The conceptual foundations of decision-making in a democracy
(2003)–Peter Pappenheim–
Auteursrechtelijk beschermd
[pagina 83]
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Part Three
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| - | any information process involves a totally subjective element: the giving of meaning to an event which by itself does not have one, and which therefore must be created by a subject. |
| - | the process usually fulfils a function, namely providing the information required to set switches according to the state of the environment, and do so in a way which promotes the objectives of the subject. |
| - | in higher-level beings, especially men, the number of events which could have meaning is practically unlimited. To generate more energy than they cost, there must be a strict selection about the information to look for, it must be ‘relevant’. |
| - | To fulfil its purpose, the information must be ‘correct’, must be ‘true’ in the common meaning of that word as correspondence to fact |
| - | the processes of life are never perfect, are always subject to chance variations. One and the same basic process and object can generate more than one meaning. |
| - | There is one objective element in the process: its object, that part of the environment about which information is sought. Without such an object (which cannot be the subject) there is not information process. |
Knowledge (that bit of the information potential of the environment which is finally selected as the representation meeting our objective) is selected on RELEVANCE and TRUTH. To an observer of the information process, knowledge can be an object which has an own, autonomous existence, while information (as potential knowledge) is an abstract concept created as a tool for organising the observer's own information process.
3al.l) The selection procedures: relevance. The outcome of the action which we will take as a consequence of a decision will be determined by a limited set of elements of the environment. Suppose we have to choose between alternative routes to drive to a given destination; if our objective is to get there as fast and safely as possible, then the factors determining the best choice are entities like distance, quality of the road, weather, risk of traffic jams etc. If we primarily want to enjoy the ride we will choose on basis of scenery, lodging and meals. Whatever the complexity of the decision, however large the number of relevant aspects of the environment, this set of determining factors is only an extremely small subset of all aspects about which we might acquire knowledge.
All information processes start with a specification of the type of information we need. This ‘sets’ our senses in such a way that they will be receptive to a specific kind of stimulus. In the milk-sugar system that is achieved by emitting inhibitors bonding to sugar and - if free - to the operators.
In common language, we say: ‘looking for...’, M. Polanyi calls it ‘focussing’. A priori, before we start ‘looking for’, we have selected - amongst all conceivable elements of the world around us which could function as stimulus - those which we consider a candidate for assigning value, meaning. We do so by setting criteria. We then admit to our information-processing apparatus only those stimuli which meet these criteria. When we start ‘looking’, we already have decided upon the direction in which we expect the potential stimulus to be found and some general features such as size, movement etc.
Some of these criteria, like the shape of the inhibitor, are inborn. The tendency to be on the alert for movement seems to be a general and inborn feature of all creatures endowed with eyesight. Other criteria may be developed through experience, and thus through learning. A predator will remember that he has most often found game in clumps of grass and scan the landscape for those features which he remembers as characteristic of clumps of grass.
Within the range between infrared and ultraviolet, our eye can in principle register all rays of light emitted by every object in our line of vision. That is infinitely more than we could process within a reasonable time. So instead of trying to identify all objects in our line of vision, we first compare whole fields with some preset global criteria. For instance, the predator might start by just looking for darker patches. He then focuses on these darker patches and attempts to match each of them with more specific features which he has remembered as characteristic of clumps of grass and eliminates all dark patches not showing those features.
The above is not intended to provide an adequate description of an actual information process of a creature endowed with a central nervous system. That is a very intricate and as yet poorly understood holistic process. It only attempts to illustrate the nature of the criterion of relevance: to save time, energy and memory capacity by selecting, amongst all possible aspects of the outside world and amongst all possible representations we might make about the aspects of the outside world thus selected, those whose representation we will admit to our storage, to our memory, for further processing.
The general criterion is the expected contribution of the information to the (subjective) purpose of the information-processing subject. By its very nature, the criterion for relevance is totally subjective. There is one general criterion for relevancy: the information must add something to the knowledge we already possess; something in it must be new. The repetition of an experience can also add information, namely about its reliability; simply repeating a statement does not.
3a.1.2) The selection procedures: truth. Take the predator. On the basis of the above process he has decided that the dark patch yonder is a clump of high grass which experience has told him is more likely to hold game than other parts of the landscape. So he decides to sneak up to it. Arriving there, he might find the clump of grass and a rabbit. He could however also find that it is an old molehill. Or he could find a clump of grass, but no game. In the last two cases the information process did not live up to its promises. What might have gone wrong?
If he finds a clump of grass but no rabbit, the a priori selection criterion for focussing might be wrong: do clumps of grass really hold more game, are clumps of grass really relevant information? But if the dark patch which he expected to be a clump of grass turns out to be a molehill, something else is in cause: the quality of the representation does not live up to its expectations: the meaning he assigned to the dark patch did not correspond to reality.
