Science and Democracy: An Inquiry into the Relationship between Truth and Politics.

A Thesis
Presented to
The Division of History and Social Sciences
Reed College

In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
Bachelor of Arts

Aron Milberg
May 2014

Acknowledgments
Darius Rejali was an amazing help through not only the entire thesis process, but
through my entire academic career and he continued to do so through the entirety of his
sabbatical and my year off. We struck a deal when we first talked out of class my
Sophomore year; if I wrote a thesis under him, it could be on anything I wanted, as long
as it was of high quality. I hope I have fulfilled my end of the bargain. This is especially
important, given all the lessons he has taught on the importance of covenants and
friendship for life and philosophy.
Peter Steinberger put significant work into reading through and providing
insightful comments on both my qualifying exercise and my thesis, as well as stimulating
me through his upper level classes.
Lois Hobbs has provided me with near limitless help and support navigating Reed
colleges administrative, academic and bureaucratic tunnels; suffice it to say, she made
my life significantly easier and, at that, without knowing me until far later in the game.
Mark Bedau, James Fix, Paul Gronke, Rao Potluri, Kjersten Whittington are all
professors who have made my academic time at Reed challenging, interesting,
stimulating and fun. It is not an understatement that the faculty makes this school famous
for being a place of learning, a place where the most exciting part of the weekend is the
thought of returning to classes on Monday.
My parents, as usual, were of immense support, even 3000 miles away, they are
the background players who made this all work.
All in all, friends are the key to politics and philosophy. Nina Clark, Owen Mee,
Rebecca Thurber and Creighton Weidner have been great friends while I am here,
lending both emotional support and academic discourse. Abby Kaplan and Ari
Shvartsman both motivated me to finish so that I could return home. Of course, I would
never be here today without the conversations and memories I shared with Derrick
Brittain, Deana Elgeziry and Ryan Fleming.

Preface
Solutions to the problems of knowledge are solutions to the problem of the social
order.1
I am primarily dealing with discussions of maps and territories; indeed, the debate
about the burden of facticityas the term for my central problem was helpfully coined
for me by my advisercomes down to the extent to which a map functions as just that.
Maps which are too fine in detail are simply the territory at hand or its simulation and
thus do not provide a convenient means of navigation, but maps lacking detail are
useless. Science is a series of maps, called facts, outlining the natural world. Politics is
the mapping of human interests and conflicts onto the territory of public life. Both must
obfuscate enough to be useful but detailed enough to represent at all.
To traverse our collective territory without mapping it, is to, paraphrase Arendt,
act without thinking what we are doing. Once science and democracy both lay down
their maps, they often conflict over directions. The relationship between truth and
politics becomes in many ways a discussion over the relative validity of the maps at hand,
often formulated as a forced choice between them.
What follows is an attempt to think what we are doing when we are doing science
and to think what we are doing when we are doing democracy and endeavoring to argue
that they are, in practice, premise and habit nearly the same endeavor. There is the
possibility though that map-making, as an endless project of revision and renewal, can
instead take hints from other maps elucidations of their territory, without either deciding
that one map must take precedence over the other, or that by conceit, arguing that the
territories described are completely different. Furthermore, I wish to argue that truth and
politics full reduces to this relationship, which carries within it normative considerations
for both epistemology and politics.

Shapin, Steven, and Simon Schaeffer, Leviathan and the Air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental
Life, Princeton: Princeton UP, 2011, p. 332.

Table of Contents
Introduction....................................................................................................................... 1
A Brief Note: .......................................................................................................... 9
Chapter 1: The Subject of Truth and Politics .............................................................. 11
Recap .................................................................................................................... 11
Section I: Clarifying the Problem of Politics and Truth ............................................... 12
Section II: The First Statement of the Problem: Politics and Truth ............................. 14
Section III: The Modern Problem: Science and Democracy ........................................ 18
Section IV: Defining Politics, Democracy and Science ............................................... 28
Politics .................................................................................................................. 29
Democracy ............................................................................................................ 31
Science .................................................................................................................. 35
The Antimonies of Relativistic Reason, or a Confession of What I Believe and A
Preview of Most of the Argument to Come.......................................................... 41
Section V: The Project of this Thesis ........................................................................... 50
A Note on Argumentation ............................................................................................ 60
Some of what I plan to do ..................................................................................... 60
What this thesis is not ........................................................................................... 63
Chapter 2: Science in the Public Sphere, Democracy in the Laboratory .................. 67
Recap .................................................................................................................... 67
Section I: Truth. What Do We Mean by it?.................................................................. 68
A Brief Excursus on Truths Definition and Possible Replacement .................... 70
Section II: Analytic Philosophy and the Problem of Truth .......................................... 73
Subsection A: Quine and the Problem of Truth........................................................ 74
Subsection B: Rules, Meanings, the External World and Names............................. 79
Subsection C: Logic, Know How, Knowledge and Interests.................................... 83

Recapping and Theories of Math and Logic......................................................... 83

Context-Sensitivity and Interest Sensitivity ......................................................... 87
Know-How............................................................................................................ 91
Relativism ............................................................................................................. 93
Subsection D: Interregnum on the Subject/Object division...................................... 99
Subsection E: Kuhn and Scientific Paradigms........................................................ 111
Section III: Latour and the Problem of Truth ............................................................. 121
Chapter 3: Political and Epistemic Systems............................................................... 145
Recap. ................................................................................................................. 145
Section I: Relativism is Not Subjectivism, or Nave Skepticism ............................... 146
Section II: Time and Technology ............................................................................... 160
Section III: Institutions and Academia. ...................................................................... 172
Section IV: Epistemology and Politics Imply Each Other ......................................... 194
The Mutuality of Politics and Epistemology Established Perspectives........... 194
The Mutuality of Politics and Epistemology Extending My Earlier Arguments
............................................................................................................................ 202
Latour and Political Epistemology ..................................................................... 208
Latours Error and the Beginning of Science and Democracy ........................... 214
Section V: Science and Democracy (Weakly) Suggest Each Other........................... 217
Science in Democracy ........................................................................................ 218
Science because of Democracy........................................................................... 228
The Common Features of Science and Democracy............................................ 231
Both Scientist and Democrat All Along ............................................................. 243
Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 251
My Strong and Stronger Theses: ........................................................................ 251
Summary and Conclusion:.................................................................................. 254
Bibliography .................................................................................................................. 261

Abstract
The question of the proper relationship between truth and politics dates as far
back as political philosophy itself. The classical solution to the problem took three
forms, either assuming truth should dominate politics or that truth should be absent from
politics, either because it is coercive or because it is corrosive of tradition. These three
views each make the same assumptions about truth, that it is unitary, objective, dominant
and universal. The 20th century has seen scholarship that has seriously problematized the
classic notion of both truth and politics. This coincides with a rise in science as the
dominant form of epistemology and democracy as the dominant form of politics and the
modern formulation of truth and politics is that of science and democracy. Drawing
primarily on analytic philosophy, the work of Bruno Latour and the field of Science and
Technology Studies, I attempt to show that science and democracy bear a fundamental
relationship to each other that can solve the problem of truth and politics. I attempt to
show that the conditions of possibility for both science and democracy are highly similar.
Traditional conceptions of truth and politics focus on content, while I focus on form,
because formally, science and democracy are quite similar. This renders truth no more
coercive or corrosive than any political fact itself.

Dedicated:
To my friends and philosophers from my time around Gainsborough, with whom I shared
a utopian moment, without which this thesis would never have been possible.

Introduction
In America, we are deeply uncomfortable about our status as a democratic and
scientific country. On the one hand, we insist on the truth of science and live in a world
and economy almost solely devoted to the production of knowledge and the step-father,
illegitimate son, ordepending on whom you ask, twin sister of science, technology.
Furthermore, we praise democracy and our uniqueness thereof as the first truly
democratic state. On the other hand, we are a deeply religious country and our
skepticism of authority, perhaps political, and most certainly individualist in nature, leads
us to be skeptical of science and democracy themselves. We believe the state is powerful
enough to malign us but too weak to dictate social policy. We believe science the only
answer to a good economy and yet hope it stays behind the laboratory doors, handled
with care by men in white coats, who, only so rarely have to emerge to perhaps unleash
their science into plain view, as we must in times of war and, even then, the responsibility
for the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki occurred behind the closed doors of the
White House, not in any academic setting. We thus face a paradox, we think science is
true enough to govern us and thus allow us to lift off our shoulders the burden of
democratic participation, yet think it too weak to allow it to decide our values and the
answers to the real questions to which the privilege rests with religion.
We have resigned ourselves to a pseudo-skeptical, liberal and positivistic answer,
such that we may have our democratic cake and eat our science too, namely that, though
it is true that science is perhaps the only access point to truth, no man can be in
possession of it and furthermore, that there cannot be truth about values, at least not
within science itself. Unfortunately, those who wish us to teach intelligent design in
schools are right to be skeptical of the smugness with which this compromise is accepted
as dogma, for, if we are content to let religion, for example, be the truth talker of values,
then why should science be separated as to be the sole decider of facts, for, though
science may insist on a fact and value distinctionsomething itself dubiousreligion does
not and those prone to accepting its value claims are wont to accept its statements of fact.

2
Americas ethical and political dilemmas stemming from science, however, are
not completely novel. Dating back to Plato, there has been a long-standing debate about
the nature of truth in politics. Truth is conceived of as not suspect to bias, opinion or
custom, unitary and objective and thus primary and dominant. Following from this, there
are largely two camps on the issue of truth in politics, there are those, like Plato and
modern technocrats, who think that, thus, politics should be reduced to truth and truth
should be given primacy in politics, that philosophers, theologians or scientists should
rule. On the other hand, there is that camp which thus resists the role of truth in politics,
who, for various reasons, either find truth to erode custom and thus be destructive, like
Burke and Strauss, or find truth compulsory and totalitarian, like Hannah Arendt.
In recent years, the premises on which this very old debate has been based have
come into question. Recent scholarship, particularly that coming from the sociology and
history of science and most importantly, Bruno Latour, problematizes the notion of truth,
showing it to emerge from custom and opinion, to be constructed, socially and otherwise2
and to be political in its formation.
If this scholarship is sound, which the sociology and history of science have
judged it to be, then it poses a set of pressing issues for political life. If science, being the
modern standard for truth, is political and constructed, what basis is there for its primary
inclusion in the discourse of politics? Why should religion not have equal footing to
science, for example? We are left with a conundrum, either science should rule politics,
or there is no criterion for its exclusive inclusion. Latour, himself, has struggled with this.
He maintains, in spite of his constructivism, the position that science should be given
primacy in politics, especially given the proximity of catastrophes such as climate
change.
In my thesis, I hope to advance a solution to this conundrum by reformulating the
problem in a way neither philosophers, sociologists, historians of science, nor political
theorists have seriously considered. I shall argue that every set of epistemic claims
contains a set of ethical and sometimes political claims, as well as, an even stronger set of
ethical habits and rules. Similarly, all political and ethical claims commit one to a small
2

Notably, Latour changed the subtitle of his first work Laboratory Life from The Social Construction of
Scientific Facts to The Construction of Scientific Facts. Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory
Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1986.

3
set of epistemic rules and a larger set of epistemic habits. For example, one would be
hard-pressed to find space for the freedom of thought required for science without
freedom of speech. Freedom of speech itself, however, is already premised upon
freedom of thought and upon diversity of opinion.3 I am not the first to offer this as a
descriptive answer. Shapin and Schaffer preface their book the Leviathan and the AirPump with:
Leviathan and the Air Pump was an attempt to see the problem of
knowledge and the problem of order as the same problem. Wherever
and whenever groups of people come to agree about what knowledge
is, they have practically and provisionally solved the problem of how
to array and order themselves. To have knowledge is to belong to
some sort of ordered life; to have some sort of ordered life is to have
shared knowledge.4
I, however, see this as having normative implications as wellhow could it not, if
it were true? Briefly, every epistemic system allows for only a certain number of
possible political systems. In one sense this is trivially true, as politics is concerned, in
part, with what is and we decide how to decide what is through epistemology.
Furthermore, it would seem that every political system only admits a range of possible
epistemologies.5 I want to argue that there is a unique relationship between the forms of
democracy and the form of science, in theory and in practice and that, far from being an
accidental feature or descriptive account, this provides us with a normative basis for
making science, now maturely politicized, the basis for epistemic decisions in democracy
and furthermore, democracy the political ideology to which scientists must adhere.
One implication of this thesis is that, if one is committed to democracy as a
political system, then such a commitment ipso facto rules out including religion, climate
change skepticism, flat earth beliefs or creationism on an equal footing. One may attempt

Consider how useless free speech would be if all of us shared the same thoughts, consider how sterile our
minds would be were we not free to communicate.
4
Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump, p. xlix.
5
The tradition of political theory beginning with Rawls likes to conceive of itself as post-metaphysical. I
discuss this more below in detail, but it suffices, for now, to point out that (Rawls, John, A Theory of
Justice, Cambridge, MA: Belknap of Harvard UP, 1971; Rawls, John. Justice as Fairness: Political Not
Metaphysical, Philosophy & Public Affairs 14.3, 1985: 223-51) admit that one cannot but smuggle
intuitions about epistemology and metaphysics into ones theory. Though usually not convincing to those
who believe this line of thinking, but being post-metaphysical is itself a metaphysical position.

4
to bring these ideas into the discourse, but absent facts produced through reasoning about
evidence, across biases and perspectives produced by quantitative or scientifically
qualitative analysis in a laboratory or academic research setting in a context of
institutional skepticism, one may dismiss these ideas out of hand.6 In democracy, neither
can have an equal standing to science. This thus address the kind of issues with which
Latour is concerned.
I will address this by drawing on several literatures: the analytic and
continental philosophy of science, theoreticians of democracy such as Hannah Arendt and
work in the field of Science and Technology Studies, a discipline comprising the
sociology, anthropology, history and general study of science, of which Latour is the
main representative. I will begin with a discussion of different philosophical and
sociological approaches to science. Latour does not make sense absent the path laid for
him by thinkers such as Quine and Kuhn and maybe even the tradition of analytic
philosophy stemming from Wittgenstein, Kripke and Putnam.7 Additionally, there is a
tradition in Science and Technology Studies that specifically asks questions about the
ethics and politics of science. Historians such as Steven Shapin provide an ethical
account of scientific truth. Much of the STS literature, such as the work of Sheila
Jasanoff and Yaron Ezrahi,8 address the question of the role of science in a democracy,
and vice versa, from a policy and theory perspective, respectively. Finally, I will draw

This raises practical problems, but not theoretical ones. There are examples when science is wrong and
there should be institutions that allow for the investigation of neglected ideas for which there may be
evidence, but as long as a controversy is relatively settled.
7
Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1996; Kripke, Saul A., Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language: An Elementary Exposition,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1982; Merton, Robert King, The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and
Empirical Investigations, Chicago: University of Chicago, 1973; Putnam, Hilary, The Collapse of the
Fact/value Dichotomy and Other Essays, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002; Quine, W.V., Word and
Object, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960; and Wittgenstein, Ludwig, and G. E. M.
Anscombe, Philosophical Investigations, New York: Macmillan, 1953. For the accepted treatment: Rorty,
Richard, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.
8
Ezrahi, Yaron, The Descent of Icarus: Science and the Transformation of Contemporary Democracy,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990; Jasanoff, Sheila, and Marybeth Long Martello, Earthly Politics: Local
and Global in Environmental Governance, Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2004; Science and Democracy Network,
Selected Bibliography. Program on Science, Technology & Society (STS),
<http://www.hks.harvard.edu/snd/bibliography/>. Shapin, Steven, Never Pure, Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins UP, 2010; and Shapin, Steven, Never Pure, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2010; and Shapin
and Schafer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump.

5
upon Bruno Latours work on science, technology and politics.9 I will pay special
attention throughout to the most lucid framings of the problem of truth to politics,
specifically as the problem of science and democracy and where those cited are dialogue
with the thinkers above.10
My thesis will proceed in largely two parts. First I will provide a rational
reconstruction and historical presentation of the basis for my premises at hand. I will
investigate classic accounts of truth in politics, mainly to set up the problem as it has
appeared in history and address how it is no longer possible to accept, without question,
the premises therein. I hope to demonstrate through the reconstruction arguments the
bases for my claims, which though accepted in the history and sociology of science, are
not necessarily accepted by everyone. Second, and most importantly, having marshaled
the evidence and arguments from philosophy, history and the sociology of science, I will
make a positive argument in political theory. I hope, in doing so, to address questions on
the philosophy of science and political theory.
To restate my problem: science and democracy, in order to be effective, must
embrace a form of pluralism, which admits ideas both undemocratic and unscientific and
when combined, this problem is doubled or squared. Thus the question becomes, how
can we construct a polity which is pluralistic enough as to consider any idea and, thus, in
the spirit of true skepticism be truly scientific without allowing in through the back door,
those un-provable or pernicious claims which either make us more stupid or less free.
Surely, then, science must also face the question of being democratic enough that it is
accessible to all and thus can truly become what everybody knows, but requires the
skills, knowledge and trained skepticism and such which is the purview of the elite. How
then can we establish criteria internal to science and politics so as to consider,
democratically and scientifically, any and all claims, while providing us a ground on
which, at some point, to no longer admit them? While then, climate skepticism is
9

Latour, Bruno. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
UP, 2004; Latour, Bruno, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford:
Oxford UP, 2005; Latour, Bruno, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, Durham: Duke UP, 2010; and
Latour, Bruno, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence an Anthropology of the Moderns, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard UP, 2013.
10
Arendt, Hannah. Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, New York: Penguin,
1978. I will also draw on sources that are largely attempts at answering Arendts challenge such as Elkins,
Jeremy, and Andrew Norris, Truth and Democracy, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2012.

6
unscientific, in that it is a motivated, pernicious and dangerous form of skepticism,11 it
would be undemocratic and unscientific to entertain it, or, at least, for a time. It should
be enough to say that the controversy is settled, that climate skepticism is false or at least
false enough that action against climate change is necessary. Though we should be wary
of spooky apocalyptic claims, considering the weight of evidence and the gravity of
predicted result, the time in which we could truly settle the controversy is precisely a
time when it is too late. This is not a simple Pascals wager, that the benefits of being
right (or testing if we are right) are outweighed by the costs if we are wrong, for the
substantial difference is not a question of faith, but of fact.12
Though one must value open and frank discussion in the democratic sphere about
the limits of governments and the power of markets, it would be un-democratic not just
unscientific for the state to not try to save the world, for, again, we can always unregulate the market, but we cannot make ourselves un-extinct. While then one may argue
for limits on the government and for the powers of the market, this is only if we are
assured our continued existence. I could even entertain that the necessities of capitalism,
for example, would require the market decide issues of equality, even between races and
genders.13 We may pretend this is an unsettled question and that thus the market must
decide as though the burdens of being wrong entail suffering, they do not entail
eliminating the very conditions of possibility for that debate.14 As in, we may be willing

11

Latour, Bruno, Waiting for Gaia. Composing the Common World through Arts and Politics, Lecture
French Institute, London, 2011.
12
One can only claim the difference here is slight in the abstract and that is one of my points. So, for
example, while one may say all claims are relative and thus science is true in one sense and religion in
another this does not somehow lead to the specific evidence on climate change produced by experts in
skeptical institutional settings that involve many complex measurements and tools without suggesting that
the entirety of science is suspect. The religious relativist, however, performatively contradicts herself, then,
if she proceeds to vote or use an iPod.
13
Might I say, though, that again, the scientific evidence is in: the market cannot alleviate structural
inequalities on its own, especially when these are backed up by apparently impersonal policies of
government and especially when many of the corresponding prejudices themselves are embodied in
precisely a way as to be immune to the assailments of free market reason.
14
What is key here are the importance of history and reversibility. Politics and indeed human existence is
meaningless without history, which both politics and science produce. Furthermore, a key value of any
democracy is reversibility, that a decision can be undone and repeated, as is the case in a scientific
laboratory in the best cases of confirmation.

7
to say that the current generation will suffer, but later we can institute regulations, which
fix the problem.15
The necessity of political action should itself be determined by the facticity and
gravity of the problems at hand, as much as it should be by the will of the people. Of
course, I believe it is precisely the will of the people, which should be guided by these
things. The necessity of scientific inquiry and action should be determined by which
political, social and technological questions are of most import to the polity, as much as it
should the wills and whims of abstract scientists, endeavoring at basic science. Again,
we are fortunate when these meet. Arendt says the truth compels us to action and thus is
undemocratic, but, while I think to the extent that something is settled as true it should be
compulsive, I do not agree it is undemocratic, for the very premises of democracy, its
spirit of openness, problem solving and debate, require those very epistemic conditions
which render science our best bet thus far at the truth.
I am not as nave to think that science is ever truly settled nor to think that politics
isnt actually a valid place of scientific contention. The exposure of a scientific false
fact to the public sphere, including a long settled one, could be the best jolt to its
destruction. Thus, I welcome the inclusion of intelligent design into the public debate,
but only insofar as, and forgive my elitism, this can only surely lead to its being proven
more false. The problem emerges when the stakes are risen and we do not wish to just
openly debate intelligent design, but to teach it to our children. We teach evolution as a
fact, surely, but it is not so much an imposition as intelligent design, because science
precisely challenges those who are skeptical to prove it wrong; intelligent design admits
no such possibility and thus while, then, should evolution turn out to be wrong,16 or in
need of revision,17 such a conclusion is a simple matter of the revision facts and of the

15

Again, I dont say this.

