 1967; Cohen 1986; Grofman and Feld 1988; Waldron 1993; Goodin and List 2001; Anderson 2006; Estlund this volume. 5 For a persuasive treatment of this, see Richardson 1997; 2002. See also Festenstein 2002. 7 3. Democratic Testimony From the pragmatist perspective outlined, one of the problems with locating the epistemic power of democratic institutions in procedures of judgement aggregation is that it is insensitive to the ways in which judgements which enter into the aggregative procedure are formed, and that these matter for our assessment of the epistemic capacity of democracy (Anderson 2006). However, the conception of deliberative inquiry which I am exploring here seems to bring with it its own difficulties about influence and the sources of information. As I have shown, it is an important part of this conception that space be given to dissent and criticism of decisions; and that these are constitutive of deliberation, rather than symptoms of a failure on the part of some members of the group to apprehend the general will. As I presented the argument in the previous section, for this pragmatist conception the goal of this inquiry is truth or true beliefs (or at least warranted assertions, in Deweyan vocabulary). However, we are often not in a position to assess the truth of claims put forward in deliberation, or directly to criticise truth claims that are advanced. For if we view deliberation as largely consisting of advancing and assessing arguments about what do in matters of public interest then participants in this process can be viewed as particularly concerned, not directly with evaluating the truth of the claims put in front of them, but with appraising the credibility and trustworthiness of those who put forward those claims. We can characterise this problem in the following way. In spite of Enlightenment slogans to the contrary, we are each of us ineluctably dependent on others for our knowledge. One of the basic ways in which we acquire knowledge is through being told. So in public deliberation we may sometimes appraise the truth of 8 the claims that are presented, but given the division of epistemic labour we more usually assess the credibility or trustworthiness of sources of truth-claims – we view them as more or less reliable sources of testimony (Coady 1992). Political questions often involve complex claims and bodies of knowledge of which most of us have very little, if any, grasp at all. For most citizens are not in a position to arrive at a competent judgement about GM organisms, climate change, or the medical consequences of vaccines. Without extensive education, I lack the capacity to make informed and critical judgments about the reliability of GM organisms or even the consequences of the UK’s joining the euro zone for the North East of England. We inevitably rely on a complex and mediating division of epistemic labour in the process of public deliberation. Indeed, it is a certain kind of obfuscatory rhetoric to claim just to be placing the facts in front of the citizens in order for them to arrive at their own judgement about what to do. Rather, as John O’Neill puts it, ‘the arguments pass me and most other citizens by. I simply wouldn’t know how to appraise the evidence even if you gave me all the detail. I want to know not if the evidence supports this or that conclusion, but whether I have good reason to trust those who offer it’ (J. O’Neill 2002: 259).6 Furthermore, in the case of complex scientific or technical knowledge, this is not a problem that only derives from the difficulty of transmitting complex truths to the ill-educated layperson. Rather, scientific inquiry itself a cooperative enterprise that relies on epistemic trust in others: ‘science is no refuge from the ubiquity of testimony’ (Lipton 1998: 1). Questions of credibility do not only relate to putative sources of factual knowledge or of a clear understanding of what is going on, but to trustworthiness in 6 Tetlock (2006) is an important contribution to this question, which appeared too late to discuss meaningfully here. 9 making good or bad practical judgements and in offering evaluations.7 For example, a judgement about whether a school is performing well or ‘failing’ in part requires expert professional evaluation. This is not to say that these judgements and the processes of training and professionalisation that lie behind them cannot be criticised. Rather, the point is that this is inevitably a process of critical evaluation of the credibility and trustworthiness of those who offer the judgements.8 Here too though it is also worth emphasising that it is not only the peculiarly recondite character of forms of professional expertise that rest on or may raise the issue of the credibility, integrity and trustworthiness of sources. Our testimony that office ‘humour’ is in fact racist and upsetting requires not only an acknowledgement that we can be an authoritative source on this, that our judgement can be trusted.9 Furthermore, where this testimony bears specifically on political decisions, what Mark Warren calls the generic problem of trusting arises: we both need to trust some among the crowds of ‘experts’ or sources of information who jostle for our attention, but we know that their interests may conflict with ours. In other words, what is at issue in judgements of political credibility is not only the competence of someone offering us testimony but also whether they have an interest in presenting their presentation of testimony is wholly a matter of strategic manipulation, itself insensitive to truth. The generic problem of the relationship between trust and politics is that political relationships throw the very conditions of trust into question. For politics is a realm in which the interests and identities of other actors may differ and 7 For a brief account of Dewey on valuation and practical judgement, see Festenstein 2008. As Onora O’Neill (2002b) and Glen Newey (this volume) point out, a major trend has been to bypass this process of evaluation, and pre-empt the possibility of trust, by positing a set of performance indicators against which institutions are judged, frequently with perverse consequences. 9 This leads into a further debate on the scope of moral testimony: ‘if the world of value is complex, and if our access to it is shaped by our experiences, then even among the morally mature there will be a significant role for moral testimony and thus for trust’ (Jones 1999: 56; for some doubts, see Hopkins 2007). 