The information process will live up to its promises only if the representation selected, besides being relevant, also is an adequate representation of that aspect of reality which we have selected as relevant. Whatever we have accepted as knowledge must correspond to the facts which the knowledge is expected to represent.
The basic concept of truth is that the representation which we make of a fact (object or event) corresponds to that fact. ‘Corresponds to’ differs both semantically and conceptually from ‘identical to’. It should by now be obvious that a representation of an object by definition cannot be that object itself, it can only more or less resemble it. The conceptual nature of this
correspondence and of the means to establish to what extent a representation corresponds to its object is one of the most problematic subjects of the philosophy of science, of epistemology, and is the main subject of this part.
Truth has a definite function in decision-making. Suppose the selection process on the basis of relevance was effective. Then the knowledge thus selected will maximise the probability of deciding for the ‘right’ action alternative only if this knowledge corresponds to the reality it is expected to represent, is reliable, if it is ‘true’ in this sense.
Such a functional view of truth has the advantage of fitting the common language definition of truth as ‘correspondence to fact’ which has been shown by Tarsky to be a legitimate concept by philosophical standards (See Volume Two, ‘Truth and Falsity’. P.273). It provides the context and the concepts needed to deal with our problem: how to decide in social-decision making about the truth of statements about facts whenever that truth is contested.
3a.2) Can Knowledge Be Objective?
Used in connection with truth and knowledge, the word ‘objective’ takes a commanding place in the discussions about the evaluation of scientific theories. In common language the adjective ‘objective’ is given various meanings and connotations:
| - | a synonym of true, impartial or rational |
| - | ‘outside’, independent, of the (observing or acting) subject. Remember that ‘subject’ is not here a synonym to ‘person’ but refers to its position in the information process. |
If we want to say ‘true’, ‘impartial’ or ‘rational’, we should use those words. If we value the precision of our statements we should (and I will) use the adjective ‘objective’ exclusively in the one connotation for which no other word exists, and that is the last one: outside, independent of, the subject. That connotation also is most directly connected to the substantive from which it is derived. Is it important that knowledge be thus ‘objective’, and can it ever be so?
The prevalent reason for attaching importance to the objectivity of knowledge about facts derives from the presumed relationship between objectivity as defined above with its other connotations: Objectivity is held to be a precondition for knowledge to be true and impartial. It is used as a justification for saying: ‘That's how the facts are, no matter what anybody else may say about it’. The problem with that justification is - as noted - that knowledge can never be objective in that sense, for truth can be established only by convention, while impartiality can be an attribute of a person, but never of the knowledge itself which cannot have an agenda of its own even though it may be the product of one.
There is however another justification for requiring that knowledge which is used for the establishment of facts in a decision-making process be as objective as possible in the sense of being free from subjective elements. When an individual makes a decision which requires knowledge about a specific fact, he wants this knowledge to ‘really’ represent this fact, and not just be a product of his imagination. The general perception is that truth (as correspondence between
knowledge and the facts it is supposed to represent) is jeopardised by the introduction of subjective elements, and that perception is justifiable. An adequate argumentation defining the relationship between objectivity and truth is not as simple as it would seem. We will forego it here for two reasons:
| - | The vast majority of the readership of this book will presume that relationship to exist |
| - | The other relationship, that between objectivity and impartiality, is more important for this book, and by itself provides a sufficient reason for striving for objectivity. |
The requirement of maximal impartiality follows from the democratic principle which states that we must accord equal weight to all citizens as subjects and thus to their interests and opinions. In Part Four about justice, and Part Five about democratic argumentation, it will be explained how that principle is translated into decision-making. A major role is played by the assertion that whenever we have avoided the introduction of subjective elements, we have ipso facto given all interests and opinions the same weight, namely zero.
Some elements of decision-making are intended to settle what the facts are; others attempt to balance interests and to choose between opinions. To respect the subjective interests and opinions, we should as far as possible separate those two kinds of elements. Suppose that we have decided in a democratic procedure that the fastest runner in a track event gets a prize and that the ranking of the speed will be determined by the relative order in which the contestants crossed the finish line. The crossing of the finish line is an ‘objective’ entity, a fact. The information process establishing this fact should be as free of other considerations besides establishing the order of arrival, be as objective as we can make it. The mostly unconscious bias in human observation is well documented. In preference to human observation we will therefore use a photograph triggered by an electronic eye registering each crossing of the finish line. These devices function independently from the competitors, officials and public.
Subjective considerations in the establishment of facts corrupt the decision-making process because - being presented as matters of fact - they will not be submitted to the scrutiny of justice which is the proper domain to deal with such considerations. We will revert to that subject in Part Five, chapter ‘Conviction versus persuasion’ (p.223).