Reversibility has a similar spiritual thrust to Poppers criterion of falsifiability, the implication of which
is that if a theory is wrong at all it is completely falsified. There in a sense, then, by the criterion of
falsifiability all current facts are, strictly speaking, wrong, and I have no doubt they will be revised. The
theory of evolution by natural selection will probably grow and even drastically change throughout the
centuries and in that sense, will certainly be wrong and thus is currently wrong. But, as my criteria for truth
are pragmatic and deal with settling controversies, with the possibility of their reopening later, this is not a
problem. I can say even the theory of evolution is right, but one day will be wrong.
17
Which it surely will and probably would if it werent constantly defending itself from outside attacks.
This problem of inside/outside criticism will be important later.
16

8
statement thereof, while, when trapped in the safety and comfort of faith, one can
sometimes never emerge.18
If I am then, so ardently committed to reversibility, it is because, as a condition
of possibility for productive democracy, like anything else, it is up to debate, but this,
however, is its advantage. Democracys greatest weakness is that its very foundations are
up to debate, but this is also its strength. Eliminating the condition of possibility for
democracy eliminates the possibility of productive debate at all and shakes the ground
from which one first launched his attacks in the first place. Science is in the same
position.
Democracy and science both invite you to prove them wrong, but does it make me
nave to think that one must actually do so, before a claim is settled. To the extent that
the scientific and democratic consensus is unshakeable is usually the extent to which we
can exclude claims and propositions from the relevant sphere. Thus, we can exclude
those ideas science has deemed wrong and democracy deemed undemocratic from the
democratic debate and to some extent from most scientific laboratories. We can exclude
them until the evidence has either problematized the facts or shown them to be false and
thus, we should maintain active and open institutions, which, police science and
democracy and make sure that ideas that are excluded and fall by the wayside have their
chance in the sun. To say that we should allow those who believe in intelligent design or
climate skepticism a chance to prove their ideas is to assume my consequent in the
argument against it for the burden of proof is theirs. Another way to conceive of this is
that in any democracy and in any scientific laboratory, more open, frank, honest and
critical discussion is almost always better than less, but one would be hard pressed to
prove that creationism or climate skepticism are trying to expand the discourse of free
thought rather than precisely silence those public claims which their proselytizers find
dangerous to their interests.19
18

This is not to say that there are not those who have faith in science. Indeed, both scientology and the
positivism of Steven Pinker fall into the trap of scientism, that is, making a church of laboratory. My
argument is directed as much at them, as it is those who are unscientific. Furthermore, I would argue that
scientific paradigm shifts are different from religious losses or changes in faith, or that, if they are not, in
the abstract different, then it is only because science has faith in its requirement of losing faith.
19
Must we always be genuine? No. I would even say there are acceptable times to lie. The democratic
community has the right to exclude lies though. That someone provides facts as to bolster their respective
interests is one thing, but to impugn the facticity of a class of facts for the purpose of advancing while

9
As such, I argue that though it is true that science is itself political (and
democratic) and democracy itself scientific, that facts and values cannot be cleaved from
one another, that truth is, dare I say, constructed, that skepticism is healthy, that the world
is not then up for grabs. We have long known that just because something is socially
constructed does not mean that it can change (or, for that matter, is false). Thus I argue,
in sum, that the conditions of possibility for science and democracy and that thus the
conditions of plurality offer the criteria through which those things singular20 may be
excluded. In our problem, then, lies our solution.

A Brief Note:
There is, in a sense, an abridged way to read this thesis, as to shorten its length.
To do this, one must read Sections I-III of Chapter 1, Section III of Chapter 2 and
Sections IV and V of Chapter 3. I strongly recommend Sections I and II of Chapter 2 as
well. Of Section II, the most important subsection is on Kuhn, E, as it sort of sums up the
previous sections. The excursus and interregnum in Chapter 2 can be safely skipped;
their function is to provide alternative definitions for those who want to see something in
addition to just critique and though I stand by them, they are not necessary (though
perhaps sufficient) for my final arguments. Sections IV and V of Chapter 1 provide
further definitions and outlines and are for those who wish to have more semantic rigor.
Sections I-III of Chapter 3 harden up the previous discussions and lay the groundwork for
my final arguments about science and democracy. In them I hope to allay fears about
skepticism, subjectivism, anti-intellectualism and other intellectual vices. If my earlier
arguments did not bring on these worries, then they are less necessary.

disguising ones interests, that is quite another. Michael P. Lynch argues (Lynch, Michael P, In Praise of
Reason: Why Rationality Matters for Democracy, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014) that these positions
are a form of skepticism, but which are skeptical of reason itself. Skepticism is only possible from the
vantage point of reasonin which case it must be specific or contradictory, or from faith, which, as such,
bars it from the public sphere, inasmuch as a nation not committed to a particular faith should not admit
faith claims as factual and be wary of them used in value judgments.
20
In the sense of anti-plural. See, my argument here will be that truth is assumed to be unified and that this
is the source of many of the problems in the literature, but, I argue, the strength of truth comes precisely
from its plurality and that, though this makes it social, constructed and political, it by no means obviates its
relative claim to eternality, historicality or validity as the current ground for action.

Chapter 1: The Subject of Truth and Politics

Recap
The problem of truth and politics has been with us for a long time. It is a serious
problem with grave consequences, especially in light of climate change, new age
mysticism, creationism, millennialism or political eschatology and campaigns against
vaccinations or water fluoridation. I am going to interrogate the nature of truth, as
expressed through science, and the nature of politics, as expressed through democracy;
they remain the purest forms of their genera we have at this point in history, in hopes of
finding a normative resolution to the problem inhering in the terms of the problem itself.
In this first chapter, I discuss the problem inherent in the relationship between
truth and politics. I aim to discuss the question as it arose in classical political theory and
then to frame the modern equivalent, the question of relationship of science to
democracy. Classical political philosophy provided many answers to the problem of truth
and politics, which fall largely into three camps, the skeptical, the pluralist and the
conservative. The conservative and pluralist accounts are impoverished, I argue, without
the skeptical account, but the skeptical account either destroys everything in its wake, or
cannot provide a criterial reason for why politics, in accepting a class of or even a
specific truth, even skeptically, should not then act on those truths.
The problem of truth and democracy is very old and typically was solved with
realism, skepticism, traditionalism or pluralism. I argue that realism begs the question
and that pluralism and traditionalism collapse into skepticism. Skepticism itself however
is not a solution, because it simply pushes the problem into the political sphere itself.

12

Section I: Clarifying the Problem of Politics and Truth

No one has ever doubted that truth and politics Hannah Arendt begins
her Truth and Politics,21 are on rather bad terms. Arendt justifies this by claiming that
lies have always been regarded as necessary in politics. Though she is an authority,
she is not the authority and the question of the relationship of truth to politics lingers
enough, insubstantially answered, to requite entire volumes, which asks whether our
politics should be concerned with truth at all and the more complex question: the
question not of whether but of how truth should matter?22 Assuring the reader, the
volume rests on an affirmative answer to the first of these questions and leaves the
volume to discuss the second, ironically, enough, using Arendts essay as one of the main
starting points. Arendt probably meant to say only as much. Arendt only says truth and
politics are on bad terms to affirmatively answer that truth and politics should bear at
least some relationship, but what that is, she claims, should be minimal. Although the
politically most relevant questions are factual23 politics and truth remain locked in
conflict.24
Must this be the case? Is not truth one of the few virtuous things left in
this world? Stolid, pure, substantial and unchanging, truth derives it virtuosity from its
precisely lack of morality. Truth, like Solomon indifferently offering to sever a baby in
half to prove who is theand this is the pointtrue mother, settles all disputes, as it is
indifferent to the disputants. Politics, the realm of dialogue and argument, the place in
which we should openly and safely dispute25 must surely be open to such a powerful
force for settling disputes, a mechanism by which it can safely anesthetize the seemingly
endless quarrels, each of which is made to seem to split the earth in two, capable of
ending the human race by itself. Surely we want refuge from such endless conflict in

21

Arendt, Hannah, Between Past and Future, 227.

Elkins, Jeremy, and Norris, Truth and Democracy, 3.
23
Arendt, Hannah, Between Past and Future, 232.
24
Locke, John, and James Tully, A Letter Concerning Toleration, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983. Locke,
John, and Peter Laslett, Two Treatises of Government, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988.
25
That politics must remain the discussion of the public realm is countenanced by the fact that most very
strongly resist political discussions within the realm of the private, (i.e., the house) or its role in making
decisions about the private or even social realm, such as friendships. It is for this reason politics is
verboten at my Passover Seders.
22

13
something so noble as truth? Even a good Christian is willing to admit that the good may
be subjective. No artist or art historian thinks of the beautiful as something universal, but
the truth? Are we not to tell it, to seek it, to discover it, to let us guide us?
Is it so simple as the old adage, perhaps, that the truth hurts? It cant be.
Feelings are meant to be hurt in politics, so that cannot be the source of truths bad name.
Arendt quotes Kant who says the external power which deprives man of the freedom to
communicate his thought publicly deprives him at the same time of his freedom to
think26 that freedom of speech is required for freedom of thought. Politics requires
freedom of thought. In turn, freedom of speech implies something more though, both s
the power to lie and the power to be wrong. Freedom of speech requires open discourse,
the spouting of opinion. Since the time of Plato, the opposite to truth was mere
opinion.27 Many a political argument I have had ended with the other informing me that
is only your opinion which despite being painfully obviousand, dare I say, the point
harkens to something important: politics is the realm of opinion and truth is that which is
not up to debate.
Surely, if truth is, well, true it should guide us? Where we were once
certain, we are now confused,28 as there are centuries of dispute on this issue. I will now
address the original formulations of the problem and why much necessary discourse on it
must take at its starting point a different formulation.
In the next section, I am going to outline the history of thinking on the
relationship and problem of truth to politics, primarily as it appears in classical political
theory.

26

Arendt, Hannah, Between Past and Future, 234.

Ibid, 233.
28
Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, New York: Harper, 1962, 1.
27

14

Section II: The First Statement of the Problem: Politics

and Truth
The central question with which I am dealing is that of the relationship of truth to
politics: should it exist and if so, how? The debates about truth and politics cuts to the
issues beginning with philosophy itself and, in some sense, is the main meta-question
involved in political philosophy. These disputes are necessary because just as reflection
is useless and idle and perhaps impossible without practical, embodied action in the
world, action without reflection is sterile, reactive and though perhaps good at generating
noveltyreflection without action does so toonovelty is only purposeful within the realm
of history.
If the relationship were obvious politicians and philosophers would be out of
work. But I will be entertaining and explication, what perhaps is a more significant metaclaim that is that debates about truth and politics are exhausted by the question of the
relationship of science and democracy. No one would argue that science is not a form of
epistemology and thus bears on questions of truth. No one would argue that democracy
is not politics and thus bears on questions of ethics and politics. No one, indeed, then
would challenge perhaps that the question of the relationship of science to democracy is
itself the most timely and most relevant manifestation of the question of truth and
politics. We live in a world made whole by science and technology and decides our
political lives in what we claim to believe is a democracy. That science is the only
legitimate epistemic system and democracy the only legitimate political system is both so
taken for granted by the public and argued for in the Ivory Tower, that it would seem odd
to problematize it.
We are, however, at an impasse and one, which has been with us since Plato. If
the truth is unified, self-evident and free from bias or custom and there are those with
access to the truth, then should not truth be the means by which we govern ourselves;
those with access to the truth that should govern us. Philosophy, as we know it, begins
with Plato and Aristotle and so does the debate about truth and politics. Truth, for Plato,
was a remembrance, through discourse, tutelage, guidance or inspiration, of the perfect

15
forms, which, imperfectly reflected, form the substance of the world in shadowy form.
Indeed, truth is most importantly singular and something quite non-human.
Aristotle disputed the particular Platonic epistemology, inasmuch as, for Aristotle,
truth is not remembered, but discovered and, not residing in forms, instead truth is
immanent in the world itself.29 Where they disagree, though, highlights where they and
most others agree. Truth is singular. Truth is objective. Truth is somewhat discoverable.
Truth is without bias. Truth is independent of custom. Truth is independent of the
human mind and of humans. Truth is reflected in the myriad forms of the world, either as
the source of the reflections which generate it, or inherent in the analysis of the materials
themselves. Truth, we tend to think, comprise or can be described with natural30 laws and
not those flimsy political ones, which we may break.
Much of these aspects of truth reflect the same notion. Truth is an
indivisible whole, free from the idiosyncrasies of custom, the trends of opinion, the sways
of bias, the fickleness of history, the mistakes of reason, the abuses of lying and the
particularities of time, space and the moment. That truth shines through what otherwise
is a constantly changing world means that truth is dominant. Telling the truth outpaces
lying. Waiting until one knows the truth represents more maturity than spouting an
opinion.
Indeed, it is the superiority of truth to opinion and bias that lead Plato to think that
it should dominate those things in the realm of politics and who better then to lead us
politically than those with unique access to truth, the philosophers?31 Aristotle, himself a
29

Aristotle, and David Bostock, Metaphysics, Oxford: Clarendon, 1994.

Were I to get into the problem of nature, this would be a whole other can of worms. Briefly, Latour,
who we will meet later, discusses the nature/culture divide and the necessity of overcoming it in We Have
Never Been Modern, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988. Kate Soper in What is Nature?, Oxford: Oxford
UP.,1998, makes a very good case that nature is a cultural construction, as much as culture itself is a natural
phenomena. For her part, Nancy Cartwright argues in How the Laws of Physics Lie, Oxford: Clarendon,
1983, 2, that in empirical fact and perhaps by necessity there is a trade-off between explanation and
descriptive adequacy and that, as such, theoretical laws are necessarily false. Distinguishing between
theoretical and phenomenological laws, the former being fundamental, and the latter generally descriptive
of what happens. She stakes the claim that phenomenological laws are true of objects in the world,
Ibid, 3, while theoretical laws are only true of models we make of the world. Given any ontology which
makes a subject object division and has a representational account of truth, this rebuttal, as well as the
Quine-Duhem hypothesis I will discuss later obtain and create difficulties. An account which collapses the
subject object divide loses this weakness, but then how one can conceive of abstract laws describing the
world from a vantage point from which humans have been subtracted or how there can be any model that
does not, by implication, touch on its own existence?
31
The Republic in Plato, and Benjamin Jowett, The Dialogues of Plato, New York: Random House, 1937.
30

16
philosopher, was not content to rule, though this is not because dispute the nature of truth,
even the nature of its dominance.
Aristotle was skeptical that any single man, let alone someone so arrogant as a
philosopher, could know the truth. The truth can be demonstrated, but also reasoned to by
dialectical analysis of the beliefs of the fewthe wise and the many.32 If the wise and the
many agree, Aristotle thought, we may rest at that, otherwise we must investigate the
problem at hand. Furthermore, this enterprise should itself be quite close to politics.
Political science, Aristotle reasoned, studying the public realm of handling disputes,
should be an architectonic science, which combines all other forms of knowledge. Not
only then, should truth rule politics, but the study of politics itself was the study of
unifying ultimate truths, but, one which we are cautioned, is a difficult and perhaps never
ending enterprise. Though more cautious and less arrogant and certainly less willing to
let any one class or any one-person rule, Aristotle still did not dispute the fundamental
relevance of truth to politics.
So then, from whence does truth and politics hairy relationship come? That truth
should not be the province of politics, Jeremy Elkins explains, usually amounts to one of
two positions the traditionalist or conservative account, or the pluralist account.33
The pluralist account we have seen already, as Arendt expounds it famously. Pluralists
claim that politics is the realm of plural, disputed and diverse opinions, doxa, and because
truth is anathema to opinion, seen from the viewpoint of politics, truth has a despotic
character.34 The conservative account represents the notion that it is truths venomous
interaction with custom and tradition, rather than opinion, that makes it foreign to
politics, this notion that, as with, for example, the French Revolution, one could remake
anew the entire human world. Michael Oakeshott pokes fun at this as rationalism in
politics35 and indeed, it is precisely rational as opposed to factual truth that is
normally at hand.36 A second variant of the skeptical answer, though one which voiced as
much by liberals is the skeptical account, the notion that our relationship to truth is
asymptotic, that, perhaps Hume is right, we may never know anything, as the principles
32

Aristotle, and H. Rackham, Aristotle: Politics, London: Heinemann, 1959.

Elkins and Norris, Truth and Democracy, 23-24.
34
Arendt, Between Past and Future, 241.
35
Oakeshott, Michael, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1991.
36
Arendt, Between Past and Future, 232.
33

17
by which we know are themselves unjustly derived from the world; we assume can know
because we assume we can know and its only by recourse to this vicious circle that we
rest in any sort of knowledge at all. Perhaps then, Plato is right, the skeptics say, truth
should rule, but it is men who rule, not ideas and men are fallible, precisely when the
truth is not. I will return to the question of skepticism later.
Something interesting is at work here. The pluralist and conservative account
attempt to cleave rational truth from politics. Arendt insists factual truth must remain.
Burke does not mind factual truth as the traditions behind eroded exist themselves as a
kind of truth. The skeptical account, however, disputes even factual truth. Indeed, by the
skeptics account, one does not even know if the sun will rise tomorrow. Burkes own
argument elides the difference somewhat, as well, but it would seem that the argument
that truth be kept from politics requires that rational and factual truth be different. If
factual truth itself does not exist, how can people dispute about anything at all. Surely
there must be something that is. But, that said, there is not much to differentiate factual
from rational truth. That, at which, it seeks to aim, is the notion, perhaps, of particular
versus universal. While, then, one may say it is raining and be shown to be true or
false, rain is produced by evaporated water, according to the laws of chemistry and
physics and predicted by the science of meteorology is suspect.
What is contained with a rational truth is a fact about facts, a statement of a
general, universal kind, which, if applied with sound judgment allows one to predict a
particular fact. I am tempted to say that those universal conclusions, at which one
arrives, if true, would be facts, of the same status as those things current. If we should
judge by skepticism, factual truth itself disappears, as one now is limited to only those
which must be true, according to logic or math, or those sensations which appear to be
true, subjectively.
Perhaps, then, factual truths are those constrained to sensory primitives. Maybe
then, one can figure out if others experienced the same sensory phenomena, and if so, can
admit those factual truths that Arendt and Burke would like to, but, it is hard to see how
simple facts of sensory data could be political at all, absent some form of causality. The
presumption that rational and factual truth are different is itself a category error unless
rigidly defined, that is, Arendt and Burke, it would seem, would like to admit facts of a

18
higher order than it is raining those like Germany invaded Belgium in August 191437
presume it is possible to have factual truths about causes, intentions, sequences and so on,
which, if truth, gives no possible ground to distinguish factual truth from rational truth.
Arendt herself recognizes that factual truth is no more self-evident than opinion.38 The
difference between factual truth and rational truth is either insubstantial or the difference
between facts as primitive sense data, things as they appear to a person in one moment,
gutted of all other efficacy and history, and facts about causes, facts linking facts. The
distinction between factual and rational truths opens itself up to the skeptical rebuttal
immediately, unless it is not really a distinction in theory at all, but one, which, we just
assume. Anyone can tell you what an invasion is, though, I dont see why then anyone
cant tell you what a physical law is and thus I am not sure why we must cleave factual
and rational truth.
I will return to the question of skepticism and the responses to problem of truth
and politics later in section IV. Now I turn to the discussion of the modern formulation
of the problem of truth and politics: the question of the problem of the relationship of
science to democracy.

Section III: The Modern Problem: Science and

Democracy
The ancient question of the relationship of truth to politics appears in modernity
as the question of the proper relationship of science and democracy. Science today is
considered the most legitimate form of access to the truth, the most legitimate
epistemology and, as such, scientists seem to be in the place of Platos philosophers,
those benighted folks destined to rule, despite their overwhelming desire to remain in the
laboratory and discover the truth. Thus, if the inherent normative notions of the Platonic
and traditional formulation of truth satisfactorily solve the question of truth to politics, it

37
38

Ibid, 249.
Ibid, 243.

