Category Archives: Epistemic Institutional Design

Pragmatism, Pluralism, and Relativism

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Many people are fleeing social media, and my friend James Stanescu is trying to bring back blogging in response. He has an excellent post summarizing some of the differences between the pragmatisms of William James and C.S. Peirce. (I’ll call them “James” and “Scu” here for clarity.) Scu is drawing especially on Cheryl Misak’s capsule history, which itself is worth a read for reinvigorating the study of folks like Chauncey Wright and C.I. Lewis.

Peirce and James fought over the proper definition of pragmatism, as well as the term itself, but the simplest shared sense of the project is that truth and meaning are tied to use and inquiry. But Peirce emphasized inquiry, and James use, and that has made all the difference:

Peirce: “The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real. That is the way I would explain reality.”

James: “The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite assignable reasons.”

I’m thoroughly with Peirce on this. But for Scu, ever the debater, this post is an occasion to also pick a fight with Peirceans on behalf of James:

Against Peirce’s metaphysical deflation, James gives us a metaphysical plenum. Pragmatism, for James, means living in a world that is disenchanted, re-enchanted, never disenchanted, never enchanted all at once. It means living in a world of scientific rationality and base materialism alongside the energies of God, all the Gods, things older than Gods, and beings that are yet-to-come. Horkheimer’s critique turns out to have some weight, James’ pragmatism makes the world both too subjective and too objective, both too rational and too mystical. 

My sense is that Peirce is not really a metaphysical deflationist like the logical positivists. For one thing he spins up a very complicated system of triadic relationships as categories or conceptual schema, and for another thing, he was some sort of pan-psychist. That said, he was at base a Monist (THE Monist) and so in some very, very specific sense he’s more a deflationist than, say, substance dualists. But not really like the logical positivists or scientistic materialists would be. Still, his monism is in stark contrast with the pluralism of William James.

To suck the nuance out of these debates, it helps to wonder: to what extent is pragmatism relativistic? I think neither James nor Peirce are truly relativists, and I find the Rortyan shrug as irritating as everyone else did. But Williams James was… an enthusiast. He sometimes let himself write and say things that smacked of relativism–more in line with his radical empiricism than his pragmatism, to be honest–and some of his adherents have taken this too far.

Scu was partly provoked into writing this up by Patricia Lockwood’s review essay on Simon Critchley’s mysticism book. It’s one of those wonderful takedowns that shows off the reviewer’s erudition at the expense of the author:

…as the inquiry wore on I began to experience a hysterical sympathy: there was such a rhythm of anxious restatement, so much of Critchley telling you what he was about to do and then not doing it, such endless throat-clearing and adjectival gooeyness and such a tendency for his mind to explode whenever he encountered a juxtaposition like ‘the ravishing far-near’.

It seems that it’s a philosopher’s job to say every word three times, its opposite twice and then the original word again, italicised. 

I loved the review, too, and so I guess she’s provoked us both. I’ve also spent more than a little time dabbling with mystic texts and traditions, and so I sometimes flirt with the academic study of the same–even though I can’t for the life of me find much value in it. There’s some kind of performative contradiction in studying such things.

Now, I think Scu’s post captures where I get off the bus with the Jamesean tradition–in both pragmatism and mystics. (While appreciating James’ psychology and his religious sociology all the more!) Ineffable spiritual traditions are fun to play around with, but the manifold claims of all the alternative practices that academics group together under that label can’t all be true! Most of them have to be false because they contradict each other, and I’m not impressed by efforts to embrace contradiction as some kind of deep logical wisdom. “Ah, yes, well after Gödel we must understand that contradiction exposes a deeper truth!” Sigh.

Here’s Scu again:

James’ system of verification and validation allows for a multiple ways of verifying something. If there are many processes that can arrive at different answers about if something is true, and there is no way to put these processes in some sort of hierarchy, we have utterly exploded the metaphysical possibilities of the world. We have therefore a multiverse, a pluriverse, a pluralistic universe (to use some of James’ terms). The world is, as James puts it, “ultra-Gothic.” 

The line I hate most here is “there is no way to put these processes in some sort of hierarchy,” such that–as he goes on to explain–aesthetic and scientific modes of determining truth are unable to correct each other but are instead equally true.