Many who downplay objectivity as a criterion for the evaluation of knowledge do not deny the desirability of objectivity. Their main argument is that objectivity is impossible and that the claims of objectivity are misused to enforce whatever decision the powers-that-be have taken. As previously noted, total objectivity is indeed impossible. But everything human is imperfect, perfection is not a category of life. We are justified to ask for that level of objectivity which the specific information process allows, and should do so. There are two ways for attempting to evaluate the objectivity of knowledge about facts.
| 1) | We can promote objectivity by ensuring that in the process of generating knowledge we avoid all subjective elements which are not absolutely necessary for making the representation (of the object) which we need for our decision. Objectivity is then sought by designing and executing procedures for generating knowledge which meet this criterion, and the objectivity thus achieved is properly called ‘methodological, procedural or rule objectivity’. |
| 2) | We can analyse the knowledge itself and evaluate to which extent it possesses or can possess a property which we would call ‘objectivity’ and which we can define in concrete, factual terms. Then whether knowledge does or does not possess this property is a matter of fact. That kind of objectivity will be called ‘factual objectivity’ (see also Volume two, ‘Freeman on objective knowledge’, p.278 ). Because that property depends on the object, the evaluation in terms of objectivity of factually objective knowledge can be more objective than that which does not possess that property, even if total objectivity can never be achieved. Also, the degree to which factual objectivity is possible sets the goal which procedural objectivity should meet, and thus is a factor in choosing procedures for achieving rule objectivity. |
3a.2.1) Factual objectivity. In information there are two kinds of processes at work:
| - | assigning meaning; that is exclusive to the information process and always subjective. |
| - | generating and transmitting the impulses, signs, about the object of the information process. |
The second one will always contain a physico-chemical component free of subjective elements. But it may involve other information processes, such as communication, which will introduce subjective elements. The extend to which the process must involve information processes in addition to the physico-chemical ones depends on the nature of the object about which information is sought.
Suppose we are only interested in the question whether a certain fact exists or not, and suppose that this fact contains no information element and thus is independent for its existence from any individual. Is there a rabbit on my lawn or not? I look at my lawn. The information process is initiated by the subjective act of looking. The impulses I will receive, the rays of light striking my pupil, are generated by the light reflecting properties of whatever I am looking at, in casu by what I think is a rabbit; they are independent from me. The next steps, transforming rays of light into the firing of neurons in my brain, again are dependent only on the physico-chemical properties of my eyes and the optical nerve. While these may differ from one individual to another, they are a given for the process concerned and unaffected by any ‘value’ consideration. Only the end of the process (giving the meaning ‘rabbit’ to the state of neurons in my brain) is subjective. The rabbit and the rays of light have an existence which is independent from myself as observer.Ga naar voetnoot1
Suppose that - in the endeavour of gaining information about such a fact - we could completely standardise the process of registering the impulses and giving meaning; if so, the same impulses then will always generate the same meaning. Such knowledge would become ‘objective’ to all individuals using that standardised process, in the sense that - within that group of individuals - the knowledge about the existence of the fact will be identical and therefore inter-subjectively exchangeable. It is the most objective knowledge we can conceive. Total identity still is rarely if ever possible. But within a group of able and willing individuals we can often attain a degree of congruence which is sufficient for decision-making. For all practical purposes such knowledge is really ‘factually objective’, is the highest level of objectivity that can be achieved.
The statement that maximal objectivity has been achieved does not imply that the resulting representations are totally objective. The resulting knowledge still contains irreducibly subjective and conventional elements in its initiation and in the giving of meaning. Factually objectivity applies to the absence or at least relative scarcity of such elements in between. Besides the commonality of its object, congruence of representations in a group is a measure of the success of its acculturation and the diligence with which the participants tried to achieve congruence.
In ‘Objective Knowledge’, Popper asserts that knowledge can be totally objective. Once they have been created in the mind of an individual, he says, certain types of knowledge have obtained an autonomous existence independent from their author and from the existence of other individuals which might reconstruct that knowledge through an information process. As can be expected from the part on information, I disagree. For a refutation of his arguments, the interested reader is referred to Volume Two, chapter ‘Against the autonomous existence of world three objects’, p.296. It explains why any knowledge is dependent for its existence on an information-processing subject, why mathematical theorems have no existence outside the mind of mathematicians and why their ‘truth’ can never be objective but depends on shared conventions about what we call true in mathematics.