19
would seem that scientists are naturally given to ruling.39 Arendt, herself, addresses this
problem in her Human Condition and her thoughts are worth quoting in full:
The reason why it may be wise to distrust the political judgment of
scientists qua scientists is not primarily their lack of characteror
their naivetbut precisely the fact that they move in a world where
speech has lost its power. And whatever men do or know or
experience can make sense only to the sense that they can be spoken
about. There may be truths beyond speed, and they are of great
relevance to man in the singular, that is, to man in so far as he is not
a political being, whatever else he may be. Men in the plural, that is,
men insofar as they and move and act in this world, can experience
meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to
each other and themselves.40
Arendt is highlighting something important here: political action must be
collective, open, based in speech and action and mutually intelligible and science,
especially modern techno-science, deals with truths inaccessible to most and often
disconnected significantly from the real world of disputes, arguments and conflicts which
lays the terrain for the political world. Arendt seems to waver between what is the
argument from skepticism to the argument from doxa and this tension seems to arise from
the fact that, for the most part, her theory of truth is that of Platos largely unchanged, and
her tacit recognition, that political actors or not, scientists are those modern philosophers
with access to the truth. She is, however, wrong to state that scientists operate in a world
where speech has lost its power and later in the same book she continues with a theory of
science, very much like the one which Latour proffers, which will discuss later. Again, it
is worth quoting in full:
Similarly, the capacity for action, at least in the sense of the
releasing of processes, is still with us, although it has become the
exclusive prerogative of scientists, who have enlarged the realm of
human affairs to the point of extinguishing the time honored
protective dividing line between nature and the human world. In
view of such achievements, performed for centuries in the unseen
39

If science is true and scientists have access to truth, then it follows that scientists should rule on those
questions on which they know best. It does not follow necessarily that scientists rule always without
checks and balances and on everything. Furthermore, other people may have access to scientific truth, in
which case they would be suited to govern as well. Suffice it to say, although educating everyone in
science is a goal of democracy, such that the ideal humanist democracy looks, in many ways, like the world
implied here, this vision is not democratic.
40
Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998, 4.

20
quiet of the laboratories, it seems only proper that their deeds should
eventually have turned out to have greater news value, to be of
greater political significance, than the administrative and diplomatic
doings of most so-called statesmen. It certainly is not without irony
that those whom public opinion has persistent held to be the least
practical and the least political members of society should have
turned out to be the only ones left who still know how to act and to
act in concert[T]hey have become one of the most potent power
generating groups in all history. But the actions of the scientists,
acting from the standpoint of the universe and not into the web of
human relationships, lacks the revelatory character of action as well
as the ability to produce stories and become historical, which
together form the very source from which meaningfulness spring
into and illuminate human existence[T]hese few who still know
what it means to acttheir experience even rarer than the genuine
experience and love for the world.41
Arendt acknowledges that through their capacity for productive novel action,
scientists have already been engaged in those actions which are by nature political, if
only because it is the imperative of modern myth makers to document the stories and
narratives of scientists. Again, Arendt mistakes her own subject of argument, as
scientists precisely are those noteworthy actors who make history, even if it is not in their
words that history is made and the whole discipline of the History and Social Studies of
Science attests to this fact. The tension therefore in Arendt, seems to be that between a
skeptical account of why science should be absent from politics and one based in the
nature of politics itself, perhaps stemming from a almost-romanticist desire to cleave the
dry sterile truthas she conceives itof scientists, from the exciting world of politics
itself. The tension here arises from the fact that the account of truth given in the classical
and modern traditions bespeaks really only a few solutions and that, given its premises,
only the skeptical argument really works, taking with it most other things.
Science has unequivocally become, in the 20th and 21st century, the dominant
epistemology in the world.42 As science has risen to become the dominant epistemology,
democracy has risen to become the dominant political theory. All forms of knowledge
41

Ibid, 324.
Agar, Jon, Science in the Twentieth Century and Beyond, Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2012; Daston,
Lorraine, and Peter Galison, Objectivity, New York: Zone, 2007; McGuire, J. E., and Barbara
Tuchaska, Science Unfettered: A Philosophical Study in Sociohistorical Ontology, Athens, OH: Ohio UP,
2000.

42

21
these days seem to try to justify themselves as scientificwith names such as Creation
Science, Intelligent Design, Climate Change Skepticism, and Scientology43rhetorically
positioning knowledge as scientific even if it contradicts the enterprise. All politics seems
to revolve around democracy and not so much if, but, instead which: liberal,
representative, direct, consensus etc. Even dictatorships and monarchies all feel the need
to legitimate themselves with democracy, with countries such as Saudi Arabia having a
faux elected parliament.44
The rise of science as the dominant epistemology rose concurrently with
democracy45 as the dominant political theory and this could be, in part, a historical
accident, but its investigation is directly relevant to my question at hand. That democracy
and science arose together is the product of the Enlightenment, which originated many
ideas, such as free inquiry, freedom of speech, freedom of person and assembly, freedom
from bias, prejudice, intolerance and custom, and so on that are amenable to both science
and democracy.46 The list of values endemic to democracy, in many ways, matches that
of science. In part this is because of the rhetorical strength democracy gained from
science and vice versa and that as these two ideologies rose to power they were
competing against similar forces, such as illiberalism, the remnants of feudalism, the
worst kinds of mercantilism, the need to exploit popular sentiment and receive political
support and funding, the fight against monarchy, old world bias and oppression. The
values of science figured into the imaginary of democracy and the values of democracy
figured into the imaginary of science,47 both combing back to Greece and Rome and
alternatively shedding Jerusalem48 to prove their worth and lineage as the Western modes
of thought.

43

Latour, Politics of Nature.

Dunn, John, Western Political Theory in the Face of the Future, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1979,
Dunn makes a point of arguing that all regimes, democratic or not, must justify themselves as democracies.
45
That the two helped create each other is a also well agreed upon. See Lynch in Praise of Reason and
Ezrahi in The Descent of Icarus and Ezrahi, Yaron, Imagined Democracies: Necessary Political Fictions,
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2012.
46
Political Theory in STS as in Hackett, Edward J, Olga Amsterdamska, Michael Lynch and Judy
Wacjman, The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.
47
Ezrahi, The Decent of Icarus; Ezrahi, Imagined Democracies.
48
Kielmansegg, Peter, Horst Mewes, and Elisabeth Glaser-Schmidt, Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss:
German migrs and American Political Thought after World War II, Washington, D.C.: German
Historical Institute, 1995; Meier, Heinrich, Leo Strauss and the Theological-political Problem, Cambridge,
44

22
In modern contexts, the discussion of the relationship of truth to democracy takes
almost exclusively the form of the relationship of science to democracy. Though it is true
that Machiavelli began the attempt to introduce science to politics by writing in The
Prince, a guidebook for a method of analyzing and advising princesequivalents of
mayors or governors or other form of executive over a city state or small kingdom
without the sullying of advice with value judgments. Machiavelli wished to put the
science in political science. On the other hand, illiberalin the sense of supporting a
sovereign with almost no checks on power, save maybe the sovereigns court, to whos
decision the sovereign is by prudence not by compact bound to assentthinkers such as
Hobbes put a lot of faith in the reliability and accuracy of the objective world.49 That
said, the relationship of Hobbes to objective notions of truth and what could be called
proto-constructivism is itself a subject of debate.50 Hobbes, in the Elements of Law,
argued that there can be no disputes in mathematics and other logical enterprises, but
only in debates of the empirical, for which probability cannot be certain.51 Those who
claimed knowledge he argued were dogmatists. Later, in the Leviathan, Hobbes becomes
even uncertain about the mathematical and realizes that the only truths are those
following from definitions commonly agreed upon. So mathematics, while true, derives
from public agreement about definitions, a sophisticated position which presages
Wittgenstein, Kripke and Putnam to some extent.
Totalitarianism and science have largely departed, conceptually, from each other
since then. Political science largely follows in Machiavellis tradition and seeks to
provide objective advice to political leaders about doing their job, both in terms of getting
and maintaining power but also in formulating good policy. That said, political science
almost exclusively occurs in democracies, at least as commonly conceived. Political
UK: Cambridge UP, 2006; and Smith, Steven B, The Cambridge Companion to Leo Strauss, Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge UP, 2009.
49
Hobbes may be a liberal in the sense of believing in an autonomous reasoning subject guided by rational
self interest
50
Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-pump, is entirely about this. They seem to argue that Hobbes
basically recognized the truth of constructivism, while at the same time wishing it were not true. For I
doubt not, but if it had been a thing contrary to any mans right of dominion, or to the interest of men that
have dominion, that the three angles of a triangle should be equal to two angles of a square, that doctrine
should have been, if not disputed, yet by the burning of all books of geometry suppressed, as far as he
whom it concerned was able. See Chapter 11, The Discipline of Manners in the Hobbes.
51
Cite quote about 20 to 21 probably in Hobbes, Thomas, and Ferdinand Tnnies, The Elements of Law,
Natural & Politic, Cambridge, UK: University Press, 1928.

23
science perhaps can hide behind its lack of value judgments because normally it is not
called upon for nefarious purposes, at least in its own self-conception.
Furthermore, although the Nazis, for example, made mangled usage of the cult of
enlightenment reason, through hackneyed, though perhaps current, theories of racial
biological determination, Gring famously claimed that were the Hitler to declare that
2 + 2 = 5, it would be so.52
The thinkers following all associated reason and rationality as the natural and
most perfect state of man and science to be the epistemic system following from these
and democracy the political. Thinkers such as John Locke, Immanuel Kant and John
Stuart Mill all associated reason and rationality with truth through science and
democracy. Their ideology of common assent worked because it was assumed that given
a certain level of rationality, nobody could disagree with rational truth. As such, because
democratic franchise in their times was only to be given to those who could handle the
burdens of reason, which primarily meant educated, land-owning men of good pedigree
(though Mill vindicated the rights of women as well); it was assumed that the question
that rational truth would compel, in a totalitarian way, the need for open discussion of
doxa, did not pressingly send their minds spinning. It is perhaps the egalitarianism and
liberalism of an evolving secular society, no doubt in part fueled by the burning
deconstructions of tradition entailed in science and democracy as methods, means and
models that opened franchise in both spheres to those not traditionally enmeshed in them,
such as women, non-landowners, people of color, younger adults and more.
The public sphere and civil society were seen as organs of democracy and the
grounds of science and in these the fine arts, literature, theater, the Press, the humanities,
52

Little did Gring and the Fuhrer know that were this to be true, it would be because the mathematical
community democratically assented to his will and did nothing but a redefinition, a parlor trick, if you will.
Interestingly, Wikipedia has a whole article devoted to quotes of 2 + 2 = 5 and provides, as a citation, a
display of loyalty by Gring to the Fuhrer in Hermann Gring, Museum of Tolerance Multimedia
Learning Center, Retrieved 18 Feb. 2012. Additionally, the page discusses Orwells usage of this motif in
his works. A small irony emerges in the fact that Dostoevsky uses the quote in Notes form the
Underground as a site of nihilistic and romance resistance to objectivity, the kind to which I earlier
speculate that Arendt feels indebted to. Is this not a perfect formulation? The 2 + 2 = 5 of good natured
resistance to authority, which takes as its supposed enemy science and its products, seems to only be able to
end in the totalitarian twisting of the nature of reality. It is not in science where speech and action have lost
their meaning, as Arendt says, but in totalitarianism (which she says elsewhere), which in many ways is a
state where science has ceased to function.

24
the liberal arts, the coffee house, the public square, the novel and so on opened up the
vessels of both science, through journals, salons and scientific societies and democracy,
through the press, the pulpitsecular and religious, and other means of public
communication to give way to democratic decision making through other means than
voting and franchise and even then open up the political floor to the dispossessed, from
children to the colonized to prisoners and madmen. People discovered new realms of
interiority and subjectivity coming to conceive of the subject and the subjectiveand thus
the object and objectiveas we do today.53 Certainly the systems of epistemology and
politics both became more open, more secular, more tolerant and more humane as they
became more exclusively scientific and democratic, even as if these veils of objectivity
actually hid bias and other pernicious forms of structural violence. It was, perhaps, the
very fact that science and democracy collaborated to open up the world to all people of
all types that the two, comprising primarily the power elite, spawned crises of confidence
in the both of them. In the language of interest and ideology, requited not so historical
flukes of biological racism, sexism and justifications for colonialism (sometimes to bring
those very shining methods of science and democracy by the sword to people who would
probably had gratefully taken them, had they not come with torches, axes, nooses and
slave ships).54
Indeed, as the twentieth century rolled around, according to many thinkers, it
became clear that even if science produced objective knowledge, it did so through and
because of a specific cultural history. Robert Merton famously argued that scientific facts
can be true, objective and eternal but that still the method for validating that knowledge is
a specific culture, indeed a culture uniquely suited to producing that truth. This claim
smacks of ethnocentrism, but formulated correctly is very relevant to my argument.
Specifically, he argues, science emerges from four values communism,knowledge is
to be shareddisinterestedness,scientists should not have a personal stake in their
results only their productionorganized skepticism,as a community, scientists must
53

Arendt, The Human Condition; and Habermas, Jrgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public
Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989.
54
Anderson and Adams in Hackett et al., The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies; Harding,
Sandra G, The Science Question in Feminism, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986; Harding, Sandra G., The
Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies Reader, Durham: Duke UP, 2011; and Smith, Barbara
Herrnstein, Scandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth and the Human, Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2006.

25
assume whatever is at hand to be false until provenand universalisma scientific fact
is true for all people at all times. There are many problems with these norms, but they are
a starting point.55 Karl Popper, who proffered the definition of science as based in
falsification, the idea that a theory cannot be right unless it can be proved wrong,
believed in a cultural and traditional basis for science.56 At the same time that the
sociology and philosophy of science noticed that there was a specific culture to science
and that specific culture may have something more than accidental to do with democracy,
epistemology and metaphysics exclusively started to become the philosophy of science
and the philosophy of mind. After three hundred years, from Kant through Hegel to
Peirce, the idea that epistemology fundamentally became the philosophy of science was
tacitly accepted in philosophy. Though questions were raised of the validity of this
model, they always came either with the assumption that it was largely true and had to be
combated on its own spirit, such as through post colonialism and feminism, or were
attacks largely from outside the academic, philosophical or scientific enterprise
altogether, as with the attacks that have occurred from Christianity.
Furthermore, that political theory and political science made their claims for the
sake of democracy is standard fare now. In the early twentieth century, anti-democratic
thought through Schmitt and Strauss were largely the last gasp thereof. It is interesting to
note, though, that Carl Schmitt thought all political concepts were secularized theological
concepts57 and for Leo Strauss the central question of political philosophy is that of the
conflict between reason and revelation.58 Both of these then problematize democracy
through the lens of truth, in effect claiming that it the necessity of truth, either as the
wisdom of leaders veiled in noble lies, or the decision making made in crisis, that provide
a vantage point against democracy.
Later on, I will argue that Strauss conception of revelation vs. reason does
nothing but show that entailed in the premises of epistemology lie questions of
metaphysics suggesting a stronger version of my argument, and perhaps the opposite of
what he intended.
55

Merton, Robert King, The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1973.
56
Popper, Karl R, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, New York: Basic, 1959.
57
Schmitt, Carl, and Michael Hoelzl, Political Theology, Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2008.
58
Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theological-political Problem.

26
Contra Schmitt, democracy, precisely by being scientific, and science precisely by
being democratic, has means for dealing with controversy. Science settles controversy as
fact as needed to complete a goal and will be willing to re-open the matter when time and
perhaps the dictates of necessity allow it to do so. Science has a more dynamic, but still
resolute method by which to deal with crisis, more so that a dictator who is bound by the
limits of his own reason and his personal ties. Schmitt and Strauss showed only that there
were limits to democracy, but that these limits could be, I will argue, be resolved within
the framework of democracy itself.59
Similarly, it was discovered within the bounds of philosophy and science, that the
two of them had definite limits.60 No mathematical system can be complete and correct.
No computation can decide when a program will halt, and as far as we know all
computational systems have this boundary. Science cannot resolve the problem of
induction internally, though it can describe how people make inductions in real life, both
scientists and laymen. The question of emergence and reductionism cannot be addressed
strictly by empirical evidence, though, in weak form, it is definitely suggested as a
solution.
Because science is now recognized as the main epistemology that needs to be
addressed and democracy the main political theory, the central question I will address is
the relationship between science and democracy, which will call into high relief the
problems of truth and politics. All the old battles are being re-fought on the terrain of
science and democracy.
For example, there are those, in the tradition of Plato, who argue that politics
should be a theoretical and guided only by political science proper, such as realists and
neo-realists61 or should be guided by the natural sciences, thinkers such as Steven Pinker,
who are liberal, still believe this.62 In fact, as Thomas Frank argues, the culture of
science, the idea that winning is a matter of historical progress guiding and thus that

59

Hart, H. L. A, The Concept of Law, Oxford: Clarendon, 1961: and Luhmann, Niklas, Klaus A. Ziegert,
and Fatima Kastner, Law as a Social System, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004.
60
Yanofsky, Noson S, The Outer Limits of Reason, What Science, Mathematics, and Logic Cannot Tell Us,
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013.
61
Morgenthau, Hans J., Hartmut Behr, Felix Rsch, and Maeva Vidal, The Concept of the Political, New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Ironically, this tradition comes from Schmitt. Coincidence?
62
Pinker, Steven, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, New York: Viking, 2011.

27
politics can be a game of crunching numbers suffuses the culture of the Democratic party,
the closest thing to liberal and progressive politics in the United States.63 This position
originates from Hegel, who famously related truth to politics in a cycle. Politics is about
what is and can be. This requires a theory about how we can know there is an is. How
we can know what there is depends on the nature of man, which is a claim about how
things are and can be.64 Ironically, the right took up this idea, such as in the works of
Francis Fukuyama, who claims that neo-liberalism, as the end of ideology, modeled after
science as the end of ideology, has triumphed and thus we are the end of history.65
Furthermore, thinkers such as Rawls66 and believers in rational actor theory
attempt to make a political theory without epistemology and metaphysics. Though I
think they fail and that they really smuggle in epistemic and metaphysical claims, those
of the rationalist camp, would probably be inclined to disagree with me. In fact, they
probably would argue that science is itself post-metaphysical. Now, the fact that their
position then becomes: science is post-metaphysical, we want post-metaphysical politics
and thus science should govern our politics.
Because being post-metaphysics is itself a metaphysical claimindeed, one
cannot escape philosophy (this is Kant and Hegels point on rationality and
epistemology) or ideology (as Althusser would phrase it)this claim is a metaphysical
one that science, being post-metaphysical has political priority, which one can see as a
technocratic reformulation of Plato.67 It is exactly this claim I am problematizing and
which, weakly formulated, and actually lends credence to my idea that there is a
fundamental connection between science and democracy. For example, though critical of
rationalism, Richard Rorty makes an argument for democracy that is nearly identical to
this one, claiming that motivated and anti-metaphysical skepticism is the required and

63

Frank, Thomas, "Donkey Business," Harper's Monthly Jan. 2014: 5-8.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, Arnold V. Miller, and J. N. Findlay, Phenomenology of Spirit, Oxford:
Clarendon, 1977; and Kojve, Alexandre, and Raymond Queneau, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel:
Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, New York: Basic, 1969.
65
Fukuyama, Francis, The End of History and the Last Man, New York: Free, 1992.
66
MacDonald, Paul K, "Useful Fiction or Miracle Maker: The Competing Epistemological Foundations of
Rational Choice Theory," American Political Science Review 97.04, (2003): 551-565; and Rawls, A Theory
of Justice.
67
Althusser, Louis, On Ideology, London: Verso, 2008; and Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit.
64

28
healthy epistemology for democracy68 This line of argumentation, however, will not
satisfy those against whom it leveled. Just as one cannot convince a non-rational person
to be rational with reason or a relativist that truth exists by showing that relativism
applied to itself is contradictory, one cannot convince someone who is postmetaphysical that their claims are in fact metaphysical but of a reordered kind.
Heidegger famously asserted that the present-at-hand the mode of inquiry which
fancies itself scientific and non-metaphysical is itself just a form of the ready-to-hand the
practical and value laden method of interacting with the world; in sum, objectivist and
scientific posturing are themselves a specific form of value judgments and claims about
the good, the beautiful, the true and the just, but, are instead formulated as to claim to not
be about those things.69 This is as coherent as a metaphysics, which posits that there are
objects about which we can have no knowledge. While, in one sense, this is true, in the
other, one realizes that of those objects we do have knowledge, namely that we cannot
have knowledge about them. Through this rebuttal, Hegel attempts to show that
something, which is metaphysically valid, is perhaps contradictory from the perspective
of human pragmatics and epistemology.70 What Fukuyama, Neo Realists, Machiavellians,
certain political scientists and technocrats all have in common then is that they precisely
believe the claim that epistemology and politics suggest each other, they just fashion
themselves against ideology and against metaphysics, and think science is precisely the
epistemic system that is beyond metaphysics and democracy the political system. Being
against metaphysics is a form of metaphysics, just as being against ideology is an
ideology.