Whenever I sit with relativists, I find that two things seem to be true of their position:

  1. They really want to preserve space for pluralism, and so their relativism is a usually a species of liberal toleration with some metaphysical baggage they’re not really willing to embrace. Sometimes they’re also motivated by fear of error: a wise caution to which they grant an unwise metaphysical status.
  2. They don’t really care what this costs people for whom the principle of a fixed, shared reality is a hard–fought and oft-missed goal: victims of false confessions or lying witnesses, citizens of tyrannical regimes with flimsy propaganda, mentally-ill individuals trying to sort out their delusions and hallucinations from the truth, eager scientists seeking truth amidst fraud, etc.

I know it seems arrogant to say “actually, your heart is not being pierced by the nails from Christ’s cross, you’re just hallucinating real good,” but that’s my position! And in some sense Scu himself recognizes that this kind of relativism/pluralism of “no actually lots of contradictory things are true” runs into its own arrogance problems. His own work depends on the idea that the exclusion of alternative forms of experience leads to error and, in fact, to evil! For instance, there are true claims to be verified about animal cruelty that a thoroughgoing relativist would be tempted to ignore because so few people are really interested in them. But I maintain that genteel relativism is an attempt to one-up folks just trying to make sense of our shared world by saying that actually we don’t need to share it at all: everyone gets their own.

For the things that matter, like fascism or climate change, that’s not really true. It’d be nice if the folks who don’t believe in global warming weren’t polluting the same world as the folks who do, but the tragedy of existence–and its joy!–is that we must share one world. No one sane and good is ever a relativist or a (Jamesean) pragmatist about criminal guilt or innocence, about child abuse and the Satanic panic, or about vaccines. Relativism is always reserved for some other stuff that’s off to the side, like whether a particular artwork is beautiful.

(Scu cites Kandinsky’s aesthetics here, right on cue: K: “It is also exclusively from this inner standpoint that one must answer the question whether the work is good or bad.” Which Scu glosses: “Kandinsky’s truth is every bit as true as any logical inquiry.”) It strikes me that we built aesthetics precisely to get such truly relativistic judgments out of the way for science and ethics and ontology.

Now, I say that as someone who really loves pluralistic work. I also love fiction, even science-fiction and fantasy! I want to inhabit a political world where plural life-worlds and sources of meaning can flourish, where people are constantly inventing and imagining something other than the pure scientific truth.

I’m also more than happy to acknowledge that the technocratic liberal reality principle tends to its own abuses: in a world of deepfakes and misinformation, fact-checking can go too far. We can be overconfident and “correct” a true claim by reasserting an error, or a value as a fact. In that sense, I think that fallibilism is just as important as pluralism, and that fallibilism requires a reality principle to which we can return, reconsider, and correct ourselves or be corrected by others. A relativistic world is one with few reasons to change your mind!

That’s why I say that, practiced badly, Jamesean pagmatism tends towards a kind of solipsistic arrogance: if every relation with the world bears its own form of verification from which there is no hierarchy, corrective, or escape, then there’s no outside from which to hear criticism and reconsider, either. Deliberation, doubt, critical reflection, and reconsideration are all missing!

It’s worth noting, here, that Scu’s Jamesean pragmatism is in service of his radical/weird empiricism, and ultimately a challenge to anthropocentrism:

Radical empiricism affirms the realness of relations. 

Weird empiricism sees how these principles opens up a strange, bizarre, yes weird, pluriverse. One that can bring in the more than human world. Weird empiricism both sees the reality of our relationship to the more than human world (our relationship to other animals, but also ghosts, the sacred, imagined geographies, the dead and the undying). But also weird empiricism takes seriously the experience of the more than human world. That is, we can understand that other animals have a stake in claims of the truth because they can experience just as well as human. Though their truths may be alter than ours–weird truths from weird worlds.

And that idea, that animals have experiences that can act as a corrective to our epistemic and practical domination of them, strikes me as requiring fallibilism and ultimately undermining relativism. So I think what Scu says makes it clear that the terms of that pluralism can’t be metaphysical or ontological. I, too, want to enable as many compatible life-worlds as are mutually compatible! But there’s a ground truth out there that makes those shared horizons possible.