Popper's notion of a truth above human authority, that a statement may be true or false whatever we say about it, is both the expression of common sense and anathema to many philosophers. As with Kant's transcendental reason, the cause of the apparent paradox is the neglect of the time frame, the process, in which the notion of truth is formed. The moment somebody has read our sentence ‘... is ...’, whatever ‘is’ has become the past and as such is indeed beyond our authority. Our subsequent evaluation of the truth of that statement is not beyond our authority, as it has no existence independent of the evaluating subject. Extending the validity of the statement to the future evidently has even less claim such ‘authority’.
As totally objective knowledge does not exist, ‘factually objective’ will refer exclusively to knowledge which requires no subjective element in the course between the initiation of the information process and the giving of meaning. Much human information-processing is not aimed at obtaining information about outside facts, but at organizing the information process itself, like ‘thinking about thinking’. Knowledge developed in such a process can never be factually objective in the sense we have given that word. Statements referring to abstract concepts always fall into the category of ‘not factually objective’. However many dogs we look at, the
physico-chemical process of vision will never produce signals to which we would give the meaning ‘all dogs’. No such statement can ever be factually objective even in the restricted sense in which we are using the expression.
Summing up: there exists no totally factually objective knowledge, but some kinds of knowledge have the potential to be as ‘factually objective’ as humanly possible. If we can generate such knowledge without introducing any subjective elements between the initiation of the process and the giving of meaning, the resulting knowledge is as objective as any knowledge can ever be. That provides a standard against which to evaluate - in terms of objectivity - various information processes and the knowledge they produce.
3a.2.2 Methodological, procedural or rule objectivity. The objectivity of knowledge becomes an issue only if contested. In a controversy about facts the prevalent term is not objectivity, but truth, a concept to which we will revert in the next paragraph. In many cases the statement that some knowledge is true cannot be factually objective even in the restricted sense we have given it, so that we cannot even define the maximum achievable objectivity, we have no even remotely objective standard against which to measure the information process and the knowledge it produced.
In the absence of any non-subjective standard of objectivity, we can still - if we value it - promote the objectivity of our knowledge by designing and controlling the information process so as to prevent the introduction of unnecessary subjective elements. To that effect we can devise methods, procedures, rules and give the predicate ‘procedurally objective’ to knowledge which has been developed according to these rules. Such objectivity is totally conventional. Given the functional view of knowledge derived from its role in life, ‘conventional’ is no disqualification. Striving for objectivity is worthwhile any time it contributes to reduce errors in decision-making.
Even factually objective knowledge requires rules for establishing its objectivity whenever that is contested. For instance some contestants may be unwilling to admit any fact not to their liking, however evident, and others may be of good will but have a deficient registration capability. The overlap of meanings may be insufficient. We will revert to this in part five about argumentation. Concluding: If we want statements about facts to be as objective as possible, we will always need conventional methods, procedures and rules to that effect. But some types of statements can be more objective than others.
3a.2.3) Objective truth and falsity. Disagreement about the evaluation of a statement about facts in terms of truth can often be reduced to a disagreement about the objectivity of such an evaluation. Whether or not knowledge can be factually objective then is relevant to social decision-making.
The objectivity of the knowledge is not identical to the objectivity of the evaluation of the truth of that knowledge. Knowledge may be factually objective, and yet not true. Your friends arrive for dinner, and the husband says: ‘don't you have a TV aerial on your roof?’ Your answer is
‘yes’, for you know you have one because two days ago you saw the first swallows of the season resting on it. ‘Well, you don't have one now.’ You go outside and take a look: no aerial! The storm last night has blown it into your backyard. The knowledge you had was factually objective, it just was not true anymore.
Suppose we ‘know’ something (that we have an aerial on the roof). Checking the truth or falseness of that knowledge adds to that knowledge, is new knowledge. Can such knowledge-about-knowledge be factually objective? Take the above case. If we agree on the meaning of truth, then whether or not there is a fact corresponding to the knowledge we investigate (that I have an aerial on my roof) is itself a fact whose representation can be generated by the same kind of (physico-chemical) process which has generated the knowledge whose truth we investigate, namely vision. In case of factually objective knowledge, the process leading to the judgement ‘true’ or ‘false’ can also be factually objective, provided the fact concerned is available for observation.
Can the truth or falsity of not-factually-objective statements be established in any factually objective way? Some, for instance Popper, say: ‘yes, in certain cases’.
1) Universal statements, like ‘all dogs have tails’ or ‘My old Labrador, Sara, was the best retriever there ever was’. However concrete the dogs we investigate may be, such statements do not correspond to a fact whose generation of impulses as well as their transmission and registration can be achieved by a non-informational process. The dogs may be concrete, but the concepts of ‘all’ or ‘the best’ are not facts. They are pure creations of our own information process and have no existence outside that process, and thus outside the subject of that process. Yet we can assess their truth-value through knowledge which is factually (not totally) objective.