Section IV: Defining Politics, Democracy and Science

A good deal of the further work in this thesis will entail elaborating on claims
about truth and politics as well as science and democracy. Substantial portions will

68

Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity.

Heidegger, Being and Time.
70
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit.
69

29
address the facts around these definitions. The multiple problematic definitions of truth
will form the substantial part of the next chapter. As such, I will define politics, science
and democracy here. Fundamental questions concerning these definitions are the subject
of years of scholarly work. In fact, significant portions of the arguments to follow
involve rational reconstruction and definition building. That is to say, that because a
significant portion of my argument involves redefining the terms at hand or discovering
meanings and truths already buried within them, it stands to reason that even within this
work, the definitions of politics, science and democracy are not given.
There is not a single way to define these categories that does not raise problems.
Though I am the type to be completely content with definitions based on family
resemblances, noting that definitions obtain over a range of sub-claims, as a system of
concepts, which includes and excludes in a somewhat haphazard manner, this will not
suffice for most. I commit myself only then to the family resemblances elucidated by
these definitions and will come back to and will problematize them in due time.

Politics
The most basic definition of politics comes from Aristotle, who also inaugurated
political philosophy. Aristotle argued that Men are by nature political animals.71 Men,
in addition, are marked off from other animals by possessing reason and the power of
thought.72 Additionally, political animals are those which have some single activity
common to them all (which as not true of all gregarious animals); such are men, bees,
wasps, ants and cranes.73 Finally, men, compared to other animalsalone can perceive
the good and the bad, the just and the unjust, and the rest and it is a partnership of these
things which makes a state, a collection of citizens, who are defined by nothing else so
well as by participation in judicial functions and political office.74 In sum, humans are
social and rational animals; they use language. Separating man from other social and
communicative animals though, is the capacity of humans, as my intro to political
71

See Barnes, Jonathan, Aristotle: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000, 127 for source of
citations. Originally Politics I 1, 1253a, 2.
72
Ibid, 125.
73
Ibid, 125. HA I 1, 488a, 8-10
74
Ibid, 127. Politics I 1, 1253a, 15-18; Politics III 1, 1265a, 22-3.

30
philosophy professor once said, to kvetch, to know good from bad and talk about it.
Furthermore, when humans kvetch enough, they establish a sphere in which they govern
themselves, serving both as the governors and the governed.
Building off of Aristotles definition is Hannah Arendts. Focusing on language
and its capacity to make things public Arendt argues wherever the relevance of speech is
at stakes, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political
being.75 Arendt divides human life into labormetabolism with nature, workcraft and
actionmeaningful action between men. Elaborating on this she claims:
Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the
intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the
fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world. While all aspects of the
human condition are somehow related to politics, this plurality is specifically the
conditionsnot only the condition sine qua nonbut also the condition per quamof all
political life. Thus, the language of the Romans, perhaps the most political people we
have known, used the words to live and to be among men or to die and to cease to
be among men, as synonyms.76
Politics consists in the capacity of humans to speak and act among one another
and, as such, constitute a public realm, in which things happen. Furthermore, men are
definitionally in the plural, in that humans are constituted by their sociality and publicity
and furthermore all humans are united in that they are individually unique. To be
political, therefore, meant that everything was decided through words and persuasion
and not through force and violence.77 This contrasts notably with later definitions of
politics, which argued for an administrative view. Politics is conterminous with the state,
which is a bureaucracy given the legitimate ability to use force within a given territory.78
This absence of violence meant the public sphere was the sphere of freedom,79 that is

75

Arendt, The Human Condition, 3.

Ibid, 7-8.
77
Ibid, 26.
78
This notion is in the common knowledge, but it emerges from Hobbes and Weber.
79
Arendt, The Human Condition, 30.
76

31
not to be subject to the necessity of life, or the command of another and not to be in
command oneself. It meant neither to rule nor to be ruled.80
Arendt and Aristotle basically defined the political as the affairs of the public
realm, that ontologically unique realm constituted through and by human speech and
action. The publicity of the political allowed men to rule themselves and each other
together and furthermore guaranteed them an epistemic and metaphysical common.
Arendt and Aristotle thus both tie the political, from the beginning, to democracy and to
truth, or at least the grounds on which they occur. For this reason I find their definitions
pleasing and of import.
They highlight, though, the stark contrast of what we typically understand.
Politics is meant to be the realm of administration, of bureaucracy and governance and
ruler-ship. Politics necessarily involves violence and its suppression as well as the
creation and maintenance of law to do so. Politics can encapsulate both states and nonstates and these configurations can be monarchies, democracies, republics, dictatorships
and so forth. Thus a minimalist conception is in order. Politics involves the public or
social realm, humans in their collective form, entails the use of speech and action,
concerns and regards administration, governance, or rule, as opposed or equivalent
concepts, can take on several forms of states, or lack thereof and governments and ones
definition of politics is usually tied to precisely ones commitment to the type of state one
wants to live in.81

Democracy
It follows logically to define democracy. Democracy, despite being a subset of
politics, perhaps generates just as much, if not more, contention. There are representative
democracies, direct democracies, participatory democracies, workplace democracies,
80

Or do each in turn. Ibid, 32.

Arendt discusses these contrasting notions in The Human Condition further and traces their history. As
stated above, many of these conceptions come from Hobbes, particularly in Hobbes, Thomas, and Richard
Tuck, Leviathan, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1991and Weber, Max, Economy and Society; An Outline
of Interpretive Sociology, New York: Bedminster, 1968. Leo Strauss traces the history of politics and
political theory, particularly parlaying with Hobbes, Weber and also Machiavelli, in his texts, The City and
Man, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988a; What Is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies,
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988b; and Natural Right and History, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1999.

81

32
democratic republics, and constitutional monarchies; democracies by lot, by luck, by
vote, by consensus. This is further complicated by the fact that We are all democrats
today.82 Even monarchies strive to ingratiate themselves as best they may as the
instruments of their peoples purposes, tools of the demos.83 Thus the question follows
if we are all democrats today. Why are we all so?84
Thus democracy may consist in, polling the people,85 political equality,86 in
opposition to aristocracy, or rule of the few and thus rule of the many,87 a particular form
of government endemic to Ancient Greece which consisted in the political body and the
people, comprising citizens (and thus excluding, slaves and women, but all free people),
who decided on all city-level actions together.88
At the base of these claims is the idea of the demos, which is supposedly all the
people or at least all the adult people.89 This author cynically argues, Democracy is a
highly desirable label for which the exceedingly heterogeneous class of modern states
show a strong predilection when they come to describe themselves in public.90 This
does not satisfy me.
More edifying authors claim there are broadly three types of democratic
definitions. There are those which concern contest[s] among interest groups either
through structural conflict dominated by the elites or pluralism through bargaining.91
This definition unfortunately admits dictatorships, monarchies and aristocracies.
Inasmuch as Aristotle and Arendt touch on this idea, they correctly identify it a necessary
part of politics in general, not just democracy. The second tradition sees democracy as
an instrument for deliberation a collective search for better answers above and beyond

82

Dunn, Western Political Theory in the Face of the Future, 1.

Ibid. Consider that even, Schmitt in Schmitt and Hoelzl, Political Theology, while arguing for a
dictatorship, still believes the origin of politics and law to be in the consent of the people.
84
Dunn, Western Political Theory in the Face of the Future, 2.
85
Ibid, 4.
86
Ibid, 5.
87
Ibid, 6.
88
Ibid, 7.
89
Ibid, 11.
90
Ibid, 12.
91
Briggs, Xavier De Souza, Democracy as Problem Solving: Civic Capacity in Communities across the
Globe, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008, 7.
83

33
self-interested bargaining.92 This theory of democracy is explicitly ethical and epistemic.
The final tradition, these authors argue is the idea of democracy as problem solving,93
to which they devote the rest of the book. Problems confront people as individuals and a
collective.

Problems have objective solutions, both for individuals and collectives.

Democracy is the collective search of the state-space of reality to determine the best
solution to problems both for individuals and collectives, as the problems present
themselves both objectively and subjectively. They purposefully try to combine the
above theories. I find this theory of democracy the most normatively appealing, but it
may lack common descriptive validity. Thus I will address, briefly, a few more theories.
Joseph Schumpeter contrasts two theories.

The first is that the democratic

method is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions which realizes
the common good by making the people itself decide issues through the election of
individuals who are to assemble in order to carry out its will.94 This theory combines the
deliberative and interest group theories from above.

He argues this conception is

impoverished and rather that the democratic method is that institutional arrangement for
arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means
of competitive struggle for peoples vote.95 Briefly, that he sees these theories as
conflicting reveals a confusion of cause and consequent.
Elegantly, and variations on themes above, the conception of deliberative
democracy as the idea that when citizens or their representatives disagree morally, they
should come together to reason together to reach mutually acceptable decisions.96 This
conception consists in three principles reciprocity, publicity and accountabilitythat
regulate the basic process of politics, and three othersbasic liberty, basic opportunity,
and fair opportunity.97 While capturing fundamental intuitions about democracy, this
92

Dunn, Western Political Theory in the Face of the Future, 7.

Ibid, 8.
94
Schumpeter, Joseph in Dahl, Robert A., Ian Shapiro, and Jos Antonio Cheibub, The Democracy
Sourcebook, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003, 5. Notably, Schumpeter says, The only thing, barring
stupidity and sinister interests, that can possibly bring in disagreement and account for presence of an
opposition is a difference in opinion as to the speech with which the goal, itself common to nearly all, is to
be approached.
95
Ibid, 9.
96
Gutman, Amy and Dennis Thompson in Dahl, Shapiro, and Cheibub, The Democracy Sourcebook, 17.
97
Ibid, 19.
93

34
definition says too much and too little, by making democracy at once partly synonymous
with politics and also specifying the content of its concomitant social, economic and
cultural relationships.
Suffice it to say we now have, another frame and map of the minimalist
conception98 and its subset electoral democracy,99 the deliberative conception of
collective decision making, the conception of liberal democracy100 which consists in
guaranteeing basic rights to citizens who participate in political life in some meaningful
way, pseudo and non-democracies, which bear relations to democracy.101
Attempting to unify, in a satisfyingly minimal way, the conceptions above,
democracy seems to have the following features. First, it is a method of politics, that is to
say a publically decided feature of human life; which, second, helps determine the
method, means and manifestation of administration and governance of the people. It
either involves the election of representatives either by vote, or by lot, or the direct voting
on relevant pieces of policy and legislation. Thirdly, in democracies those classified as
citizens have equal rights to participate in the system. Fourth, democracies involve a
conflict or consensus of interest groups either selfishly battling for power or unselfishly
deliberating on solutions to problems. Finally, democracies contain typically a rhetorical
element in that democracy seems to serve as the projection for peoples hopes and dreams
about politics and, as such, is finally the philosophy or system of justification for political
systems and states, especiallyone hopesbut not exclusively concerning those with the
above features. Democracy seems, then, to be something like the scientific method in
politics, where politicians, public problems, policies and states and their grounds
themselves are subject to the rigorous demands of the public eye, in its hopes to
collectively solve the problems which face it

98

Diamond, Larry in Dahl, Shapiro, and Cheibub, The Democracy Sourcebook, 31.
Ibid, 32.
100
Ibid, 34.
101
Ibid, 36.
99

35

Science
Lastly and no less problematically, I must define science. The starting point for
discussions of science is usually Sir Karl Popper who proffered seven criteria writing:
1. It is easy to obtain confirmations, or verifications, for nearly every
theoryif we look for confirmations.
2. Confirmations should only count if they are the result of risky
predictions; that is to say, if, unenlightened by the theory in question,
we should have expected an event which was incompatible with the
theory in questionan event which would have refuted the theory
3. Every good scientific theory is a prohibition: it forbids certain
things to happen. The more a theory forbids, the better it is.
4. A theory that is not refutable by any conceivable event is
nonscientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people
often think), but a vice.
5. Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to
refute it. Testability is falsifiability
6. Confirming evidence should not count except when it is the result
of a genuine test of the theory
7. Some genuinely testable theories, when found to be false, are still
upheld by their admirersfor example, by introducing ad hoc some
auxiliary assumption, or by reinterpreting the theory ad hoc in such a
way that it escapes refutation.102, 103
These features, Popper argues can be sum[med] upby saying that the criterion of the
scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability or testability.104 Science
does not entail induction, Popper argues, for it is a myth.105
While the testing aspect of science is fundamental it evades other fundamental
things, so John Ziman argues, science is public knowledge. Scientific ideas must
102

Popper, Karl R. in Klemke, E. D., Robert Hollinger, and A. David Kline, Introductory Readings in the
Philosophy of Science, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1980, 41-42.
103
Ibid, 41-42.
104
Ibid, 42.
105
Ibid, 45.

36
survive a period of critical study and testing by other competent and disinterred
individuals, and must have been found so persuasive that they are almost universally
accepted. The objective of science is not just to acquire information nor to utter all noncontradictory notions; its goal is a consensus of rational opinion over the widest field.106
Very briefly, this notion entails some baggage, such as rational opinion, consensus, near
universal acceptance and so forth, but nonetheless probably, like Popper, captures some
of the main and important features of science. As a quick side note, science, defined like
this, sounds quite a bit like political action as defined by Arendt.
Robert K. Merton, a figure, who, though perhaps mainly wrong, will nonetheless
reappear several times out of necessity below, proposes that science recognize [its]
dependence on particular types of social structure.107 Science, Merton argues, is a
deceptively inclusive word which refers toa set of characteristic methods by means of
which science is certifieda stock of accumulated knowledge stemming from the
application of these methodsa set of cultural values and mores governing the activities
terms scientificor any combination of the foregoing.108 Merton emphasizes institutions
and the political situation in which they take place. Besides functioning as an institution,
science has four regulative and constitutive ideals universalism, the belief that truth
claims, whatever their source, are to be subjected to pre-established personal criteria,109
communism, the extended sense of common ownership of goods[that] constitute[s] a
common heritage in which the equity of the individual producer is severely limited,110
disinterestedness, a more ill-defined norm used to explain the absence of fraud due to the
strict institutional policing of scientists111 and organized skepticism, a methodological
and an institutional mandate consisting in the temporary suspension of judgment and
the detached scrutiny of beliefs in terms of empirical and logical criteria.112 Suffice it to
say, I wish this account were true and science were reducible to this, for it would make
my argument far easier. The way Merton characterizes science isas an autonomous
106

Ziman, John in Klemke, Hollinger and Kline, Introductory Readings in the Philosophy of Science, 51.
Merton, The Sociology of Science, 267.
108
Ibid, 268.
109
Ibid, 270.
110
Ibid, 272.
111
Ibid, 276.
112
Ibid, 277.
107

37
social activity dependent upon its practitioners exchanging information freely wherein
it is essential that all those involved should strive to the same standards of judgment
and from committing themselves to belief until universally shared criteria can be shown
to apply thus generating indisputable knowledge shared by the whole community.113
Fundamentally, science is a job, dependent upon the implements that the state
or other organizations puts at his disposal and thus he is just as dependent upon
institutions as is the employee in a factory upon the management.114 Science is thus a
professional form of work that has entered a phase of specialization previously
unknown.115 Unlike other professions, though, scientific work is never complete
because by its nature it must always raise new questions. As a profession, scientific
work presupposes that the rules of logic and method are valid and that what is yielded
by scientific work is important in the sense that it is worth being known.116 Through
its work science contributes to the technology of controlling life by calculating external
objects as well as mans activities and contributes methods of thinking, the tools and
the training for thought.117 The idealized view of science as vocation within the
university has itself been challenged, as private companies use science, free from the
necessity of disinteredness presupposed by both Weber and Merton,118and it is not clear
that this has truly been detrimental to science, though many claim it has, though the
industrial scientist is seen as occupying a position of potential conflict due to the
incompatibility of the norms of science with those of industrial organizations.119 This
remains true, despite the fact that the atom bomb is the brainchild of disinterested
scientific activity.120 Interestingly though, part of science as a job is denying this claim as

113

Barnes, S.B., and R.G.A. Dolby, "The Scientific Ethos: A Deviant View," Archive of European
Sociology 11, (1970): 3-25, 5.
114
Weber, Max, Science as a Vocation, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, College Division, 1960, 2.
115
Ibid, 4.
116
Ibid, 9.
117
Ibid, 13.
118
Shapin, Steven, The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2008.
119
Barnes and Dolby, "The Scientific Ethos: A Deviant View," 6.
120
Agar, Science in the Twentieth Century and Beyond; and Carol Cohn in Keller, Evelyn Fox, and Helen
E. Longino, Feminism and Science, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996, 173-86.

38
the search for knowledge was a far higher calling than any activity whose main aim was
to make a living.121
Furthermore, within scientific communities, significant discursively political
work comprises much of what passes as scientific discourse, because no science is
absolutely free from presuppositions, and no science can prove its fundamental values to
the man who rejects these presuppositions.122 Each science must undergo, in its own
way, the challenge of statements such as: no knowledge content can win its independence
from the question that gives it meaning; no question can gain its autonomy from the
choice from which it proceeds; no choice can prevent its selective nature from being
taken into consideration, can ignore what is excluded from being presented so that what
is chosen can present itself.123 In sum, questions of the definition of science, epistemic
questions and the differentiation of science from non-science, a political question, are
fundamental to the practice of science itself. A radical proposal that emerged within the
sociology of science, rather than to define science, was to treat the problem of defining
science as a problem for scientists. Thomas Gieryn famously wrote a paper in which he
analyzed epistemology as a practical problem for scientists, what he called boundarywork.124 Ostensibly, he argued, there are two ways to think of scientific boundary work,
one as a product of strainsscience has pressure from without, and the other is
interestsscience are an interest group in the process of defining themselves for
political, legitimacy and funding reasons. This problem emerges from the fact that all
vocations need standards of truth, institutions, some degree of organized skepticism and
the inability to finish. Attempts at defining science from without, both from Popper and
Merton neglect the fact that appeals to rationality, scientific skepticism or disinterest
tend to have little effect, and have more to do with the misunderstandings between
communities than the actual behavior of scientists and thus such statements should not
be abstracted from their polemical context.125

121

Shapin, The Scientific Life, 45.

Weber, Science as a Vocation 15.
123
Stengers, Isabelle, Cosmopolitics II, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011, 45.
124
Gieryn, Thomas F, "Boundary-work and the demarcation of science from non-science: strains and
interests in professional ideologies of scientists," American Sociological Review 48.6 (1983): 78179.
125
Barnes and Dolby, "The Scientific Ethos, 24.
122

39
Scientists themselves are an interest group, and, thus while they were able to
frame the debate such that it was understood to be a problem in and of itself for a
universal group of people, what was actually at stake was scientific research into the
issue. It is in this sense that scientists were here and are always an advocacy coalition
with interests of their own. Scientists themselves are also self-interested actors126 who, in
emphasizing uncertainty and eliding the positive effects, are attempting to use their
coalitional position to achieve policy goals amenable to their personal needs. That the
narrative was framed such that everyones interests were at stake is itself a consequence
of science in policy more generally. Scientists need to self-consciously portray science as
objective and universal127 precisely because in an adversarial system of policy systems128
one is in a distinctly advantageous position if they can portray their interest as precisely a
lack thereof, uniting interests and advocacy coalitions across the system, thus minimizing
the extent of conflict.129
I do not necessarily think it productive to critique science. Popper and Mertons
definitions are most certainly incomplete. There is no reason to suppose though, that
scientists themselves do not believe in these ideals, and whereas an anthropologist or
sociologist would be appalled if someone approached a strange culture and told them
their beliefs completely neglected reality, they seem alright with doing this in science.130
Furthermore, science is a profession with interests necessarily tied to business and
to and these ties may be required for the scientific enterprise to survive. If science admits
126

Weible, Christopher M., and Paul A. Sabatier, "Coalitions, Science, and Belief Change: Comparing
Adversarial and Collaborative Policy Subsystems," Policy Studies Journal 37, (2009), 196.
127
So called boundary work. Keller and Longino, Feminism and Science, 29.
128
Weible and Sabatier, Coalitions, Science, and Belief Change.
129
This paragraph comes from a paper I wrote on the role of scientific knowledge in the acid rain debate for
a public policy class.
130
Churchland makes this argument in Churchland, Paul M., Plato's Camera: How the Physical Brain
Captures a Landscape of Abstract Universals, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. Sure science is relative
he says. Sure falsifiability and Mertons norms are not descriptive, but scientists believe them, generally,
and thus they are regulative and have the capacity to be performative. The critique of Mertons notions
comes down to this. Rationality as a norm generally just means correctness and otherwise is a norm
common to all cultures inasmuch as coherence and speaking validly are (Barnes and Dolby, "The Scientific
Ethos, 9). Furthermore, universalism, inasmuch as it means disinterest, is generally common to most
people, considered preferable except by perhaps nationalists and those of that sort and if it means
consonance with observation then nearly everyone in Western and all cultures agrees (Ibid, 10). As for
organized skepticism typically scientists take sides between particular theories, often developing
emotional attachments to them and arguing their merits with vehemenceand polemical skill. (Ibid, 10).
This objection is shaky. Organized skepticism precisely means adversarial commitments battling it out.

