All the jockeying over what counts as a trustworthy source of information, or a reasonable method of inquiry, can leave us disorientated and confused. What exactly lies at the heart of our disagreements, and what can we do to resolve them? Can we rise above the fray, and escape the circularity of appealing to reasons to justify those same reasons? These are essential questions for democratic societies, and Professor Michael P. Lynch tackles them his illuminating New York Times article Reasons for Reason. I’m republishing some excerpts below with his permission and with thanks.

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Really divisive disagreements are typically not just over the facts. They are also about the best way to support our views of the facts. Call this a disagreement in epistemic principle. Our epistemic principles tell us what is rational to believe, what sources of information to trust … [This gives] rise to an unnerving question: How do we rationally defend our most fundamental epistemic principles? Like many of the best philosophical mysteries, this a problem that can seem both unanswerable and yet extremely important to solve…

Every one of our beliefs is produced by some method or source, be it humble (like memory) or complex (like technologically assisted science). But why think our methods, whatever they are, are trustworthy or reliable for getting at the truth? If I challenge one of your methods, you can’t just appeal to the same method to show that it is reliable. That would be circular. And appealing to another method won’t help either — for unless that method can be shown to be reliable, using it to determine the reliability of the first method answers nothing. So you end up either continuing on in the same vein — pointlessly citing reasons for methods and methods for reasons forever — or arguing in circles, or granting that your method is groundless. Any way you go, it seems you must admit you can give no reason for trusting your methods, and hence can give no reason to defend your most fundamental epistemic principles…

Disagreements over epistemic principles are disagreements over which methods and sources to trust. And there we have the problem. We can’t decide on what counts as a legitimate reason to doubt my epistemic principles unless we’ve already settled on our principles and that is the very issue in question. The problem that skepticism about reason raises is not about whether I have good evidence by my principles for my principles. Presumably I do. The problem is whether I can give a more objective defense of them. That is, whether I can give reasons for them that can be appreciated from what Hume called a “common point of view” — reasons that can “move some universal principle of the human frame, and touch a string, to which all mankind have an accord and symphony” ¹… Democracies aren’t simply organizing a struggle for power between competing interests; democratic politics isn’t war by other means. Democracies are, or should be, spaces of reasons.  

So one reason we should take the project of defending our epistemic principles seriously is that the ideal of civility demands it. But there is also another, even deeper, reason. We need to justify our epistemic principles from a common point of view because we need shared epistemic principles in order to even have a common point of view. Without a common background of standards against which we measure what counts as a reliable source of information, or a reliable method of inquiry, and what doesn’t, we won’t be able to agree on the facts, let alone values. Indeed, this is precisely the situation we seem to be headed towards… We live isolated in our separate bubbles of information culled from sources that only reinforce our prejudices and never challenge our basic assumptions. No wonder that … we so often fail to reach agreement over the history and physical structure of the world itself. No wonder joint action grinds to a halt. When you can’t agree on your principles of evidence and rationality, you can’t agree on the facts. And if you can’t agree on the facts, you can hardly agree on what to do in the face of the facts. 

Put simply, we need an epistemic common currency because we often have to decide, jointly, what to do in the face of disagreement. Sometimes we can accomplish this, in a democratic society, by voting. But we can’t decide every issue that way, and we certainly can’t decide on our epistemic principles — which methods and sources are actually rationally worthy of trust — by voting. We need some forms of common currency before we get to the voting booth. And that is one reason we need to resist skepticism about reason: we need to be able to give reasons for why some standards of reasons — some epistemic principles — should be part of that currency and some not. 

Yet this very fact — the fact that a civil democratic society requires a common currency of shared epistemic principles — should give us hope that we can answer the skeptical challenge. Even if, as the skeptic says, we can’t defend the truth of our principles without circularity, we might still be able to show that some are better than others. Observation and experiment, for example, aren’t just good because they are reliable means to the truth. They are valuable because almost everyone can appeal to them. They have roots in our natural instincts, as Hume might have said. If so, then perhaps we can hope to give reasons for our epistemic principles.

¹ Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals in “Enquires Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals,” ed. I. A. Selby-Brigge. 3rd ed. Revised by P. H. Nidditch. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). IX, 1, pp. 272-273.

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The above passages are extracted from the opinion piece ‘Reasons for Reason’ by Professor Michael P. Lynch (New York Times, October 2, 2011). Read the full piece.

Most of Professor Lynch’s work concerns truth, democracy and the ethics and epistemology of technology. His most recent book, Know-it-All Society: Truth and arrogance in political culture, won the Orwell Award in 2019. His other books include The Internet of Us: Knowing more and understanding less in the age of big data and the New York Times Sunday Book Review Editor’s Pick, True to Life.

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