Remember that ‘factually objective’ communication requires standardisation of the assignment of meaning, a prerequisite for a communication system to work. For social decision-making about facts in a modern democracy, the communication system includes the basic tenets of logic. Logic enables us to replace a positive by two negative statements and still refer to the same facts. We can then, without changing their meaning, restate the above facts as: ‘There exists no dog without a tail’ and ‘there is or was no dog which ever performed the job of retrieving equally well or better than my Sara’.
The statements (and the knowledge they express) ‘here is a dog without a tail’ or ‘the golden retriever Jack owned by Steve Peterson from Jackson Hole is better than your Sara’ could be factually objective, for we can assess the truth of these statements by looking at the tailless dog before us or by travelling to Jackson Hole and have Peterson show off the retrieving performance of Jack. The evaluation of the truth of these falsifying statements can be factually objective. If they indeed prove to be true, we will qualify the original statements as false and that judgement also is factually objective (but not necessarily true, for a flaw might have occurred in the information process leading to it.)
Statements of the type ‘all’ or ‘the best of all’ (universal statements) cannot be proved to be true in any factually objective way, but they can in that way be proved to be false.
2) Singular statements have the form: ‘there exists a ....’ (for instance ...dog without a tail). They too do not refer to a concrete fact to which we can point: ‘there’ or ‘somewhere’ may be anywhere, and we cannot look at ‘anywhere’, only at specific locations. The object of the information process, its reference, includes an element (anywhere) which exists only as part of our own information process. Yet if we produce the fact whose existence was asserted by the statement, we will consider this statement to be true and that evaluation to be factually objective. For it is based on factually objective knowledge derived from looking at a specific and concrete dog. Singular statements can be proved to be true in a factually objective way, but can in no way be proved to be false.
Notice that both cases refer only to statements which we would have qualified as factually objective, were it not for the addition of concepts like ‘all’ or ‘there is’. The acceptance of the factual objectivity of statements negating the ‘all’ or proving the ‘there is’ rests both on:
| - | a shared meaning of these concepts |
| - | the possibility to settle the matter by an information process which generates factually objective knowledge: vision. |
Abstract as these considerations may be, they have a practical use. For if we accept the notion that knowledge can be factually objective in the sense we have given it, then universal or singular statements about factually objective knowledge have achieved a special status.
Suppose that we can agree on:
| - | the object of a physico-chemical information process like vision |
| - | the adequacy of that process (the observer's eyes) |
| - | the meaning we attach to the words intended to describe what we see. |
Such redundant elements, like personal interests and beliefs, have nothing to do with the truth or falsity of the statement. If we have to the extent possible prevented the introduction of such subjective elements, we are justified in considering the resulting judgement about the truth of the statement to be as objective as possible, which qualifies it as a suitable de factii for democratic decision-making.
Factually objective statements (the reading of a thermometer, the appearance of a luminous spot in the sky) are usually considered to be unproblematic. That has led Popper to conclude that they provide the possibility of a totally objective evaluation, at least in the negative, of scientific theories which then can be proved to be false. That possibility is a bone of contention in the philosophy of science and we will revert to it in Part Three B).
Here we will note its conclusion: in practice the factual objectivity of statements which ‘prove’ a universal statement to be false is possible only in those cases where it is a foregone conclusion and therefore has little informative value. For the judgement ‘false’ is factually objective
only if the universality of the terms indicating this universality, like ‘all’ and ‘best’, is taken literally, is absolute. The statement ‘all dogs have tails’ must be considered falsified by the appearance of any dog without a tail, even if has just lost it in an accident. My boast that Sara was the best retriever ever is exposed as vain by any dog which bettered my Sara even in one single of the many aspects of retrieving. In such a strict interpretation we would not have believed the statements in the first place. So the falsification is only a confirmation of what we would have presumed anyway, namely that in an absolutely strict interpretation of the word ‘universal’ all such statements will be proved false sooner or later.
The logical possibility to falsify - in a factually objective way - the claim of universality of a statement is not quite useless. For if a statement which is incompatible with the claim of universality proves to be true, then we are justified in rejecting that universality until further evidence in its favour is produced. That puts the burden of proof on the proponents of the claim. The rule that we can never prove the truth of universal statements knows two exceptions:
| a) | Universal statements from which we can deduce no falsifying singular statement whose truth would lead us to reject the universal statement as false. Such universal statements are always true, no matter what, like: ‘either it will rain, hail or snow, or it will stay dry’. We need not trouble with the evaluation of such statements in terms of truth, for they cannot tell us anything useful for decision-making, cannot improve our knowledge about the real world of experience, about our environment, beyond what we already did know. They are irrelevant. |
| b) | Tautologies, statements which by convention are always considered to be true.