40
that it is being supported merely as a practical, profitable and powerful enterprise, it
would lose precisely the legitimacy to perform its function. Scientists themselves
probably require the ideology of knowledge as an end in itself in order to justify their
enterprises. Furthermore, such a romantic and utopian ideology serves to bolster the
autonomy of the scientist in their minds and the minds of others and thus affords it the
legitimacy and regulative ideal of objectivity that, while maybe empirically false, is
transcendentally proven, in a way, by the needs of practical reason. Science and its own
ideologies, strains and interests offer a contradiction and this is part of why defining
science is so difficult. I believe there are key features to science. I furthermore believe
that objectivity, rationality, universalism, communism, knowledge for its own sake,
skepticism and so forth, while maybe non-representative, certainly unite the scientific
community in a way that allows them to successfully perform their linguistic division of
labor I will describe later. Thus the key features to science are probably not those
admitted by scientists and, as we will see later, are part and parcel as to why science is a
pragmatic, coherentist and political endeavor. Suffice it to say, the boundary work
perspective allows us to from the exterior provisionally define science, while in the
interior allow scientific self-definitions to reveal something fundamental about the nature
of communities, institutions and epistemology. I want to emphasize from now on, that
claims of interested self-reflection and self-justification and social constructions are not
critiques, nor do they amount to the claims being false. If and when such issues are
raised down the line it serves nobody to think that social construction is always
deconstruction, that the unveiling of power behind truth diminishes the truth or utility
therein.
Capturing the key features of science amounts then to something like the: science
is a method for acquiring knowledge, as well as the body of knowledge acquired.131
Science fundamentally involves concepts, theories and predictions. Scientific theories
either need to be testable and tested or falsifiable and unfalsified.132 Science is social,
public and historical,133 operating either through the accumulation of knowledge or the

131

Merton, The Sociology of Science.

Contrasting induction and Popper which get at the same idea.
133
This is the thesis of McGuire and Tuchanska, Science Unfettered.
132

41
transition between paradigms.134 Science, in sum, is a public and social epistemic method
and body of knowledge, concerning predictive or descriptive concepts and theories,
which are either testable or falsifiable, preferably are tested or unfalsified, concerning the
world, which operates either in a cumulative or disjunctive fashion. Already, it seems,
science is something like the constitutional democracy of epistemologies, whose elected
representatives consort in the lower houses of industry and the upper houses of academia,
legislating the facts of the universe and the policies as technology to follow from them.

The Antimonies of Relativistic Reason, or a Confession of What I

Believe and A Preview of Most of the Argument to Come
Philosophy proceeds often through the dialectical analysis of concepts.
Conceptual analysis in analytic philosophy and rational reconstruction or genealogies in
continental philosophy amount in practice if not in theory to the same enterprise and the
dialectic as diversely defined by Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel and Marx are all methods
of this tradition. Much of that which motivates me comes from a place of bias, perhaps
even a prejudice, a sort of radical pluralism and I am often caught between the antimonies
suggested from without to that pluralism. For example, I find the sort of epistemic
conceits of much of philosophy concerning the correspondence of mans knowledge to
the world to be totally unsatisfying, anthropocentric and arrogant, and a source of
unnecessary baggage for the philosophical tradition, as much as I find the line of thinking
nearly inescapable, at least if I am to think within the boundaries of the traditions given
me, which, in effect, is to be able to think at all.
The first pair of definitions to address is realism and anti-realism. Realism is the
claim, onerous to some and painfully obvious to others that there exists a world out
there quite independently of the human mind, sociality, language, concepts, culture,
traditions, practice and so forth, picking whichever bogey one would like to slam social
scientists and humanists with in order to accuse them of naivet and nihilism. On the
other hand, are forms of anti-realism, which, range anywhere from the claim that the
world cannot be understood apart from our apparatuses of understanding
134

I will address this in depth later.

42
(correlationism), to the claim that divisions in the world are not pre-given but instead
fixed by language (nominalism) or, that, quite literally, there is nothing quite like the real
world at all (strong skepticism).
The second pair of definitions is absolutism and relativism. Absolutism is the
notion that there exists an absolute truth. This truth is unified, dominant, not subject to
bias or opinion and so forth. Relativism is the claim that truth always exists relative to a
framework, a specific position, a context, an interest or some other conceivable reference
point.
The third pair of definitions is objectivism and subjectivism. Objectivism is the
view that there exists an objective world, or an objective truth about that world, usually
endowed with a cognitive status. Subjectivism is the claim that the world exists in our
heads or in our perceptions, and in its stronger forms is the claim that the world is up for
grabs, so to speak.
All three of these antimonies entail both epistemic and metaphysical claims.
Furthermore, none of their territories is sovereign, they bleed into one another. Most
often realism, objectivism and absolutism go together. But adding complexity to that
picture, is the fact that even among realists, absolutists and objectivists there exists a form
of weak or strong skepticism (well, there is an absolute truth, we just cannot access it)
and its cousin asymptotism (I believe that the truth is out there and we are ever so slightly
approaching it asymptotically!) and a weak form of correlationism (there exists a world
out there, but yes, woefully, we cannot ever hope to understand it apart from our
conceptual apparatus).
Of course, this picture is woefully simplified. There are extreme variations on
these discussions, including forms of occasionalism, actor network theory, systems
theory and so forth. There are those who reject the subject object division (and, in doing
so, effectively cannot be absolutists, realists or objectivists, but have a very hard time
being subjectivists, anti-realists and even relativists, such as Bruno Latour, the embodiedembedded and enacted traditions in the philosophy of mind such as Humberto Mauratana,
Evan Thompson, Andy Clark and sociologists such as Niklas Luhmann and Jrgen
Habermas). There are those who reject that division and end up squarely in its wiles

43
(which, despite their amazing and fruitful contributions to philosophy, Martin Heidegger,
Hans Georg Gadamer and Maurice Merleau Ponty fall into it).
Furthermore, the very way these doctrines are formulated nearly completely
forecloses both a possibility of escape and a successful and coherent answer.
Rationalists, a package containing some mixture of realism, objectivism and absolutism,
speak as if they were nowhere while claiming to see comprehensively and
relativism a way of being nowhere while claiming to be everywhere equally.135
Both positions are god tricks. The social constructionist must, when critiquing a form
of knowledge as power, language, interest, etc., take a stance somewhere absolutely, or,
some would argue, at least a form of infinitely regressive self-reflexivity, that is finite at
any given point, but can be revised down the line. Because one independently begins to
see that self-reference is not a particularity of conscious but comes about from the world
of experience, it is no longer a surprise that it comes up against its own selfreference.136 The author of this text, Niklas Luhmann, aims to form a directly epistemic
social theory and thus his meditations are worth quoting in full:
None of this explains how knowledge that has been placed back into the world
fulfills its task, not how theory of knowledge can control whether it fulfills it or not. As
the scientific systems theory of reflection, epistemology primarily concerns the
relationship between knowledge and object, that is, knowledges reference to reality.
Pure self-reference in this case would mean: the real is what knowledge indicates as the
real. This answer is and remains unsatisfactory. One need not avoid the circle, but can
interrupt it by introducing conditioning. This is the function of reasons. These, however,
merely transform the vicious circle into an infinite regress, because now one must ask for
the reasons behind the reasons. The infinite regress is thereby fitted out with hopes of
approximating ever more closely to reality, which are finally anchored in functioning
complexity. If one in turns justifies the reasons and keeps every step of the process open
to critique and ready for revision, it becomes more improbable that such an edifice could
have been constructed without reference to reality. The circularity is not eliminated. It is
135

Biagioli, Mario in Galison, Peter, and David J. Stump, The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Contexts,
and Power, Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1996, 192; quoting Haraway, Donna Jeanne, Simians, Cyborgs,
and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, New York: Routledge, 1991.
136
Luhmann, Niklas, Social Systems, Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1995, 479.

44
used, unfolded and de-tautologized.

Without this fundamental self-reference all

knowledge would collapse.137

Luhmanns sociology, while abstract, wordy and complex also maintains a simple
elegance to it. A social system comprises communications, whose sole function is to
produce more communications (as this follows from evolutionary principles). Every
system must define a system and an environment and that definition is internal to the
system. Causality occurs asymmetrically, as a system is irritated and then causally
affected according to the rules internal to the system. A system can address a dispute
about one of these system-internal communications and charge whether or not these
communications address the outside environment relative to the system, but that in it is
now another communication, subject to the same internal rules of the system and now
subject to the same communicative regress. That the system seems to be an infinite
regress is the result of attempting to analyze a historical process in the contemporaneity
of a single moment, but luckily systemic operations occur in time.138 Rather than a
digression on the abstract sociology of a single thinker, this passage highlights several
main points.
Luhmann highlights a metaphor I will beat to death in the following pages, the
problem of the epistemic boat, which must always be in the process of reconstruction,
though, at any given point we must stand on a plank. Thus, the un-problematized usage
of the social, for example, as a category139 to critique the natural, is acceptable, if the
social itself will be critiqued from a vantage point and taken to be problematic from
another temporarily firm plank later on. Thus, at any given moment, we are skeptical and
relativistic about one set of claims, while realists, absolutists and objectivists about
others.
137

These latter claims must themselves be the further province of future

Ibid, 479. Further quotations of his which I find useful are: Historicism is itself a historical concept,
Systems research is itself a system; it cannot formulate its basic concept so that it would not itself come
under that concept, and Traditional epistemologies consider circles of this sort grounds for suspicion the
statements are false, if not gratuitous. The opposite is true. They force themselves upon on (Ibid, 482);
All regulation is itself regulated; all controls are themselves controlled. Nothing can be reproduced in a
close system without these conditions (Ibid, 483); and Even the physical world has emerged in order to
see itself (Ibid, 481).
138
I like to think this is the point of Heideggers Being and Time and Gadamers Truth and Method. Latour
explicitly mentions this point in A Textbook Case Revisited: Knowledge as a Mode of Existence and in
Hackett, et al., The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies.
139
See Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory.

45
communications, to be problematized and this act of perpetual unmaking itself is
unproblematic, if acknowledged, and thus self-reflexivity is itself as much a useful
concept in the natural sciences and every day life as it is the humanities and social
sciences, though it does not do the work all by itself.
The fact is all epistemic claims are communications and they occur in time. They
always occur relative to a contextual, performative, cultural, historical, pragmatic and
semantic matrix. They can always be the subject of further communications. They
always occur in time. Problems emerge only when we attempt to view things from
nowhere, either the temporal nowhere, or the spatial.
This brings me to the discussion of what I think to be the problems with every
part of each of the above antimonies. Realism about the natural world cannot escape the
correlationist paradox that even if we try to think the world independently of human
thought, we are doing so through human thought. We can tack onto this the circles of
language, sociality, practice, culture, theory and tradition. To say, there is a world
independent of human thought is a performative contradiction.
Anti-realism must deal with the fact that our categories of human thought have
provided us evidence of an extensive natural world, and this is under-exaggerated as it is
the majority of the entire universe, existed without humans. Correlationism can be
reformulated then as observer-dependent, not human dependent. Charles Sanders Peirce
takes this tack and argues that matter is concretized mind and thus the universe is in the
process of observing itself. This finds truck in modern philosophies of information140 and
digital physics. Furthermore, the secular occasionalism of Bruno Latour, which sees nonhuman actors as viable observers, argues reality is the sum total of a series of forever
partial, incomplete, associations and networks of actors, observing and translating each
other. Every object both has its own fundamental existence, but also exists relative to the
observations of all its associations at the given moment.141

140

Floridi, Luciano, The Philosophy of Information, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011.

Harman, Graham, On Vicarious Causation. Collapse II. Urbanomic, London. 2007; Harman,
Graham, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics, Melbourne: Re.press, 2009; and Latour,
Reassembling the Social.

141

46
Furthermore, anti-realism must account for the fact that even if there is no
performatively coherent way to conceptualize the world out there, it is just as hard to
form a coherent system of thought, which does not posit that. In fact, to say, there is no
world independent of human thought, means the world is dependent on human
thought. Where then does human thought exist? It must either exist within the world
dependent upon it in which case the claim then becomes either human thought is
dependent upon itself a boring tautology, or the Heideggerian claim the world is always
already there which is to say, at any given point in time, again time is key, one is either
observing the world as it relates to man or the reverse and that, as such, it is incoherent to
try to step outside of this circle anyway, as human thought requires the world and vice
versa. Again, because the cognitions occur in time, we are safe. Or, one can take the
perhaps more ludicrous claim that human thought exists elsewhere and this world is an
illusion, in which case, the problem of the world is just displaced and that world faces the
same observational difficulties.
For this reason Kant proposed the "world in-itself" and the "world for us",
noumena and phenomena. We are forever foreclosed access to noumena, but this quickly
results in contradiction. Either a thing is a thing or it is not, it either exists or does not.142
One would then dispute that knowledge that thing exists is knowledge, or one would have
to concede that we do have fundamental knowledge of noumena, that they exist. To say
something exists but we are foreclosed knowledge of it is to provoke the very
contradiction Kant is attempting to solve. Thus, noumena either do not exist, or we can
have knowledge of them, in which case, the distinction is irrelevant, or, at least, entirely
unmotivated. Nietzsche pointed out that if one cleaves reality from appearance and then
forecloses reality then one has ostensibly foreclosed appearance too. Furthermore, the
existence of noumena itself can only be thought of as relative to a conceptual scheme, as
Quine pointed out, or we are forced to get into quandaries about predicating objects with
non-existence statements.
Objectivism cannot accord for the fact that if there is a truth independent of bias,
then we have not seen it.

142

What I mean to say is, if the truth is a matter of

This latter claim is really troubling for philosophy and provoked Quines relativism.

47
correspondence, then it must inhere in statements about reality, not in reality itself. Then
it must handle the fact that statements about reality must inhere within reality and
furthermore the mechanism of correspondence is forever empirically incomplete, that is
to say, we have never seen a complete correspondence between sentence and reality,
unless reality is thought to comprise facts themselves, in which case, we have now a
world of sentences corresponding to their ideal semantic essences.

Furthermore,

semantic correspondence, itself, cannot be resolve except without a further notion of

truth, residing in practice, technology, coherence or consensus anyway, in which case, the
objectivism of correspondence resolves to something quite its opposite. We have never
experienced the world as free from our bias and it is empirically impossible for us to do
so.
Objectivism thus posits an abstraction. Abstractions are useful if they generate
further predictions, but to propose than an abstraction corresponds to reality itself
especially this onewhen that abstraction is proposed to precisely resolve the problem it
is now raising, one is now in a quandary. Objectivism, as an abstraction, must make
reference to objectivism in order to succeed. Objectivism cannot refer to a real empirical
reality, by nature (in which case, we are proposing there are things which exist but have
no empirical essence, inviting rebuttals to noumenal properties once again) and, in order
to be coherent, must make reference to a theory of truth rooted in subjectivity, such as a
practice, coherence or consensus based notion.
Consider the abstraction of public and private, which have never existed purely in
the world, each imbricated with the other. That said, privacy is meaningless without
publicity, for the reason that private language and meaning is impossible and thus the
bounds and existence of privacy, themselves, are defined by publicity. Publicity must,
though, to be coherent, define the private as its opposite. Publicity and privacy, then,
exist as regulative and constitutive ideals, concepts we use to render our systems coherent
and to provide normative validity to our proclamations. Objectivity could exist, as such,
in which case it would exist as a value, that is, something subjective.143
143

This problem exists for facts/values, form/content, subject/object, nature/culture and on and on. Some
would say these concepts are transcendentally proven. I do not like these claims. One can play a game and
pretend things are true that are not in order to successfully play the game. One does not then say the games

48
Subjectivism has to rebut the problems with skepticism and the problems of antirealism above. To say the world exists only in our minds is question begging.
Subjectivism either comes off as solipsistic or incoherent. But the world exists only as it
exists for me, one protests, mimicking Descartes! Except private language is impossible,
thought, of this sort, impossible without language and language impossible without
others. The very meaningfulness of the propositions and concepts used to doubt the
existence of the objective world take their meaning from a tradition, which precedes
them. Descartes attempts to undo skepticism by being unable to doubt his doubt have
failed before even reaching that point. Descartes doubt is meaningless without certainty
already, certainty that presupposes others and/or a world.
Interestingly, I want to raise the problems of absolutism by raising the problems
of relativism first. Relativism can be said to claim, there is no truth which is true in all
times and places or all truths are relative to a frame. This produces then, a
performative contradiction in both instances. Importantly, a person already convinced of
relativism cannot be swayed by this argument, just as one cannot convince a person with
reason to be rational. The idea of being relative to a frame, however, is to deal with the
problems raised by the fact that in absolutism, speaking of objects which do not exist is a
contradiction, which means in absolutism, there are no things which do not exist.
Now, the relativist can raise the point that when the absolutist points out that
claiming all truths are relative to a frame is itself, when relativized to a claim, staking a
contradiction, means that the absolutist has assumed their consequent in their argument
by attempting to take the contradictory vantage point outside some specific frame, the
very thing being addressed. Furthermore, a relativist can assume the somewhat
burdensome claim that something that is relatively absolutely true is not absolutely
true.144 I have not seen a system worked out which does this. The problem with
absolutisms argument against relativism is the problem with claiming the world exists
independent of human thought. It is true in principle and in fact that the absolutist is
operating according to a self-justifying framework as well.
pretend rules are real or transcendentally proven! Furthermore, these antimonies exist coherently as
normative concepts, not referential ones. And, what sense does it make to say something is proven if it is
the criteria by which one is proving things?
144
I deal with this in depth later.

49
Relativism invokes a contradiction if it is collapsed into a single justificatory
moment, the charge mentioned above of infinite regress. But because claims exist in
time, this is not a unique problem for relativism. The idea that turtles existing all the
way down disproves those turtles is itself an assumption and has no basis outside itself.
Furthermore, absolutism also invokes an infinite regress of sorts. Thus, there are no
problems of relativism that cannot be pinned on absolutism as well. Both systems are
self-justifying and provoke infinite regresses, coherent only by reference to themselves.
Additionally, the weak claim that everything which is absolutely true is relatively
true is most certainly true and this subsumes the claim that all concepts are true only
relative to a frame, except this one, which is true absolutely and relative to a frame,
which is itself. This is non-contradictory and has the problem of being unmotivated,
that is, if someone tries to step outside of history and space and does not sufficiently
address the problems inherent in absolutism. 145
Briefly, there are other points of relevance. First off, ones answers to questions
are constrained by the questions asked and the methods used to answer them. These
questions and methods, as they advance, foreclose alternatives to them as conceptual
possibilities, in practice, but not in theory. Questions and methods are most certainly
always relative to a time, place and culture. This empirical relativism and subjectivism is
onerous to no one, I would hope.
Secondly, the standards by which one justifies something as true must either be
justified by another system further back, internal to that justificatory system or bulletbitten such that they cannot be justified, as with Gdel. This problem inheres in the
discussion of any criteria for truth or justification, reality or axiom and so forth.
Thirdly, again, in empirical fact we cannot observe the world outside of our
observations and we cannot observe the world without affecting it. Quantum physics
poses the problem of entities whose metaphysical existence itself is affected by the
observation or usage thereof and fundamentally so, to its essence. These entities also

145

And so on.

50
create the possibility, it seems, of entities, which both exist and do not exist.146 The
existence of those quantum entities, I would argue, poses no more problems than the
weaker epistemic problem of measurement and influence affecting the object at hand.
This influence cannot be removed from the object, but it can be accounted for, with selfreflexivity. Attempts to remove the self-reflexive influence displace that self-reflexive
influence back one more step. This must be the case. Though then one can always argue
that one must not confuse the epistemic and metaphysical aspects of a problem, that
problems of knowledge are not problems of existence, the thorniness of these border
cases raises doubts of the success of that program.