What should we say when we talk about guns? (continued)

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Some people will say that they’re unnecessary and dangerous. Others will say that they’re a tool for self-defense and self-sufficiency. That’s usually where the debate rests, except that the 2nd Amendment privileges the second group. If we want to make progress, we can offer better reasons, reasons that will be superior precisely because they are responsive to the reasons of our interlocutors. That means honestly trying to find the overlap in what appears to be an incommensurable set of assumptions.

Here’s Dan Braman and Dan Kahan, in an article on how to have a better gun debate:

For one segment of American society, guns symbolize honor, human mastery over nature, and individual self-sufficiency. By opposing gun control, individuals affirm the value of these meanings and the vision of the good society that they construct. For another segment of American society, however, guns connote something else: the perpetuation of illicit social hierarchies, the elevation of force over reason, and the expression of collective indifference to the well-being of strangers. These individuals instinctively support gun control as a means of repudiating these significations and of promoting an alternative vision of the good society that features equality, social solidarity, and civilized nonaggression.

As a result, Braman and Kahan propose a “big trade”: those who oppose guns should offer to recognize and respect the rights of gun ownership, effectively normalizing it, in exchange for universal registration. By emphasizing the responsibility and civic spiritedness of most gun owners, Braman and Kahan believe that we can better reach an agreement what that responsibility entails.

For Braman and Kahan, this is an extension of their cultural cognition work, but I’d put it a little differently, in terms of the interaction between esteem and social norms: rather than depicting gun owners as dangerous hicks, we give them esteem in exchange for esteem-worthy performances of self-abnegation and sacrifice, like giving up assault weapons and semi-automatics. Since less than 0.004% of all guns are used on other human beings in any given year, we should acknowledge that most people’s guns are not the problem.

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by Flickr user deepwarren

It’s tempting to stage a cultural showdown around guns, to line up a set of  statistics and international comparisons and arguments: i.e. that carrying a gun probably increases the likelihood that you will be shot and killed. Lots of resources already go into advertising this fact, along with others. From a public health perspective it makes perfect sense to discourage gun ownership, but so long as many Americans treat guns as a central part of their identities, such discouragement will only have limited impact. Research suggests that our prior beliefs on guns will have an significant impact on the way that we process new data on gun deaths. That’s more evident in my Facebook and Twitter feeds, where tragedy and group polarization rule, but very little cross-cutting bipartisan dialogue takes place.

In “More Statistics, Less Persuasion: A Cultural Theory of Gun-Risk Perceptions,” Braman and Kahan offer evidence that risk perceptions are derivative of social norms and cultural-loaded meanings:

The risks that we face in our daily lives are far too vast in number and diverse in nature to be comprehended in their totality. Of all the potential hazards that compete for our attention, the ones most likely to penetrate our consciousness are the ones that comport with our norm-pervaded moral evaluations: it is easy to believe that ignoble activities are also physically dangerous, and worthy ones benign. Thus, “moral concern guides not just response to the risk but the basic faculty of [risk] perception” as well.

What this means is that how we process school shootings or firearm-related suicides will be largely dictated by our prior views on the social importance of guns. That’s why our responses differ so drastically: it’s not that some of us are dumb and some smart, some indifferent to suffering and some caring, but that we can only understand tragedy within a cultural framework, and that framework partially dictates which elements of the tragedy pop out as salient.

In particular, those concerned primarily with hierarchical forms of status and authority will relate to gun crimes differently from those egalitarians who abhor social statification, while those who favor individual autonomy will take up a different yet a third approach to evaluating and prioritizing risks than those who favor collective action. What Braman and Kahan show is that the facts and statistics that seem salient to us depend largely on where we fall on both the hierarchy-egalitarian axis and the individualism-solidarism axis.

Here, then, is the problem: most of the prohibition-type solutions are only going to receive support from those of us who are both egalitarian and in favor of collective action. This creates the potential for a coalition of interests between those who favor guns as a traditional prerogative of American citizenship, and those who see them as a symbol self-sufficiency and of man’s mastery of nature. You can’t simply eliminate those value profiles and risk-assessments from the electorate, and it’s important to acknowledge that they do see some facts more clearly we do. Instead, we should seek solutions that are more widely satisfying to traditionalists. Politicians understood this long ago and captured it in the canard that gun safety regulations should respect the rights of “hunters and sportsmen.”

But what kinds of policies does this respect entail?