They also cannot tell us anything new about the world around us, but they may be quite useful as tools for organising our information processing. For example we made use of a tautology when equating positive universal statements with negative single ones to turn ‘all dogs have tails’ into ‘there is no dog without a tail’. The best-known sets of tautologies are logic and mathematics. They enable us to manipulate knowledge about the outside world which we already have obtained, for instance by observation, to get the maximum out of it. But they never add new elements from this outside world. The objects of useful tautologies are symbols for whatever representations of reality are presumed to be in our mind. Tautologies are part of the process which gives meaning. They contain no factual elements and thus do not and cannot pretend to any factual objectivity. They are true by convention, not by proof through confrontation with facts. |
3a.2.4) Establishing the facts for social decision-making. To survive, a community must act. It cannot endlessly squabble about a decision. Disagreement about interests and ideals are inevitable and have to be settled by the political and judiciary process. But achieving a minimum of consensus about facts need not - and therefore should not - be problematic. Given good will, we should be able to establish consensus about the truth of knowledge which is factually objective in the sense we have given that expression and meet the above conditions (agreement on the object, the process and the meaning), certainly if these facts are available for all to experience. The biological processes with which evolution has endowed us to generate and register impulses from concrete objects and events, differ only in details between individuals. (Democratic argumentation will expose exceptions such as colour blindness.) Cultural
evolution has ensured a workable minimum of congruence in the meaning we attach to these impulses and thus provided us with an adequate common language to communicate these meanings. Yet - as stated in the part about information - communication remains imperfect, because:
| 1) | No two persons ever register the same object or event at exactly the same time and from exactly the same location. |
| 2) | We never register all impulses emanating from an object but only a subjective selection of them. The representation we make of that object is an interpretation of these impulses. That interpretation includes a mainly unconscious interpolation of those aspects which we did not register but which we ‘feel’ to be required for the ‘completeness’ of the representation. That interpolation is based largely on the individual's past experience. |
| 3) | Symbolic communication depends on the meaning and thus on the often complex connotations which we attach to a word. These connotations are learned, and the circumstances in which they were learned are never exactly the same. So even if looking at the same object, any symbol, any word used in communication will refer to representations which are never totally identical. Hence the importance of definitions. |
What makes communication and social decision-making about facts work is that it does not require perfect overlap, total identity, of representations. The action alternatives always form a limited set. The overlap, the definition, is good enough as soon as the disagreements about which alternative to choose are not caused by insufficient congruence of the individual representations about the facts.
The success of human cooperative ventures is evidence that, provided the required knowledge is factually objective, sufficient congruence is usually possible amongst individuals of good will. In the minority of cases where disagreement remains about the truth of such knowledge, it is in principle possible to create this minimum overlap of representations by making the necessary effort, mainly investigating which of the above three conditions is not met. If lack of goodwill is the cause of failure, this can then usually be exposed and the perpetrator disqualified. Discussions with people who are not willing to change their view whatever the arguments against it are an exercise in futility.
Our formal languages of logic and mathematics are the crowning achievement of western culture as a means for generating or controlling overlap in meaning. They are essentially conventional, but the reader is presumed to agree with their rules and tenets. The arguments for that presumption can be found in Part Five, chapter ‘Logic and mathematics’, p.220.
Given the will to arrive at an objective judgement about the truth of a statement, we can (and I will) assume that it is possible to achieve agreement in all cases where the knowledge expressed by the statement is factually objective and the fact which the statement is about is available for examination. Quoting Popper, if we cannot achieve agreement about the reading of a thermometer, about whether the pressure of gas in a receptacle has increased or decreased, then there could be no science, no law, no government, no literature, no civilisation, no humanity. If we accept the above assumption, and if we can reduce disagreement about statements of
fact to a set of statements which are factually objective, we can settle these differences in a way which is as objective as humanly possible by producing the facts to which these factually objective statements refer.
That does not imply that agreement will actually be achieved. Very often, the participants may refuse to make the required effort. And in some circumstances bad faith cannot be exposed. Suppose the reading of the thermometer is 37.1 for all to see, which proves a point you wanted to make. Just one person in the audience, the one who is disputing your point, says no, it reads 37.2 degrees, a difference which is crucial to the validity of your point. How do you prove that he is wrong? If your opponent is sufficiently resourceful and determined, you will never be able to get him to admit that the reading is 37.1.
It will usually be possible to achieve that all other persons willing to admit the truth do agree with you, and will disqualify your opponent's view as an attempt to resist truth at all costs. An overwhelming majority cannot be wrong on such a simple fact. Or can it? Your opponent may have bribed all the other people in the audience, which may be a committee, so that all side with him. The thermometer still reads - to you - 37.1, but everybody else says 37,2. There are plenty of examples of whole groups refusing to admit facts because doing so will rob them of their most cherished belief.