Section V: The Project of this Thesis

I have discussed now the problem of the relationship of truth to politics from a
class and a modern perspective. The classical perspective boils down, largely, to the
formulations offered by Plato and Aristotle and filled in by thinkers such as Burke. The
modern formulation, as the relationship of science to democracy thinks itself in a unique
vantage point in history and as very different from the relationship of truth to politics,
classically conceived. I find this to be more ideological than true and that Arendt so
clearly outlines both positions and elides the two of them, hopping between classical
skeptical and pluralist accounts, while paying fealty to truth and science as truth as
reminiscent of Platos philosophers, is evidence of this point.
It will be useful to return to my earlier discussion of classic reactions to truth and
politics as they will bleed into the relationship of science to democracy. If factual and
rational truths are a difference of degree then and not of kind, Arendt and Burke must
appeal in practice to a criteria by which to distinguish them and then now, not only are
political disputes about facts but they are about what counts as facts. Indeed, now
politics takes on the character of epistemic work, establishing what counts as valid
knowledge. It would seem, then, should a political discourse arrive at a valid epistemic
146

Baggott, J. E, Beyond Measure: Modern Physics, Philosophy, and the Meaning of Quantum Theory,
Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004; and Stengers, Cosmopolitics II.

51
criterion for determining truth hood, then, those things which politics admit as truth,
should have dominion over opinion. It is hard to argue that, even having determined
what counts as a fact, that just because politics is the realm of the dispute of opinions
over facts, that opinions should take precedence over facts where facts themselves decide
an opinion. Perhaps Burke can claim that tradition, even if at odds with truth, can both
decide what is true and then ignore it, but then he is pressed to a noble lie position, that
politics must admit lying and then Burkes position comes much closer to Arendts and is
subject to the same problem.
It seems then that, given the nature of truth as objective, singular, eternal and
dominant, the only way to deny truths admittance to politics is by skeptical means,
cleaving rational from factual truths, which turn out to be only the most basic sensory
primitives; any criteria for dividing factual from rational truth in any other way than the
skeptical one then admits a level of fact open to skeptical criticism, that is ontological
ones, and thus differentiates by degree not kind and, should then a political system decide
which level of facts then should count, it cannot then easily claim that truth loses
dominion at whatever level it allows. But the dispute between rational and factual truth
and the problem of skepticism are not my issue. Indeed, what Plato, Aristotle, Burke,
Oakeshott and Arendt all have in common is the same belief in the nature of truth, but
what if this is the very thing which is up for dispute.
The 20th century has seen a hundred years of the problematizing of the notion of
truth. In order to respond to Humes skeptical problem,147 Kant cleaved the world of
knowledge from the world of truth, the phenomena from the noumena and forever barred
access to the latter.148 Indeed, we were re-inserted into Platos cave, but we now only had
access to the sun, no one, not even philosophers, could leave the cave. Nietzsche noticed
then that if appearance and reality are divided, but reality itself can never be known, then,
by which criteria could appearance be?149 Though, in a sense, we can logically presume
appearance, doing so empirically prevents us from ever knowing if something is
147

Hume, David, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding: A Letter from a Gentleman to His Friend
in Edinburgh, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1977.
148
Kant, Immanuel, Paul Guyer, and Allen W. Wood, Critique of Pure Reason, Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge UP, 1998.
149
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, and Michael Tanner, Twilight of the Idols; And, the Anti-Christ, London,
England: Penguin, 1990.

52
appearance or not. As such, the logical notion of appearance forecloses its empirical
validity and its empirical sanctity consists is us being able to find an alternative.
Thomas Kuhns theory of sociological and philosophical relativism in science was
definitely not the most radical problematization of science in the 20th century. In the
following chapters I will revisit Quines, Wittgensteins, Putnams, Kripkes and Kuhns
arguments about relativism, whether or not this was their intended result. In addition, I
will address the work of Richard Rorty, Paul Feyerabend, Jrgen Habermas, and other
analytic philosophers as well as continental philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and
Michel Foucault. I will be brief and explanatory, though elaborating far more than I did
above by actually fleshing out the arguments at hand. Before I move on the literature on
the sociology of science, such as Merton, as well as thinkers who have written on the
relationship between science and democracy, such as Jrgen Habermas again, Phillip
Kitcher, Steven Shapin, Sheila Jasanoff and Yaron Ezrahi, I want to establish, using
history as a skeleton, a positive argument emerging from the analytic philosophy of
science which demonstrates that science is a value-laden enterprise that primarily
operates without foundations, instead being embedded in a set of practices, which are
publically agreed upon and often un-articulated. I will then address thinkers who have
touched on the relationship between science and democracy and on democratic theory,
primarily as a form of fact gathering, consensus making and problem solving, but all of
this has gotten me way ahead of where I need to be.
None of the aforementioned thinkers decided to truly take the lid off of science
and metaphysics. We saw earlier within the analytic tradition a reformulation of the
problems of science and of metaphysics. Quine and Kuhn have not made it into political
theory as of yet.150 One thinker, who has sought to investigate both the nature of science
as metaphysics and epistemology and of politics as an extension of the processes thereof,
is Bruno Latour. Bruno Latour began his career with ethnography of a science
laboratory.151 In this work Latour attempted to exoticize science. He followed scientists
around and showed that the way they worked was by tacitly using knowledge, embodied
in their practices and built up in a community, to ritualistically as if they were a tribe, to
150

For a notable exception, see Steinberger, Peter J, The Concept of Political Judgment, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1993.
151
Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts.

53
dissect a part of reality, present at hand, to make inscriptions. Latour went into the
laboratory, to open up the black box and showed that the means by which the world is
replicated into facts consists in a series of translations, operations and manipulations.
Along the way, men and women argue, machines inscribe, people are cited and grants are
applied for. Indeed, the process by which a particular piece of reality gains the status of
fact through a laboratory starts to come off as the process by which a senator brokers a
deal: he must build on previous work, naturalize his opinions as that of public opinion,
bargain for appropriations and seal the deal through compromise which brings about
explicit programmatic action. Proof of policy is in the eating of the pragmatic pudding
and the success or failure of an initiative or bureaucracy mimics the acceptance of a fact.
Notice, those policies so taken for granted, as so obvious and natural evoke immense ire
if even called into question. In fact, the Democrats accusations of insanity should the
subject of privatizing social securitythe very cornerstone of the modern US welfare
stateemerge are cut from the same cloth from which Steven Pinker stitches accusations
of fraudulence when faced with the opacity of critical texts, like Foucault, which, dare
suggest, that, perhaps, his oh so noble will to truth is nothing but a not so veiled will to
power. The visceral reaction of those scientistic nerds in the atheistic cult to feminist
critiques of evolutionary psychology have little to do with the facticity of those specific
factsin fact, normally, they would be skeptical of that broad sweeping type of claim,
that razor of reductionism, taking with it charity and sexuality both but that, at stake, is
the facticity of facts in general, for the questionability of scientific dogma would be
directly inversely related to the extent to which feminist claims of hegemony accurately
describe reality
Ultimately, I find Latours constructivism to be very useful. My argument
follows naturally from the train of thought I wish to engage by beginning with the
analytic philosophy of science on the one hand, continental philosophy, political theory
and investigations of the relationship between science and democracy on the other (and
indeed, Latour wrote a book on this too,152 one which is far better than his most recent).
The argument which will flow from that line is that science is a form of epistemology,
that while accurate, emerges from a specific culture, cannot free itself from the fact/value
152

Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy.

54
distinction, must deal with co-equivalently coherent, correspondent and predictive
theories through extra-scientific means and shares in common with democracy a history
as well as a whole set of common ideals, namely consensus, perspective taking,
reversibility and repeatability, problem solving, testing, demonstration, frank open
discussion, freedom of speech and thought, equality of minds and persons, openness to
all, organized skepticism, a tradition of revising tradition, a respect for the beautiful, the
good and the truthful as matters of debate, interpretation and demonstration, all of which
finds its history in Aristotle, namely his views on phronesis/techne/episteme, and the
relationship between demonstration and discovery, as the main strain in the history of
philosophy against the technocracy of Plato, without sinking into a form of relativism and
subjectivism that is pernicious. Furthermore, from Latour, I will investigate and explore
his notion of the nature and culture divide, actor-network-theory as a collection of agents
who are human and non-human, the notion of all things being equally real but not all real
things being equally powerful, the subject/object division as emerging from the specific
conglomeration of actants at hand, the notion that a fact is a settled network which
manages to hide its history from view, the important of institutions, machines, tools, tacit
knowledge to both science and democracy and science and democracy as both political
and epistemic.
All of these notions demonstrate that epistemology and science come from a
particular set of biases and cultures, that objectivity is inter-subjectivity, that facts and
values and theories are all united and that therefore truth does not erode custom, except
when custom itself configures truth as to do so and vie versa, that truth is no more
compulsive over opinion than is a politically settled opinion and policy and that
democracy is a realm in which scientific disputes can be handled but also set aside. The
problem emerges that, when truth is problematized, it seems that again the openness of
opinion now allows back in the Flat Earthers and Intelligent Designers. But, I will argue,
the solution lies in the nature of the problem.
I hope to advance a solution to this conundrum by reformulating the problem in a
way Latour has not seriously considered. I shall argue that every set of epistemic claims
contains a set of ethical and sometimes political claims, as well as, an even stronger set of
ethical habits and rules. Similarly, all political and ethical claims commit one to a small

55
set of epistemic rules and a larger set of epistemic habits. For example, one would be
hard-pressed to find space for the freedom of thought required for science without
freedom of speech. Freedom of speech itself, however, is already premised upon
freedom of thought and upon diversity of opinion. Thus, every epistemic system allows
for only a certain number of possible political systems. In one sense this is trivially true,
as politics is concerned, in part, with what is and we decide how to decide what is
through epistemology. Furthermore, it would seem that every political system only
admits a range of possible epistemologies. I want to argue that there is a unique
relationship between the forms of democracy and the form of science, in theory and in
practice and that, far from being an accidental feature or descriptive account, this
provides us with a normative basis for making science, now maturely politicized, the
basis for epistemic decisions in democracy and furthermore, democracy the political
ideology to which scientists must adhere. One implication of this thesis is that, if one is
committed to democracy as a political system, then such a commitment ipso facto rules
out including religion, climate change skepticism, flat earth beliefs or creationism on an
equal footing. One may attempt to bring these ideas into the discourse, but absent
reasoned evidence, motivated skepticism, agreement across biases and perspective and
most importantly the data as provided by quantitative or scientifically qualitative analysis
in a laboratory or academic research setting, one may dismiss these ideas out of hand. In
democracy, neither can have an equal standing to science. This thus address the kind of
issues with which Latour is concerned.
In sum, I will be making the following claims: First, I have already argued that
the problem of truth and politics, though ancient, is reducible to the question of the
relationship of science to democracy. Second, science is dependent on a relative
epistemic and metaphysical frame. Science is theory dependent, inter-subjective, value
laden and resolved through extra scientific theory determination. Following Latour, there
is a way we discuss nature and culture, actors and networks and the production of
scientific facts, which makes them both produced and ahistorical. The opening up of
science to this kind of thinking makes it political and relative, but that does not mean that
all is fair game. Third, politics and epistemology are fundamentally related. Every
epistemic system entails a set of claims, norms, practices and habits, which constitute, in

56
the main, a limited range of ethical or political systems. Furthermore, every political
system entails a set of claims, norms, practice and habits, which constitute, in the main, a
limited range of epistemic (and perhaps metaphysical) systems. Fourth, science and
democracy mutually suggest one another. Both science and democracy entail consensus,
perspective taking, tolerance and openness, freedom of thought and speech, pragmatism,
constant rational reconstruction and reevaluation, and institutionalized skepticism based
on a system of trust and merit. Thus science is one of the epistemic systems appropriate
the family of democracies and democracy is one of the systems approach to science.
Fifth, the natural mutual relationship between science and democracy, coupled with
supplementary values and intuitions about both epistemology and politics, suggest that of
the range of possible systems, these are the best.
If it were possible given time and space considerations, I would make the stronger
claim that the internal needs of each system imply a necessary connection.153 Indeed, I
would even wish to push for the strongest claim, that metaphysical commitments prove
that science is always the means to an end of most epistemologies and democracy of most
politics, but that these systems, though the most open to any other systems than other
systems, are themselves only possibly if accepted all the way. Thus even without
foundations, most commitments lead to science and thus democracy and democracy and
thus science. Given the argument as outlined below, these arguments could be extracted,
but taking them is a fundamentally unique project, which though germane to the interests
of this one, and indeed part of my original plan, requires conceptual elaborations beyond
what is available here. That said, the commitments of these stronger claims are perhaps
good to keep implicitly in mind as one reads through my thesis.
The literature reveals that science and democracy face the same fundamental
problems. Both are committed to tolerance, to perspective taking, to unity through
difference, to truths that hold for many or all interests, to freedom of speech and thought,
to problem solving, to novelty, to equality, to prestige based on merit not on economic
value, to openness, to reversibility, to repeatability, to fact and to truth. Arguably, both

153

Brown, Mark B, Science in Democracy: Expertise, Institutions, and Representation, Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2009; Kitcher, Philip, Science, Truth, and Democracy, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001; and Kitcher,
Philip, Science in a Democratic Society, Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2011.

57
are committed to beauty, justice and other virtues as well, being new manifestations in a
long line of ideas.
Both face the same negations, namely intolerance, claims to universal truth and
rule, bias, power, interests gaining too much hold and defending themselves against those
who think they know everything, have moved beyond their utility or some other similar
claim. Both have been attacked as baseless, unable to deal with pragmatic reality, weak
and so on. Both can be co-opted by forces, which, using the nature of science and
democracy against them can take hold and rule. In science, this takes the form of an
institutionalized bias becoming a way of thinking to the exclusion of useful and true
novel idea, or ones, which, though wrong, productively shape the discourse toward a
greater truth. In democracy, this takes the form of totalitarianism, the specter against
which democracy constantly hides, for, if a totalitarian regime comes to power
democratically, only through non-democratic means can it be subdued. Indeed, if an
intellectual regime comes to power in science, most likely, nonscientific means will be
dethrone it, such as the deaths of the old guard of scientists or the emergence of scientists
backed by stronger interests.
Both face these problems precisely because of their novel formulation in which
everything is open to debate and all ideas must be considered for their persuasiveness,
utility and support in fact. This makes it seem as though these idea systems cannot
defend against persuasiveness but false or nondemocratic ideas, but this is not true. Both
can refer back to their original values and to each other for support and if this is not
enough to impel back the forces at hand, then hopefully rule of law or institutionalized
skepticism, often amounting to the same thing. Without the threat of totalitarianism and
untruth, though, democracy and science would have no other against which to define
them and through those antagonisms can internally clarify their true values.
Indeed, for science and democracy, unlike other ideologies, constantly clarifying
and reformulating values, core and otherwise, is fundamental to the project. This makes
them subject to pernicious causes or stupidity, for, in opening the process of clarification
to all, these can sneak in. That said it is hopefully with regard to explicit values, justified
true belief, specific facts and tests that the clarification occurs. This is their main hope
against pernicious causes and stupidity, the main vices of both science and democracy, of

58
which totalitarianism and institutionalized ignorance are but one instantiation. Science
must be open to all, in effect must be democratic and this is both its worst flaw and main
strength. Democracy similarly must be scientific, as it must test all possible ideas from a
range, and similarly this is its greatest flaw and biggest strength. As Holderlin argues,
where the destructive power lies, the saving power lies also, that the conditions of
possibility for science producing truth and democracy just power are the conditions under
which they can be hijacked by perniciousness and stupidity, but it is only through that,
their open-endedness and thus their opening up of the public world to action, as Arendt
would call it, freely motivated speech and deeds which can create unpredictable,
unforeseen, novel and historical results, that they succeed at all.
More accurately, both science and democracy are in the position of Quines
aforementioned Otto Neuraths Boat. When out at sea, and ones ship is sinking, one will
drown if they scrap the ship, but, if one rebuilds her ship slowly and steadily, one can
keep floating on. In the case of paradigm shifts and revolutions then, one will drown if
one throws out the ship, but this does not foreclose building a lifeboat or a new ship on
the deck of the old and casting it out to jump aboard, throwing off the old sinking hull,
for the safety and smallness of something new. Along the way, floating in the ocean, one
may gather new wood and supplies and though one will never set foot on dry land, the
possibility lies in the horizon. This is the position of both science and democracy,
rebuilding anew ones ship, sometimes requiring throwing it out to sea, for the prospect of
surviving in an ever expanding ocean, one which seems to grow the more one rebuilds his
or her ship. One can lose hope and jump off or sabotage the shipstupidity and
perniciousnessand one can live in a myth where one claims to his crew that they are
about to hit land, or, indeed, are living in an illusion and are actually already upon it, as
millennialism and new age mysticism both offer. But science and democracy are realists
and do not entertain the end of history. Science and democracy mean maturely and
squarely facing the eternity of being at sea with renewed courage and attempting to make
life on board the ship as peaceful and enlightening as possible. If one attempts to sink the
ship or jump off, first one tries to convince him otherwise, secondly he locks him in the
galley, but finally he throws him overboardand one need not believe in the death
penalty, or scientific excommunication for this to be the case, one may, within the

59
political sphere, simply stop listening to someone until they speak reasonably again, and
in science, not publish them until they produce good works.
We are, in our time, faced with truly apocalyptic dangers, such as pollution,
climate change, nuclear war, biochemical war, perpetual surveillance, peak oil, media
over-saturation, the practical elimination of privacy with social media and much more.
Similarly, we face the possibility of eliminating hunger, poverty, many diseases,
nonrenewable energy, depression, cancer, anxiety, war, loneliness and more. Thus faced
with the possibility of our destruction of our species, the only end of history worth
entertaining, we cannot afford the type of pernicious motivated skepticism, which
perniciously totalitarian, seeks to exploit the stupid and prevent us from acting on things
like climate change, that prevent us from seeing the truth in Darwinism. That many of
these problems are the result of the thoughtless use of science, the undemocratic (but
liberal and capitalist) use of science and the unscientific use of democracy (entertaining
climate skepticism and creationism) only enjoins us to this fact more. We should not thus
abandon science and democracy altogetherjust because dogmatists and the stupid misuse
truth do not mean it should be a part of politics and just because the intolerant and
dogmatic misuse politics, does not mean science can escape its political nature. We
should, instead, make our democracy fully scientific and our science fully democratic, as
is reasonable given the demarcation criteria, which allows some exclusion, at least
temporarily, from the spheres.
While in a utopian democracy, all are scientists and in a utopian world of science,
all are democrats, not everyone must be good willed or smart, only open, ready to let the
institutional mechanisms of the public sphere do their good through dialogue and ready to
do their duty of reflection and contemplation in the private sphere and willingness to
open the thoughts of others in public. As such, this theory is not elitist, as has been
charged of both science and democracy. So, the question of truth and politics, science and
democracy is ever more urgent, for ours is an era that require both reflection and action
and in which combination we are not yet sure. Let us hope then, that we are willing and
ready to accept the scientific nature of democracy and democratic nature of science
before it is too late. For truly it would be tragedy if truth took the form of species wide
annihilation in the name of skepticism and anti-dogmatism took the form of the complete

60
evisceration of science for the purposes of profit, in the name of practicality. The
question of the relationship of science to democracy is the question of how must we live
and act in an uncertain world, which, though sometimes taking abstract forms, is one of
the most important questions of all.154

A Note on Argumentation
This section is exactly as it is titled: a note. For purposes of substantive content,
this section can be safely skipped. Ostensibly, I much explain in some form why my
thesis is so long. In all honesty, I wish I could have written twice or only one fifth as
much. This section is the closest thing to a methodology section. Furthermore, I describe
what are, perhaps, my biases, in the interest of self-reflexivity.

Some of what I plan to do

My style of argumentation is slightly heterodox. I have embarked upon a
significant project which encompasses metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics,
aesthetics, sociology, history, philosophy both Continental and analytic, intellectual
history and political theory. If I had time I would illustrate my argument with case
studies and an empirical study, but alas I do not. I permanently oscillate between arguing
for premises and accepting them as taken for granted so that I may move on. Much of
my work appears to be intellectual history, but that is because it is the easiest way for me
to frame the conceptual planks necessary to build my rhetorical ark.
Problematically, many of the arguments here are based on disciplinary
boundaries. All of the arguments stemming from analytic philosophy I elucidate are
relatively taken for granted within a strain of analytic philosophy and are wholly
compatible with most of Continental philosophy. Furthermore, thinkers in the poststructuralist, Continental or post-modern vein will find my arguments totally amenable.
Additionally, my discussions of Latour and the sociology and history of science are also
taken for granted within those fields. Unfortunately though, with the exception of a few,
154

Callon, Michel, Pierre Lascoumes, and Yannick Barthe, Acting in an Uncertain World: An Essay on
Technical Democracy, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009.