In my last post, I emphasized the importance of taking full prohibition off the table for safety reasons, and I linked to two kinds of suggestions for gun control that seem like reasonable accommodations with the many civic-minded gun owners in the country: the federal legislation recommendations from the Mayors Against Illegal Guns, and the Op-Ed by Craig Whitney, “A Way Out of the Gun Stalemate.”

To this, let me add the state and local initiatives suggested by the Mayors Against Illegal Guns, which are in many ways more important, such as better mental health reporting and ammunition controls and licensing. Many of these are things that need not be resolved nationally to be effective: for instance, California single-handedly improved ballistics recognition by requiring guns sold in the state to “micro-stamp” their serial numbers onto shell casings. That program should be expanded to other states.

A lot of the pushback I received last week was tied to the fact that places like Japan and Great Britain have had reasonable success with prohibitions. Certainly this is true, but it seems to ignore both that those places started off with a very different gun culture, and that they are geographic anomalies, islands of dense populations with a lot of ethnic homogeneity. We have 310,000,000 of the damned things, and we’ve had many failures over the years trying to curb that numbers’ growth. We should try something different.

(Always a good reminder: Timur Kuran’s and Cass Sunstein’s “Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation.”)

Cultural Cognition is Not a Bias

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Some recent posts by Dan Kahan on the subject of “cultural cognition” deserve attention:

(Cultural cognition refers to the tendency of individuals to conform their beliefs about disputed matters of fact (e.g., whether global warming is a serious threat; whether the death penalty deters murder; whether gun control makes society more safe or less) to values that define their cultural identities.)

There’s no remotely plausible account of human rationality—of our ability to accumulate genuine knowledge about how the world works—that doesn’t treat as central individuals’ amazing capacity to reliably identify and put themselves in intimate contact with others who can transmit to them what is known collectively as a result of science.

Indeed, as I said at the outset, it is not correct even to describe cultural cognition as a heuristic. A heuristic is a mental “shortcut”—an alternative to the use of a more effortful, and more intricate mental operation that might well exceed the time and capacity of most people to exercise in most circumstances.

But there is no substitute for relying on the authority of those who know what they are talking about as a means of building and transmitting collective knowledge. Cultural cognition is no shortcut; it is an integral component in the machinery of human rationality.

Unsurprisingly, the faculties that we use in exercising this feature of our rationality can be compromised by influences that undermine its reliability. One of those influences is the binding of antagonistic cultural meanings to risk and other policy-relevant facts. But it makes about as much sense to treat the disorienting impact of antagonistic meanings as evidence that cultural cognition is a bias as it does to describe the toxicity of lead paint as evidence that human intelligence is a “bias.”

Look: people aren’t stupid. They know they can’t resolve difficult empirical issues (on climate change, on HPV-vaccine risks, on nuclear power, on gun control, etc.) on their own, so they do the smart thing: they seek out the views of experts whom they trust to help them figure out what the evidence is. But the experts they are most likely to trust, not surprisingly, are the ones who share their values.

What makes me feel bleak about the prospects of reason isn’t anything we find in our studies; it is how often risk communicators fail to recruit culturally diverse messengers when they are trying to communicate sound science.

The number of scientific insights that make our lives better and that don’t culturally polarize us is orders of magnitude greater than the ones that do. There’s not a “culture war” over going to doctors when we are sick and following their advice to take antibiotics when they figure out we have infections. Individualists aren’t throttling egalitarians over whether it makes sense to pasteurize milk or whether high-voltage power lines are causing children to die of leukemia.

People (the vast majority of them) form the right beliefs on these and countless issues, moreover, not because they “understand the science” involved but because they are enmeshed in networks of trust and authority that certify whom to believe about what.

For sure, people with different cultural identities don’t rely on the same certification networks. But in the vast run of cases, those distinct cultural certifiers do converge on the best available information. Cultural communities that didn’t possess mechanisms for enabling their members to recognize the best information—ones that consistently made them distrust those who do know something about how the world works and trust those who don’t—just wouldn’t last very long: their adherents would end up dead.

Rational democratic deliberations about policy-relevant science, then, doesn’t require that people become experts on risk. It requires only that our society take the steps necessary to protect its science communication environment from a distinctive pathology that enfeebles ordinary citizens from using their (ordinarily) reliable ability to discern what it is that experts know.