We have stated that all objectivity in the end is rule objectivity. Alas, there is no rule or procedure which can insure that decisions on the truth of statements of facts will be correct. Nothing can give us total certainty that an evaluation of even a factually objective statement is completely objective. A majority decision maximises the probability of truth and objectivity only provided a large majority of the people involved have as a primary objective the establishment of truth in decision-making about facts. In Part five it will be shown that striving for objectivity follows from the choice for democracy, especially from the respect of autonomy and the substitution of justice for power in settling differences.
Agreeing with the desirability of objectivity is but a first step. Achieving even a minimum of objectivity requires the ability and will to make the necessary efforts and sacrifices. In addition to acknowledging truth, we must also identify the causes of unintended misrepresentation of facts and the subterfuges of those aiming at deception. Any institutionalization of the procedures and rules for establishing facts presumes the existence of a sufficiently large group of able people who are dedicated to that endeavour. As with all norms, the primary basis for truth is the ‘will’, the motivation, of the people involved.
CONCLUSION: When faced with conflicting statements of fact, for instance about the probable effects of alternative policy options, democrats must try to reduce these differences to decisions about factually objective statements about facts which are or can be made available for observation and about facts which have been accepted as true in previous democratic procedures, and let their decision depend on agreement about these statements. That is the procedure used by courts of law; it should be extended to all social decision-making. A democratic society must devise and implement procedures to that end. That method will work only if all concerned will acknowledge the necessity of truth in the sense of correspondence to fact and
of the consequent maximisation of objectivity. If so, deception and bad faith are quite likely to be exposed. The consequent loss of credibility will be a much heavier penalty in terms of social acceptance than in societies which condone such practices.
3a.3) Private Versus Social Knowledge.Ga naar voetnoot2)
The contrast between the two is immediately evident as we enter the library of a university to look for a book. This is 1980 and the library has not yet discarded its old filing system: row upon row of drawers filled with cards, one for every book. For each letter of the alphabet, there are from three to ten drawers full of cards. Clearly no individual knows the contents of even one percent of all these books and articles. Yet this information is available to every member of society... should he wish to read it.
In principle, human knowledge consists of all representations any man has ever made. The bulk of this knowledge has remained the private property of its creator and has never been communicated. That does not necessarily mean that it has been lost: It may have contributed to actions of its creator which influenced the life of others. But with the demise of the individual harbouring the representations, it has disappeared as knowledge.
Private knowledge can become social knowledge only if it has been communicated by its originator to somebody else. At that stage it is still private knowledge, but now of two persons, and it could disappear with them. To become social knowledge it must be communicated in a way which will preserve it and make it accessible to other persons interested in it, preferably by committing it to a medium which preserves it indefinitely and transmits the representation of its author as faithfully as possible. The written word is the most suitable medium for ideas. Photography is better for images, etc. So one of the basic conditions for the creation of social knowledge is individuals willing and able to communicate their knowledge.
For a message to become social knowledge there must be publishers to print it and libraries or individuals to buy the book. In the case of oral communication, there must be individuals who listen to it, will remember what has been said and will pass it on to others. A main function of society is to promote the interaction, the mediation, between the sender and the receiver of the messages.
Two tasks stand out and both of them consume energy:
| - | Enabling its members to communicate in a symbolic language by ensuring sufficient overlap. The community must ensure that they can learn the necessary symbols and the meaning which they have to attach to them. |
| - | Preserving knowledge. As a single individual can only be aware of an infinitesimal fraction of all relevant knowledge that has been generated and encoded in a medium of communication, that must also be a communal responsibility. |
This accumulated knowledge is useful for decision-making only if the potential user is able to retrieve - out of this immense body of preserved knowledge - those bits which he considers relevant. Retrieving knowledge consumes energy. The energy necessary for retrieval increases geometrically with the size of the haystack of information through which we have to sift to find the needle-sized bit which we need. Society must develop adequate selection, storage and retrieval procedures. Selection should eliminate redundant knowledge without losing potentially useful knowledge. The body of knowledge which has thus been selected and stored in a way permitting retrieval is called social knowledge.
You will now understand why ‘public’, the usual opposite of ‘private’, is not adequate. First, public has the connotation of ‘what everybody knows’ which is not intended here. Secondly, it is a passive notion which does not do justice to the process of selection and storage involved which is directed by a ‘point of view’, by some notion of ‘the interest of society’. Whatever the elusive nature of this social interest may be, it depends in any case on the type of society. That is why this type (democracy) had to be defined right at the start of this book, and why any proposal in this book can claim validity only for a democratic society. That is why the philosophy of science cannot proceed beyond pure description until the society in which science has to function has been defined. Defining criteria for selection of knowledge on the basis of relevancy involves relative interests; that is the domain of justice.