61
these arguments are considered highly problematic in the fields of natural science and in
many traditions of analytic philosophy. Another way to think of this is that many of the
scholars working in these traditions either encounter my arguments and dismiss them
forthright, find them to be real challenges but conclude they are wrong, misunderstand
them and critique them as straw-men, see them as a threat to their disciplines and to truth
itself, or agree with some components either in theory or as empirical fact.155
Furthermore, many of the planks stand alone or tie together. Where they are meant to tie
together I have said so and where ideas end up being isomorphic or accidentally related
to or work as solutions to other problems, I have tried to say so. That said, then, this
argument proceeds in two ways, on the one hand, I would like to argue for many of my
points, but where possible, if the disagreement is indissolubleas some of these points
have been argued about for hundreds of yearsI ask you either accept it as a premise and
judge it internally to my argument, or to look at the arguments I provide that are related
to each other.
I have specifically framed this argument such that each chapter and within them
sections and sometimes sub-sections can both cohere together and stand alone. That is to
say, even if my philosophical reasons are disagreed with, for example, my pragmatic
reasons in the discussion of science and politics motivate acceptance of much of my
claim, even within a metaphysics hostile to mine, but, it is the case that within the
metaphysical cloth I have sewed from several traditions, I hope to illustrate that my
claims necessarily and very naturally emerge from the picture I provide and the success
of my arguments down the line should retroactively serve as pragmatic motivations for
accepting the previous arguments. Much like Heideggers Being and Time, Whiteheads
Process and Reality, or Wittgensteins Tractacus, all works up to whose quality I vainly
hope to match one day and certainly do not here, I have provided an argument that is both
cumulative and architectonic, but also horizontal, so to speak, where the arguments at
the end, could very well have been in the beginning, with the choice of architecture
155

For example, many scientists consider Kuhns discussion of paradigms to be empirically descriptive, but
his philosophical points wrong. Many thinkers appreciate Quine, Wittgenstein, and Putnams arguments
against the subject object division to have components that are very useful and mostly right but some
components that are wrong. The science wars erupted from those that thought relativism was tantamount to
Holocaust denial and an indictment of the sciences. Seeing as my project is to precisely defend the
importance of science and democracy, this charge should not be leveled at me.

62
dependent on the specific point I am trying to prove, namely that, facts and theories
internal to notions of truth, science, democracy, politics and so on motivate a
fundamental relationship between truth and politics, fully encapsulated by that of science
and democracy, which, upon examination of both the pragmatic, political and ethical
concerns as well as the metaphysical and epistemic, there are reasons to accept my final
argument, both as it stands on its own and as it emerges from the boat I have tried to
build.
Unfortunately, or perhaps, fortunately, I have chosen to take on an extremely
large subject matter in a very short time, which, by nature seeks to combine, reconstruct,
deconstruct and analyze several literatures, each with long extensive internal and external
debates. I cannot hope to resolve major questions here, within or between these systems,
despite the fact that I must necessarily gesture at these answers in order to proceed. As
such, much of this reads like a mixture of a thought experiment, wherein positions are
assumed, but also as several intersecting planks, many of which can hopefully stand on
their own but especially stand together. I personally am committed to very little of the
specificities that mar the debates. To wit, I am only and mostly committed to the thesis
that science and democracy should and do bear a very strong relationship together and for
reasons internal to both, to them together and external to them, we should endeavor to
accept science and democracy fundamentally, but, only with the important necessity of
infusing them both which a much needed pluralism, a move beyond foundationalism and
with less dogmatism. I believe there are positive normative and descriptive claims we
can make about the world and about human life, but I also am foundationally a relativist,
though my commitment to its weak or strong form is not particularly strong.
Furthermore, I encounter within this several metaphysical traditions, and while I am
sympathetic to more object-based ontologies which try to move beyond anthropocentrism
and the subject/object divide, the weight of those traditions which do not do so is too
great to both argue against them and to proffer my thesis, thus I have tried to walk a
middle road. I make my argument largely in correlationist fashion, but in a way I
hope would withstand its evisceration.

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What this thesis is not

Ultimately, I am trying to make an argument largely spanning the philosophy of
science and political theory, which, by its nature, must directly address questions of
metaphysics, epistemology, and politics. I am not writing a sociological or historical
thesis, though I draw significantly on those literatures as they relate to science. The
problem is that despite the importance of history in my argument, it is very difficult to
draw from specific histories or ethnographic works general conceptual points about the
topics of science and democracy, as those types of work tend to emphasize contingency,
specificity and interpretation. Ultimately, if I could write a highly synthetic history of
science and democracy using my theoretical mode and propose ideas of methodological
and substantive relevance for sociology that would be a dream come true.
I have, of course, benefited from those historical and methodological approaches
that surround my topic. For example, laboratory ethnographies such as Laboratory Life,
Velvet Revolution at the Synchrotron, and other similar exercises emphasize the
importance of political epistemology to the work of social scientific theorizing.
Similarly, works of medical anthropology such as Life Exposed and In Search of Respect,
emphasize the role of epistemology, politics and so forth in the creation of subjectivity,
the role that scientific, medical, humanistic and political knowledge play together. I
learned of the importance of language as a political and scientific actor in works such as
Scripting Addiction, which emphasizes the role of language in constituting and evaluating
objects of study and the subjectivities within that in medical, clinical and scientific
contexts, or in Science on Stage, which evaluates the role of language in the political
presentation of scientific advice to state actors.
Similarly, in works such as Creating the American Junkie, the role of politics in
constructing a valid object of scientific study was highly emphasized. This follows in a
long tradition that shows how politics intercedes in constructing valid objects of scientific
study all along. In Leviathan and the Air-Pump, Shapin and Schaeffer show how
mechanistic tools of scientific appraisal were created and disputed through political
means. In Objectivity, Daston and Galison trace the history of the notion of objectivity,
which was intimately tied to its opposite, subjectivity, which, Latour argues in other

64
places, was only asserted as a last ditch attempt to stave off the objectifying power of the
sciences, which, this history shows, was imputed to it only through active constructions,
as the fact that subjectivity and the self constituted science as much as science as such
constituted the self, demonstrates that science never shed the subjective ever. As such,
there is a mythos to science, which operates through symbols, meanings and culture,
which takes up and feeds back in to the scientific endeavor itself, as is shown in
Conjuring Science.
Focusing on a similar time of the origin of the science, The Scientific Revolution,
by Shapin, attempts to demonstrate the historicity of the creation of science. The early
practitioners were aware of this historicity and actively tried to use it and hide it, as
Shapin argues in A Social History of Truth, and Peter Dear argues in Revolutionizing the
Sciences. These histories show that there is a social, historical and cultural element that
generated the very possibility of science and that the development of science itself was a
contingent fact. But, perhaps less obvious, history itself plays a role in scientific
knowledge itself, not just causally but constitutively. As much as politics helped created
science, though, science helped created politics, as Roger Berkowitz attempts to show in
The Gift of Science, of which the argument is that modern jurisprudence broke off from
its classical other in an attempt to assimilate the scientific worldview. Similarly, Yaron
Ezrahi in The Descent of Icarus, and Imagining Democracies, shows how science played
a very important justificatory, ideological, causal and constitutive role in the development
of politics, much like it did in the very creation of the public sphere, as Habermas argues
in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.
That all technological systems are socio-technical systems and all technologies
encode values was made apparent to me in the work Mechanizing Proof, a history of
computing which demonstrates its political, military and ideological origins. Similarly,
Cybernetic Revolutionaries, and From Newspeak to Cyberspeak, show how cybernetics,
computation and the complexity sciences played a role in the possibility of novel political
forms such as socialism and communism. Adopting the idiom of complexity and
retroactively projecting it, Jon Agar, in Science in the Twentieth Century and Beyond,
address the socio-techno-scientific nature of the history of the last 100 years. If there is

65
any point at which one can separate science, technology, society, values, politics and so
forth, it is not obvious that this Archimedean point is present anywhere in recent memory.
Finally, the work Merchants of Doubt, illustrates the role that science and politics
played in each others business. The text demonstrates the role that politics and
economics played in enlisting scientists to generate politically motivated skepticism and
doubt, turning the very skepticism of science which is its advantage against the
possibility of believing scientific results when they start to conflict with business and
political interests, as with smoking, star wars, acid rain, climate change and so forth.
That this internal skepticism, the attempt to focus on apolitical science instead of values,
is a disservice at times to science, Joshua P. Howe shows in Behind the Curve. The
decision to be a-political is itself a political one with consequences for both scientific
knowledge and public policy, as the two, I emphasize can never be separated.
All of the aforementioned texts attempt, in sociology and history, to show how
adopting the idioms of technoscience, socio-technical systems, political epistemology and
so forth can generate extremely useful empirical results, thus justifying them as thoughts.
Much of the history and sociology of science and politics, it seems, cannot be explained
without adopting this idea. At the same time, these histories and sociologies do a good
amount of work to show how the internal facts of history and society suggest very much
that one must adopt these idioms and methodologies, quite independent of their
presumption in the beginning. At the risk of assuming what they are trying to prove,
these histories and sociologies provide the backdrop to my of what this thesis argues. At
some point, the methodological and practical implications of my argument will need to be
drawn out, as for me, a pragmatist, the proof of principle is in the pudding, which is eaten
at the tables of faculty lounges in history and social science departments.
As such, this thesis operates in four ways:
1. A conceptual argument that science and democracy bear a fundamental theoretical
relationship to one another
2. A conceptual argument that science and democracy solve each others conceptual
problems
3. An empirical argument that assuming the relationship between science and
democracy, politics and epistemology is productive of good empirical research
and is thus validated

66
4. An empirical argument that the evidence surrounding science and democracy
supports the relationship between politics and epistemology.
In a sense then, the third point will hopefully be validated in the course of work just
through citation. The fourth point is something I have addressed elsewhere in empirical
studies which have supported my hypothesis, but barring that, is a hypothesis, with
respect to the readers, which needs to be tested and thus cannot be said to be true or false
in the course of this thought experiment. The first and second are related and form the
bulk of the thesis, though the third and fourth are mobilized in their defense. As such,
then, with respect to the weakest aspect of my argument, there are ostensibly four ways I
can be right and each way does not depend on the others, though provides evidence for
them. For the stronger parts of my argument, this still obtains, though because the
stronger arguments are primarily conceptual, if they are proven they support the above
four hypotheses, but the above four under determine them.

Chapter 2: Science in the Public Sphere,

Democracy in the Laboratory
Recap
Recapping, there has been a long debate in Western philosophy about the proper
relationship of truth to politics. The classic formulation often asked about the role
philosophers or religious figures should play. Starting with Burke, it more explicitly
became about the role of rational truth as relevant to philosophy, which, as a criterion,
either admits a skeptical solution, or a solution based in pluralism as with Arendt, or in
tradition as with Burke and Oakeshott. The pluralist and traditional account cannot seem
to account for truth correctly and must recourse to the skeptical account, which, even if
true still does not explain why if a political system decides that, ceteris paribus, a class of
truths is admissible, they should not be followed.
The modern debate is largely around the role of science in a democracy and often
takes the form of whether or not scientists themselves should rule. This problem, I argue,
once addressed, accounts for all of the aspects of the original one of truth and politics.
Those who argue about the relationship of science and democracy, before the last fifty
years or so, largely retraced the steps of the classic debate. The problem lies in the fact
that most scholars leave the nature of truth unquestioned and thus are forced into the
same positions as the classics. Even with a more nuanced theory of truth, which accounts
for social, contextual, practical, political and other forces in producing truth, the problem
remains, though the tools for solving it inhere in the new formulation of the problem
itself.
It would seem that all along, we were deceived about what we were doing. We
did not have the truth about the truth. Surely it could not be that there were no realm of
appearance? That would nearly impossible. The realm of appearance revealed itself to
be a form of reality itself and reality on good terms with appearance, rather than the
enemies we were lead to believe they are.

68
This chapter is primarily concerned with my second claim that science is
dependent on a relative epistemic and metaphysical frame. Science is theory dependent,
intersubjective, value laden and resolved through extra scientific theory determination.
Following Latour, there is a way we discuss nature and culture, actors and networks and
the production of scientific facts that makes them both produced and ahistorical. The
opening up science to this kind of thinking makes it political and relative, but that does
not mean that all is fair game.

Section I: Truth. What Do We Mean by it?

It will be of use to outline the basic theories of truth, all of which provide analytic
clues to the problem at hand.156 There are four main theories of truth: correspondence,
coherence, practice and authority.
Correspondence is the theory that true things correspond to reality. Truth is
therefore a property of propositions. Correspondence theory states that if one has a set of
facts X and a proposition P(X), P(X) is true if X. Thus truth is a property of statements,
this being the thesis of Ludwig Wittgenstein in the Tractacus Logico-philosophicus,
where he proposed that the world itself is composed of facts, at least inasmuch as it has
any relevance for humankind, and that, there is a perfectly logical language which is
reducible to the full set of propositions about the world. And this language, in the manner
of good truth, admits no other possibility, and being in language forecloses that which
cannot be said: whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.157
Coherence is the theory that true things, propositions or other sorts of beliefs,
must be compatible or follow from our previous beliefs about the world and the subject
matter at hand. If a fact coheres with ones other repertoire of facts, or one means of
looking at the world, it can be said to be true, especially if it follows from ones previous
beliefs. If a fact does not cohere, it either must be rejected, or the fact with which it does

156

See Lynch, In Praise of Reason, Chapters 3, 5, 9, 14, 20, and 32.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Bertrand Russell, and Charles Kay Ogden, Tractacus Logico-philosophicus,
London: Routledge, 1992.

157

69
not cohere must be. If a fact contradicts ones theoretical frame, this means that, strictly
speaking, one cannot admit the existence of this fact,158 or one must revise ones
theoretical frame, in a sense adopting a new one.
Practice theories divide into two subgroups: technological and practical.
Technological theories of truth state that something is true if we can build a machine or
simulation, which expresses the true fact at hand. A practice theory of truth argues that
truths are guides to action and that something is true if we can use it to achieve a goal.
As such, the technological theory is a subgroup of this, though for the most part they are
analytically distinct, because practice can be expressed in the lab, in the real world, on
a mathematics problem set and more. For example, we can say that water turns into steam
at boiling temperature because that allows us to use a thermometer and a stove to boil the
water at said temperature.
Authority theories argue that truth derives from authority, which itself either
derives from a person, text, or tradition on the one hand159 or a community on the other.
The communal theory of truth states something is true if everyone agrees on it. That a
dollar bill maintains its value is because of this principle. This takes many forms, either
of revelation, wherein something is true because God, the ultimate authority figure, or
one of his prophets proclaims something to be truethe Pope is such a person for
Catholicsbut it also takes a range of other forms, from a fathers admonition that its true
because he says it is answering a childs challenge with a restatement of the question
begged by the presumptuous father assuming he can command such an important human
as the child in question. Hilary Putnam gives an accepted theory of authority, wherein
societally delegated authorities causally baptize terms and thus given them their

158

This peculiarity of debates about epistemology and ontology is the subject of Quines On What There
Is in Quine, W. V. O. From a Logical Point of View, 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999.
159
A more secular interpretation, so to speak is I must have a basic trust in my epistemic faculties and a
particular trust in the beliefs I form when I am conscientiousConsistence requires me to have the same
basic trust in the epistemic faculties of all other persons whose general similarity to me I come to believe
when I am conscientiousI owe the same particular trust in the beliefs of others who conscientiousness I
conscientiously discover. Zagzebski, Linda Trinkaus, Epistemic Authority: A Theory of Trust, Authority,
and Autonomy in Belief, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012, 160.

70
meaning160 which, in the form of rigid designators,161 obtains regardless of the underlying
content beneath it.
Many of these truths are compatible with one another and some may even
presume or imply the others. Surely, someone somewhere has conceived of other
theories of truth, but those do not concern us unless they a discernible real effect on the
discursive surrounding truth.
These theories of truth have been around since Plato and Aristotle in one form or
another. They largely stay with us and in common parlance, we jump between them to
justify our statements when we engage in meta-semantic discourse. I hope to
problematize these theories of truth and though I will retain some aspects of each of the
theories at hand, political theory would benefit from a more varied notion of truth.

A Brief Excursus on Truths Definition and Possible Replacement

Some, such as Kevin Scharp,162 think we should abandon truth all together.
Because of the sophistication of this approach, it highlights key features of truth and will
allow me to temporarily and liminally define truth. That said, this section, while
providing a nice counterbalance to the discussion above, may be safely skipped by those
who care less about the specific internal debates of analytic philosophy about truth.
Scharp suggests we replace truth with two other concepts: Ascending truth is like
truth in that the inference from the declarative sentence p to p is ascending true is valid.
It differs from truth in that the inference p is ascending true to p is not always valid
(although it is valid in a majority of sentences). Descending truth is like truth in that the
inference p is descending true to p is valid for any declarative sentence. However, it
differs from truth in that the inference from p to p is descending true is not always valid
(although, again, it is valid for the vast majority of sentences.
I like this approach as it derives from the same sort of conceptual analysis and
rational reconstruction I am using and furthermore purports to deal with unhappy

160

Meaning of Meaning, in Putnam, Hilary, Mind, Language, and Reality, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP,
1975.
161
Kripke, Saul A, Naming and Necessity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1980.
162
Scharp, Kevin, Replacing Truth, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013.

71
paradoxes, such as the liars paradox (when a Cretan utters all Cretans are liars).163
Replacing Truth offers a brilliant discussion of truth I cant hope to match. He defines
Correspondence: a bearer is true iff it corresponds to reality. Coherence: a bearer is
true iff it coheres with other bearers, Pragmatic: a bearer is true iff it is prudent to have
the belief associated with that truth bearer, and Epistemic: a bearer is true iff it would
be justified for an ideal rational agent in ideal rational circumstances, while I do not
directly address this definition, it certainly highlights key features of the facts of giving
reasons central to both science and democracy. He adds, Deflationary: truth is not
substantial and has no analysis. Instead, truth predicates play an important expressive role
in our linguistic practice. Most deflationists also think that a principle, known as schema
T, is central to philosophical explanation of truth: b is true iff X. In this schema b is a
name or description of a truth-bearer and X is a schematic sentential variableit serves
as a placeholder for a sentence that translates the content of b into the language used to
formulate Schema TDeflationists argue truth should have no explanatory role
whatsoever.164
Deflationists fall into five categories alethic expressivism in which truth claims
express the commitment of the speaker, prosententialism wherein truth claims are
defined by the pragmatics and contexts of utterances which do not claim truth claims,
disquotationalism in which truth claims are described by the sentences comprising the
truth schema, minimalism, in which truth claims are described by the propositions
inhering in the truth schema, and inferentialism wherein a supplementary rule makes p
follow from p is true and vice versa (14), Scharp also identifies the modest account
which is that for all x, x is true if and only if there is a bindable sentential variable, such
that x is equivalent to that bindable sentential variable and x is equivalent to a sentence
which can stand in for that bindable sentential variable.

163

For a full treatment of such paradoxes, traditionally thought of as limits to truth and science, see
Yanofsky, The Outer Limits of Reason, which lists several unsolvable problems classed into language
problems like the liars paradox, philosophical problems like Zenos paradox, infinity puzzles such as in set
theory, computational complexities like P and NP, computing impossibilities like the halting problem,
scientific limitations like quantum vs. relativity, metascientific problems like the nature of math, and
mathematical obstructions like logic.
164
Ibid, 13.