8 10 conflict with ours: ‘[w]here there is politics, then, the conditions of trust are weak: the convergence of interests between truster and trusted cannot be taken for granted’ (Warren 1999: 312). In the political interactions where trust is required, we cannot rely on sincere and open utterances. Given that I know that our interests and identities may conflict, how can I know that you will act so as to secure my interests, and so can rest satisfied with the habit of reliance upon you? Further, some writers argue that this problem of mutual opacity and so of trust is deepened in the circumstances of multicultural politics, where we cannot assume a common identity or common values (for discussion, see Festenstein 2005). So, on the one hand, it seems sensible to treat opinions and arguments offered in political deliberation with extreme caution. Yet withholding trust altogether renders us (that is, most of us, the ‘us’ who don’t proclaim ourselves experts on GM foods, climate change, and so on) unable to arrive at any decision at all. So, while we cannot just dispense with this form of epistemic trust, it is sometimes easy to lapse into a default position of glib cynicism: ‘it is hardly surprising that in the face of so many complex questions, and even more opinions, trust is refused not only when there is accessible and reliable evidence of trustworthiness, but also when there is reasonably accessible evidence of trustworthiness’ (O. O’Neill 2002a: 142). We do not wish to be duped either by intentional trickery or by our own complacency when confronted by the incompetent testimony of others. At the same time, wrongly withholding epistemic trust, failing to accord a speaker credibility when he or she deserves it, can of course deprive us of the knowledge on the basis of which we should act and expresses a misguided belief about the speaker. In addition, as Miranda Fricker has argued, failing to give a speaker credibility which is actually deserved may be characterised as itself a form of 11 oppression, ‘epistemic injustice’ (Fricker 2003). Powerful social norms can unjustly withhold or grant credibility from marginal or dominated groups, as they do in the case of other social resources and forms of status. Groups, identities, styles of reasoning, may be excluded or assimilated (a theme pursued in work of Iris Marion Young, for whom there is a particular worry that the emphasis on cognitive goals may block other forms of participation that are or are perceived as not legitimately cognitive).10 4. Pragmatism and Trustworthiness The claim of this section is that we should consider the pragmatist conception of democratic inquiry as offering a helpful way of addressing this dilemma. It does not purport to be a method for solving the dilemma, in the sense of showing that in any individual case the dilemma is not real. Rather, the claim is that the procedures and virtues that this account of deliberation supports address the dilemma in the right way. We can understand the pragmatist conception of democratic inquiry as a response to the inescapability of trust in this context as well as the vulnerability that it brings with it. Inquiry is a social enterprise, with an actual division of labour (cf. Bohman 1999) Pragmatism starts from the belief that critical inquiry itself cannot ground all our beliefs. We can therefore view our beliefs both as rooted in history and practice, and as subject to justification, and rational criticism. We can only begin to reason on the basis of the beliefs and practices that we already have – we cannot call everything into question all at once – and these are given to us by historical contingency. What is 10 See Young 2000. 12 important then is to provide the conditions to open up belief claims up to dissent and rational disagreement, which this account does by viewing democratic deliberation as a way of giving voice to different forms of reasons and experience and as a testing ground for different practical judgements: ‘you won’t bootstrap yourself out of history and escape your current beliefs. But still you can make progress’ (Herzog 2006: 107). If we accept that the social and mediated character of belief is a central feature of the pragmatist account, it remains to explain how this account specifically makes room for gauging the trustworthiness of sources rather than directly appraising the truth of epistemic claims. It would be a mistake to think that viewing democratic deliberation as principally a matter of the assessment of trustworthiness is to encourage the uncritical and irrational acceptance of the putatively authoritative claims of others – a politics of deference, as it has been called.11 For the point I have stressed is that the taking on trust that this position argues is indispensable must be critical rather than uncritically deferential. Consider first what I called the procedural dimension. Distinctively deliberative institutions such as citizens’ juries can be viewed in a Kantian way, as an opportunity for citizens to express their maturity by subjecting the truth claims of practitioners to direct critical appraisal. However, if we accept the points made in the last section, about the limits on our capacity to provide well grounded direct appraisals of this sort, then we can view these institutions in a different light. As O’Neill puts it, It is a feature of juries that they do not for the most part if at all consider the truth or falsity of the evidence directly, but the trustworthiness of those who present it. Thus it is with the citizens’ jury: often, it is the character of those on 11 For a version of this charge, levelled at the treatment of testimony in Sanders (1997), see Dryzek (2000). 