Besides relevancy, we must also consider efficiency. To be useful, the effort we must make to retrieve the knowledge which we need for a certain purpose should be commensurable to the benefit we expect from it. That problem is mainly a technical and economical one and not relevant for this book.
To sum up: Knowledge must be selected, (hierarchically) labelled and stored according to the kind of criteria and standards which, to be democratic, must be explicit and documented. A certain label should contain - to the extent possible - only knowledge meeting those standards. Scientific knowledge is such a label, and a primary one. It is selected in this book for further investigation because of its impact on decision-making in today's western civilisation.
3a.4) Science and Culture.
Science and culture are abstract concepts. They obtain ‘meaning’ by the context in which they are used, in this book social decision-making. Culture here is synonymous with social knowledge and is used in its widest sense, encompassing far more than art and science. We might define it as all information transmitted and stored by human means of communication, as the whole accessible content of our ‘external memory’. For much of it the concept of truth is irrelevant.
In the context of social-decision making about facts, the ‘truth’ aspect of selection concerns only that cultural knowledge which pretends to be a representation of reality in decision-making. If culture is not used as a basis for deciding about facts, we can select exclusively on the criterion of relevance. A new symphony claiming a place in the repertory of an orchestra, a new
novel looking for a publisher, the distribution of subsidies over various art forms, none of them involves a decision about truth, except where the argumentation about them appeals to matters of fact.
‘As science tells us’ is the prevalent justification for a statement about facts in social decisionmaking. A property of scientific theories is their claim of universality, possibly limited by conditions defined in their axioms. Physics specifies no limiting conditions; the regularities which its theories describe (like the first and second law of thermodynamics) are called laws and are presumed to be valid throughout the universe and for all objects and events. Other theories claim validity for at least for one entire section of reality such as all organic compounds or all plants with green leaves.
The wide range of applicability of science, the authority it has managed to obtain and the fact that it is often the only criterion having any semblance of objectivity have made science the most prominent tool for establishing facts in a modern society. The evident effectiveness of science in helping us to influence the course of events to our advantage has endowed it with an aura of authority and encourages the selection of a scientific theory or statement for the expected impact which its acceptance will have on the realisation of certain objectives which are not directly related to the problem (the establishment of facts) which the theory is presumed to solve, rather than for its truth value. The politician will present ‘facts’ which favour whatever decision is most convenient to him on political grounds and then search for a theory and/or scientist endorsing those facts. In the eighties, the industry in most countries has thus successfully countered proposals for restraining the use of oil by the price mechanism by quoting scientists who assert that the discovery of new sources of oil will for the foreseeable future catch up or even outstrip the increase in demand, pointing to the fact that it always has done so in the past! While that argument is evidently inane, the ‘authority’ of these ‘scientists’ is sufficient to throw sand into the extremely delicate mechanism of achieving international agreement about an oil price policy based on the same principles which business follows for its own long-term pricing policy, namely the cost of alternative sources of energy.
Scientists are human. If they have invested a great amount of energy and time in developing or mastering a system of scientific theories, they will tend to protect it against competitors, whatever its merit as a representation of reality. The scientific community works without any general, enforced and objective selection procedure on truth; scientific theories prosper and survive because of the number and power of the people whose allegiance they have managed to obtain. Their performance in confrontation with facts is just one of the factors at play in obtaining that allegiance. (See Volume Two, Capita Selecta, chapter ‘Knowledge and Human Understanding as a Social Venture’, par. ‘The Social Responsibility of Science, Ravetz’, p.410.)
Given their impact, the way a society selects scientific theories is of basic importance to its viability and the next section will be devoted to that subject. The democratic principle requires that the selection be as objective as we can make it. As shown in the previous chapter (Can knowledge be objective?), that same requirement follows from maximising the efficiency of decision-making.
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- Whether objects and events can have an existence of their own which is independent from any observer, whether there is an objective reality, is for some - for instance postmodernists - a hot issue which is dealt with in Volume Two, CAPITA SELECTA, ‘The Confusion about Reality’, p.423. Obviously, I believe that the answer is yes; otherwise I would not have written this book. If you do not share my belief, you can have it your way, but you must accept that in accordance with your point of view I will refuse to acknowledge your existence other than as a figment of my imagination with which I can do what I want, namely ignore it. What you cannot do is have it both ways, that I both accept your view and acknowledge your existence, unless you force me through violence: the postmodernistic position is not one conducive to the peaceful society which postmodernists hold so dear.
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- I have to use ‘private’ instead of the slightly better suited ‘personal’ because my connotation differs somewhat from M. Polanyi's in his chef d'oeuvre ‘Personal Knowledge’.