13 whose testimony we call, their capacity to speak on the issue in question, their reliability, independence and disinterestedness that is at issue. The model provides the best we can hope for in the institutional dimension to answerability. (O’Neill 1998: 100) Similarly, a free press -- when functioning well -- can be viewed as putting before the public the facts on the basis of which a judgement can be made. However, as I have suggested, this obscures our dependence on inevitably partial sources and our inability to make any evaluation without reference to other sources. A free press, then, can allow us to make judgements about the reliability and trustworthiness of sources of information, including those media themselves. Assessing reliability and trustworthiness also calls on the epistemic sensibility outlined in the pragmatist account of deliberation, in two ways. The first is that displaying the pragmatist virtues can play a role in establishing trustworthiness in this way for others. For we are more likely to treat as credible a claimant who is prepared to subject his or her claims to these tests, and who is prepared to take part in open scrutiny of her claims and debate about them. To reiterate: many of us won’t be in a position to judge the outcomes of such a debate with any great competence. But the preparedness to enter into the debate is an indicator of the trustworthiness of the source in this kind of case. Indeed, willingness to expose one’s own arguments and claims to test seems to be one of the few means by which trust can be created out of initial distrust – trust not in the specific claims (these may fail the test of public scrutiny) but of the agents agreeing to open up their positions in this way. A reflexive critical openness toward the claims of others is also necessary as a part of our evaluative equipment when we try to make judgements of credibility. We need to filter, sort and discriminate among epistemic sources, but to do so in a way 14 that does not perpetuate epistemic injustice. One approach here is to fall back on Lockean maxims to guide the assessment of testimony, such as that we want witnesses that are knowledgeable, consistent with one another, and confident. The difficulty with such maxims is that they cannot work as formal rules (cf. Shapin 1994; Lipton 1998). Knowledgeable informants are good, but may also be bad if they overinterpret or their knowledge is attained at the price of being highly partisan on the issue (Hendriks, Dryzek and Hunold 2007). Consistency among witnesses is good, but can be bad if it is a sign of collusion, or of the failure to interrogate a wide enough range of sources. Confidence in presentation is good, but sometimes hesitancy should inspire more confidence. The point we can draw from this is that responsiveness of the right kind is a kind of ethos or sensibility, rather than the implementation of a codifiable set of formal rules (but compare Lipton 1998). 5. Conclusion: Deliberative Vulnerability The pragmatist conception of deliberation rests on a claim that is conditional but thought to be fairly uncontroversial: that we value the truth (in the ‘low profile’ sense outlined here), and so value the conditions under which we can arrive at true beliefs. This is a premise that we may reject, but, Misak thinks, on the whole will not: she claims that it is ‘relatively uncontentious’ that ‘everybody claims to be after’ true beliefs (Misak 2000: 107). It may be true that well-grounded beliefs are what we are after, if we view ourselves principally as inquirers, but it is much more contentious to think that we chase true beliefs at the expense of pursuing other interests and goals. Political agents may put other considerations, such as building coalitions, flattering 15 friends and avoiding embarrassment ahead of adhering to the conditions for the production of a true belief. Now in any given particular case it may be sensible (rational, justified) for me to overlook the point of view of various particular others. And, if that is so, it is not clear what grip the consideration that in general I should arrange things so that my beliefs are tested against as wide as possible range of experience and argument has or should have. One response to this worry invokes the thought that there are specific virtues that accompany inquiry. So, this argument runs, if I wish to avoid epistemic irresponsibility and the difficulties that may flow from that then I should cultivate these virtuous dispositions. And it is in the nature of such dispositions that I cannot just pick them up and drop them at different moments and in different contexts, so to speak. So even when there may be a perspective from which my own interest, ideal or point of view could be better served by a less conscientious adherence to the methodological strictures of inquiry pragmatism, my dispositions will be such that I won’t sacrifice them in order to achieve my political goal. To accept this response, we will need a fuller sense of the specific content of the virtues and how they are derived than I have attempted here. But even if we accept this line of argument, it does not rid us of the difficulty, which concerns the utility or applicability of these virtues in the political realm. For we may question whether the epistemic virtues should be paramount in guiding political action when these virtues are unevenly diffused across deliberators. For you to deliberate conscientiously with integrity and reflexive critical awareness while I energetically pursue my narrow selfinterest or particular political project may result in a worse political outcome (which may be an epistemically worse outcome) than if you were equally energetic on your own behalf. 16 An alternative response to the problem runs as follows. The pragmatist may respond that pragmatism provides some critical leverage on this instrumentallyoriented political agent, and this is exactly the point of the pragmatist account of truth and deliberation. After all, even if I concentrate on coalition-building and vote winning, I will want to do so on the basis of true beliefs: this commitment, and so what follows from it, should not be regarded as dispensable. Even if I have this instrumental attitude toward the political process, I will still wish to form my interests, ideals and projects on the basis of true beliefs and so through epistemically responsible habits and practices. So I will want procedures, institutions and a public culture that fosters these. This is a compressed and sketchy presentation, and a lot more needs development here. I have tried to set out an important account of the claim that democracy possesses epistemic powers, to describe the problem that democratic testimony raises for such an approach, and to outline how this problem can be addressed. Acknowledgement of the ineliminable division of epistemic labour and of testimony in democratic inquiry does not necessarily slide into the endorsement of deference. 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