72
Contrasting these theories, a schematic sentential variable serves as a placeholder
for another sentence, which can translate the contents of the variable, and the sentence
surrounding it, whereas a binding sentential variable is one, which can refer to an object
and be translated quite independently of a schema. (14) There are pluralist conceptions
of truth that the property of being true differs from discourse to discourse, either wherein
truth predicates signify different properties in different discourses i.e. that truth itself
varies from linguistic context to context (14) or that there is only property of being true,
but it can be instantiated by different underlying properties(15) i.e. that the truth of a
sentence is context-sensitive, but truth itself is not.
Finally the Davidsonian view that the theory of truth is necessarily axiomatic
but has an empirical interpretation as part of the agents beliefs, desires and meanings
(15). Suffice it to say, in my account, correspondence, coherence, pragmatics, epistemic
and authority all capture different aspects of what we mean by the word truth. I find the
definitions of pluralist and deflationist to be amenable to what he calls Davidsonian,
which I find to be an extension of the Quinean theory of truth motivated by the differentaspect theory I state below.
I propose here a very tendentious and temporary theory of truth, which itself
contains many problems and is highly subject to revision. There are frameworks
consisting in concepts, sentences and/or their conjunction and/or their coequivalence. An
agent has interests and goals, namely those things that are appropriate, or beneficial for
the person to do and conscious formulations of what the person conceives to be their
interests, whether they are or are not. Conceptual systems define what entities are in the
world, the positing of the world itself (though it is a posit and presupposition) and how to
carve up the world. Following from this then are set of sentences, which describe this
conceptual system and the world. A conceptual systems ability to handle truth claims
entails coherence. Coherence can be thought of as an all or nothing affair, or itself
always relative to a frame, meaning that, a system can be relatively coherent if it can subdivided into coherent subsections, and can be measured as coherent to the extent to which
those sub-systems can be aggregated into more coherent systems. A persons conceptual
system derives semantic validity from the ability of the agent to use the sentences
relevant to that system in a public space, and among those designated by the linguistic

73
division of labor, whether that be defined as any sufficiently felicitous rational or
capable agent, in a manner deemed to be correct, or to cohere or accord with a rule,
which itself is the concretized practice and discourse surrounding that word within the
relevant tradition of conceptual inheritance and current usage. Correct usage itself is
always relative to a frame and the relevant interests, fine-grained nature of usage and
the degree to which one wants to impress the right linguistic division of labor member.
Thus, if a sentence is used correctly it will correspond or be the ground of
correspondence for sentences meant to accord with those suggested and contained within
the individual agent and its relevant community of uses conceptual system. A
community justifies it conceptual system with reasons, which is to say, relevant to some
interest, even if that interest is objectively describing reality, instruction in the right
sentences and conceptual apparatuses allows a person to use a practice or build a machine
achieving the relevant goal over the relevant set of entities to which it is meant to apply.
As such, truth is an empirical theory of agents and communities. Truth can therefore be
understood as deflationary, as a way to make meaningful the use of certain words and
practices, or as something inhering in reality itself, but this itself will be defined by the
relevant conceptual system in its attempts to empirically accord with reality pendant that
basal definition of truth.

Section II: Analytic Philosophy and the Problem of

Truth
Thomas Kuhn proffered the famous argument that science proceeds in two
phases, that of normal and revolutionary science. Science consists in paradigms, which
are, in turn, meta-theories, guiding assumptions and ideal models and these paradigm
guide, direct and constrain research. Though I find Kuhns argument plausible, I believe
it requires the philosophical work of W.V. O. Quine to make sense. Following from
Kuhns notions about scientific revolution comes Latours theses about the nature of the
construction of scientific facts. In the sections, which follow, I will detail relevant

74
analytic philosophical conceptions of truth, leading up to a discussion of Kuhn. In the
section which follows I will detail Latours ideas and how they operate in relation to the
analytic philosophical ideas outlined here.

Subsection A: Quine and the Problem of Truth

Quines main argument of relevance here is his thesis that all facts are theory
laden. This goes hand in hand with his arguments about ontological relativity, the thesis
that statements are only true relative to a frame. Furthermore, Quine argues that analytic
statements of a tautological self-supporting nature and synthetic-empirical statements are
one in the same. Following from this, Quine argues that facts underdetermine theories,
that is, while the number of theories about facts is constrained by not being contradictory,
there is a sense in which there are infinitely many facts. Coupled with this is his theory
of radical translation, that the attempt to mean something by pointing to reality is not
possible, as disputes of meaning are disputes about representing reality itself. These
theories suggest, in turn, that the fact-value dichotomy is suspect and that theories must
be settled by extra-scientific means.
One constructs a conceptual scheme based on primary sense perceptions. Ones
conceptual scheme must be, or should be, able to accommodate all those facts of sensedata one acquires, as well as other higher order facts. To say that there is something of
some type is to say that it is possible for that type of thing to exist.165
The central thesis of Ontological Relativity is what Quine calls
the double relativity involved in all talk about what ontology a
theory is committed to or what entities the terms in a theory refer to.
According to Quine. The ontological import of a theory can be
determined only relative to some other theory or language (itself
taken at face value) and relative to some choice of how to translate
or interpret the former in the terms of the latter. 166

165
166

Quine, From a Logical Point of View.

Romanos, George D, Quine and Analytic Philosophy, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983, 43.

75
Quine illustrates this with a dispute167 about ontology. If McX maintains there is
something which I maintain there is not [then] McX can quite consistently with his own
point of view, describe our difference of opinion by saying that I refuse to acknowledge
certain entities[but when I]try to formulate out difference of opinion, on the other
hand, I seem to be in a predicament. I cannot admit that there are things which McX
countenances that I do not, for in admitting such that there are such things I should be
contradicting my own rejection of the term.168
Intimately tied up with this argument is the notion that analytic and synthetic
statements are not fundamentally different. Quine argues that those who argue for the
difference merely suppose what they are trying to prove. Why is it that a class of facts,
which is true by nature of their formulation, is fundamentally different from things,
which are true as a result of sense-experience? If our system is to say that given a set of
facts, a certain law follows, then it is the case that this law must be the case and thus has
the same status within our conceptual scheme as analytic facts, as facts are always given
with reference to theories anyway.169
Quine, somewhat defiantly states, Physical objects are only posits[and] [t]he
abstract entitles which are the substance of mathematicsultimately classes and classes of
classes and so onare another posit in the same spirit. Epistemologically these are myths
on the same footing withgods, neither better nor worse except for difference in the
degree to which they expedite our dealings with sense experiences.170 That is to say, the
correspondence of a statement depends on an analytic frame, which itself must be
adjudicated by the other theories of truth mentioned, coherence, practice and authority, or
with reference to extra-scientific criteria, par simplicter.
Facts, thus, underdetermine theories. Given any set of finite facts, one can hyper
specify the condition of each, without laws even necessary to produce the given state of
affairs and on the other hand, even given a non deflated theory of truth, one can conjunct
any true statement with any number of statements and make it true. Even if one believes
in the theory of evolution as a mechanism to explain life and the current doctrines of
167

Quine, From a Logical Point of View.

Ibid, 1.
169
Ibid, 37.
170
Ibid, 45.
168

76
physics to accurately depict reality, one can conjunct the complete set of physical laws
and biological laws with the statement God created the earth in seven days, with man on
the 6th and God rested on the 7th and the word of the bible is literally true, but God, in
order to test mans faith created the universe such that it would appear to have been
produced by following the specific laws of physics as conceived today and thus those
laws will always give accurate predictions of reality though, they are, strictly speaking
false. The problem of induction becomes a problem with reality itself. Now, of course,
one could say this is preposterous and say that the extra conditions are not relevant to the
specific truth at hand, but, if an alternate hypothesis is true, how could it not be relevant?
That is not even the most threatening part: even if the irrelevance hypothesis is true,
ostensibly Occams razor, then simplicity and relevance is a criteria by which we judge
something to be true, but simplicity and relevance are normative claims, are subjective
and non-verifiable and are about the statement of fact, not that to which the fact
corresponds, which is what people typically think of as truth. In sum, there is a P1(X),
P2(X), P3(X) which isnt true if X as normally believed but if X and if Pn(X) is more
simple than Py/=n(X). I will go into this problem in far greater depth later, but it is
sufficient to state its truth in this rudimentary form.
Given anything one can select out of the universe to point to and say something
about it, one has opened oneself up to an infinite number of referents without having has
somehow pre-specified what it is to which one is referring, his famous example being,
that upon meeting a tribesman, he points to a rabbit and says gavagai which
presumably could mean rabbit or rabbit jumping or white or temporal instance of
a rabbit or even that specific rabbit. He could keep using gavagai, and this could clarify
the word potentially, in almost a Saussurean fashion, where one learns a meaning by what
it is not, but one can only rule out a finite number of things at a time and the problem of
translation remains.171 Given that all facts are theory dependent, all facts of the same
order being derived from observed instances in reality and from the fact that absent a
dictionary providing translation, an agreed upon guide book which reveals the
homologies between languages, an infinite number of referents is possible. Given any

171

Ibid, 45.

77
finite set of facts, or of sense data, there are an infinite number of true statements that can
be made, which, in some sense, can be mutually inconsistent.
That the laws of the universe can be any way, means that given any state of affairs
there is some laws which can be changed and made to result in the same thing, and the
epistemic problem of not being able to derive causality from within the world itself (as it
already requires a theory of causality, itself non-determinable somewhere along the
chain, even if that chain is an infinite regress) becomes a metaphysical problem about the
nature of things. Just as in Wittgensteins argument against private language, that the
lack of possible self-knowledge itself poses a problem about the actual meaning of the
word used172 by way of the theory used to produce it. Any set of facts is itself derived
from theories, which themselves can only be determined with reference to the empirical
world, itself determined by theories. At base, that the substratum can be any possible
way, means that one has never escaped the realm of theory to touch upon reality itself:
one cannot bring language to correspond with reality, for language only corresponds to a
reality which itself has been determined to be possible by a set of language rules which
describe the correspondence to reality. In sum, language only ever corresponds to itself
and can do so in an infinite number of ways.173
Quine solved this problem by raising what he claimed was Otto Neuraths
metaphor of a boat at sea, When out at sea, and ones ship is sinking, one will drown if
they scrap the ship, but, if one rebuilds her ship slowly and steadily, one can keep
floating on. In the case of paradigm shifts and revolutions then, one will drown if one
throws out the ship, but this does not foreclose building a lifeboat or a new ship on the
deck of the old and casting it out to jump aboard, throwing off the old sinking hull, for
the safety and smallness of something new. Along the way, floating in the ocean, one
may gather new wood and supplies and though one will never set foot on dry land, the
possibility lies in the horizon. This is the position of both science and democracy,
rebuilding anew ones ship, sometimes requiring throwing it out to sea, for the prospect of

172

Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language; and Wittgenstein, Ludwig, and G. E. M.
Anscombe, Philosophical Investigations, New York: Macmillan, 1953.
173
Rorty, Richard, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1979; Rorty,
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity and Rorty, Richard, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge UP, 1991b.

78
surviving in an ever expanding ocean, one which seems to grow the more one rebuilds his
or her ship.
Finally, one of the most important consequences of Quines theories is the
collapse of the fact/value distinction:
Quine suggests that the whole idea of classifying every statement
including the statements of pure mathematics as factual or
conventional was a hopeless muddle. But if the whole idea that
there is a clear notion of fact collapsed with the hopelessly
restrictive empiricist picture that gave rise to it, what happens to the
fact/value dichotomy? As the economist-philosopher Vivian Walsh
has written to borrow and adapt Quines vivid image, if a theory
may be black with fact and white with convention, it might well (as
far as logical empiricism could tell) be red with values. Since for
them confirmation or falsification had to be a property of a theory as
a whole, they had no way of unraveling the whole cloth.
Thus Walshmade the point that after[the] abandonment of the
picture of factual sentences as individually capable of
confrontation with sense experienceand Quines critique of the
logical positivists picture of what they called the language of
science as neatly divided into a factual part and an analytic part,
the whole argument for the classical fact/value dichotomy was in
ruins and that, as far as logical empiricism could tell science might
presuppose values as well as experiences and convention. It is
quite clear that does presuppose valuesit presupposes epistemic
values.
In the philosophy of science, what this point of view implied is
that normative judgments are essential to the practice of science
itselfJudgments of coherence, plausibility, reasonableness,
simplicity, and of what Dirac famously called the beauty of the
hypothesis, are all normative judgmentsin the case of
reasoning.174
That a form of pragmatism which suggests the mutuality of judgments of fact and
value follows from this sort of thinking and bolsters the points I wish to make about the
inextricability of ethics and thus politics and epistemology later in this thesis. I will now
continue on to other philosophers who have made points similar to or the same as Quine,
but derived from a different method.
174

Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact/value Dichotomy and Other Essays, 30-31, citing Morton White,
Toward Reunion in Philosophy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1956. Not cited here.

79

Subsection B: Rules, Meanings, the External World and Names

This section outlines the views of Wittgenstein on rules and private language.175 I
follow with Peirces account of epistemologies relevance to establishing the existence of
the outside world. As I rely on Kripke for my analysis of Wittgenstein, I will mention his
theory of rigid designators at the end in line with Putnams theory of meaning.
The first is the argument that to understand anything like description and privacy,
one must understand practice and must be signified within a given community. Ludwig
Wittgenstein enjoins us to attempt to conceive of following a rule. It so happens that no
course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be
made out to accord with the ruleif everything can be made out to accord with the rule,
then it can also be made out to conflict with it176 and furthermore, given the limits of our
epistemic bounds, we can never know if we were duped without our knowing into
following this or that rule. Hence, Wittgenstein writes, obeying a rule is a practice.
And to think one is obeying a rule is not to obey a rule. Hence it is not possible to obey a
rule privately: otherwise thinking one was obeying a rule would be the same as obeying
it.177 So as it is with rules, it is with language. As Kripke points out outward criteria for
an inner process are circumstances, observable in the behavior of an individual, which,
when present would lead others to agree with his avowals. If the individual generally
makes his avowals under the right circumstances, others will say of him that he has
mastered the right expression.178 It is impossible to follow a rule unless there is a
community that agrees that each instance you perform of the rule accords with the rule, or
that it seems at least as though you, not randomly, are producing behavior which accords
with the rule frequently enough. There are no rules without communities. These rules
dont take power because of the opinions of the community but because of
175

This is adapted from an essay I wrote on Heidegger for a class on existentialism my sophomore year. In
it, I argued that Heidegger allows us to abandon the subject/object division.
176
From Wittgenstein and Anscombe, Philosophical Investigations, but cited in Kripke, Wittgenstein on
Rules and Private Language, 81e. Much of my reading of Wittgenstein is indebted to Kripke. This can be
thought of something like Quines ontological relativity thesis, wherein if a statement P(x) is true iff x,
there are an infinite number of P(x) which accurately describe x, if accurately describe x is to mean say
what happened given a set of, or network of beliefs about what x could be.
177
Proposition 202, 81e, from Wittgenstein and Anscombe, Philosophical Investigations, but cited in
Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language.
178
Ibid, 100.

80
agreementin forms of life,179 those things which Heidegger would call the
equipmental networks of the world, those shared nebulous webs of practices and
discourse which allow one to act meaningfully.
Wittgenstein further enjoins us to imagine a private language in which a person
could write down or give vocal expression to his inner experiences180 wherein
individual words of this language are to refer to what can only be known to the person
speaking; to his immediate private sensations. So another person cannot understand the
language.181 The trick comes in play, in that, while it is certainly conceivable that a
person constructs such a system of significations, it is never possible for the person to
accurately use it. Because the subject using the language can always be following a
different set of rules and significations than those of which he is aware, it cannot be said
that there is any meaningful content to his language; absent of an external community and
set of practices to justify and ground his assertions and conceptualizations they carry no
weight whatsoever. All this may seem to suggest is that perhaps the subjectivity of the
subject is only meaningfully understood or known about given an external set of criteria
for its discussion, but that does not whisk away the experience itself. If experience,
however, is to be conceived of as beliefs, desires, goals and so on, in the form of knowthat, propositional discourse, then experience takes on an explicitly linguistic edge, which
forces it to be subject to the same limitations of rule following, and as such, makes it
unintelligible or meaningless without an outside criteria.
We have no power of self-reflection or self-knowledge as individual subjects.
Charles Sanders Peirce claims that we have no intuitive power of distinguishing an
intuition from a cognition determined by others,182 as in, because we only ever have
access to the cognition as it immediately appears to us, there is no sense in which one can
distinguish its causal origin. Did the sensation arise from a more primordial sensation or
from an exterior vantage point? Because of this, there is never any ability to distinguish
whether or not cognition is genuinely causally internal, and that is to say, there is no
internal criterion inherent in thought that allows us to understand a thought as genuinely
179

Ibid, 88e.
Ibid, 88e.
181
Ibid, 89e.
182
Peirce, Charles S., Writings of Charles S. Peirce, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press, 1982, 200.
180

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ours. One can only ever reason about internal cognitions based on external evidence
because internal demarcating criteria are sorely lacking. It follows from this that all
understanding of the self via self-consciousness is always ultimately understanding via
other-consciousness. Whether we reason about ourselves on the basis of behavior,
distinction, language or any other criteria, we are reasoning on the basis of externality
and ultimately on practice. This perhaps, it seems, does not pose a metaphysical rejoinder
to the traditional notion of the subject, but it does, one must admit, prevent any real
epistemic discussion of it, as such. While it is certainly possible that something like an
individual subject with ineffable experience exists, it is meaningless to talk about it; the
only way to ever reason about such a subject is via the very external criteria and
explicable actions that one wishes to explain away.
From these above analyses, we thus can assume the following. A rule cannot be
followed except by reference to publically accepted criteria for doing so. Rules obtain
over practices. Communities define these rules. Wittgenstein posited that language
exists in language games,183 that is, publically accepted notions and functions of use.
Meaning is always relative to a language frame. That Wittgenstein and Quine bear a
relationship together has been noted.184 In fact, Richard Rorty expands upon Quines
notion of under-determination and theory-ladenness and Wittgensteins notion of rules,
private language and meaning to argue that all truth is relative to a linguistic frame, a
language game.185 Though, as both Wittgenstein and Quine are wont to point out,
language exists as an extension of practice186 and though it is the case that rules only
make sense when discursively made sense of in public, language itself similarly derives
from use.
From whose use though, is still a question. Much of the critical discourse
surrounding truth likes to take the more spectacular of those theories of truth and show
that they are really another. The argument from authority in Putnams case is exactly
such an attempt, showing that meaning is external to the human head, and that there is a
sense in which a proposition corresponds to reality, but it does so by virtue of the fact that
183

Wittgenstein and Anscombe, Philosophical Investigations; and Wittgenstein, Ludwig, G. H. Von

Wright, and G. E. M. Anscombe, On Certainty, New York: J. & J. Harper, 1969.
184
Arrington, Robert L., and Hans-Johann Glock, Wittgenstein and Quine, London: Routledge, 1996.
185
Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature; and Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity.
186
Wittgenstein and Quine and Glock, Wittgenstein and Quine, 184.

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someone said it does. Regardless of what is then determined about the underlying
properties of it, that fact remains true because of that baptism, in sum correspondence is
tethered to claims about authority, not the other way around. In other words, this is more
a theory of meaning than truth, as Putnam argues that the meaning of a word derives from
a socially ascribed leader, which states it to be such, such as scientists.187 Putnam
famously posits his Twin Earth thought experiment. Putnam posits a world that is
exactly similar to the one in which we currently live, except that water, rather than being
composed of H2O is composed of a chemical called XYZ, though in all other respects is
like water. From the perspective of practice, the water is identical and coherence cannot
solve this problem without reference to very criteria for which I am searching. Suffice it
to say, the meaning of water does not depend on ones head, but on the causal history of
the naming of the water. That is to say, whether or not a proposition corresponds to
reality depends on the causal history of the name involved. Furthermore, the existence of
the name is provided for by a community of scientists delegated the role of establishing
what water is by the community. As such, the meaning of water and thus the truth of
propositions concerning water derives from a specific causal history produced in the
naming of the object at hand, by an authority which derives its role from the community
at large delegating that function to it and by virtue of this work, the fact that in practice
and by technical means, XYZ and H2O function the same, that they correspond to the
same thing, or that they are the same or different coheres with our previous assumptions,
depends on its history.
This theory is extended in Naming and Necessity by Saul Kripke who argues
that once a name is applied to an object, it becomes a rigid designator and thus forth, all

Putnam, Hilary, "Meaning and Reference," Journal of Philosophy 70, (1973): 699-711; and
Putnam, Mind, Language, and Reality.

187

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instantiations of that object meaning that do not correspond to the original are subscripted
versions of the original.188
1. To every name or designating expression 'X', there corresponds a cluster of
properties, namely the family of those properties such that A believes 'X'.
2. One of the properties, or some conjointly, are believed by A to pick out some
individual uniquely.
3. If most, or a weighted most, of the 's are satisfied by one unique object y,
then y is the referent of 'X'.
4. If the vote yields no unique object, 'X' does not refer.
5. The statement, 'If X exists, then X has most of the 's' is known a priori by the
speaker.
6. The statement, 'If X exists, then X has most of the 's' expresses a necessary truth
(in the idiolect of the speaker).
(C) For any successful theory, the account must not be circular. The properties
which are used in the vote must not themselves involve the notion of reference in
such a way that it is ultimately impossible to eliminate.189

Subsection C: Logic, Know How, Knowledge and Interests

Recapping and Theories of Math and Logic
To recap what has been said in simple terms, we have encountered several
hypotheses about truth and language. The first is that facts and sense-experience
underdetermine the semantic possibilities of sentences about them. Though perhaps the
elementary facts here disallow some formulations, they ostensibly allow an infinite kind,
188

Kripke and Putnams theory, by many interpretations, endorses what Helen Beebee calls natural kind
essentialism, the view that that which natural kinds exist is a full mind and theory independent matter,
that natural kinds have intrinsic essences, and that natural kinds have a hierarchical structure (Beebee
in Mumford, Stephen, and Matthew Tugby, Metaphysics and Science, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013, 141).
That this essay is called How to carve nature at its joints without abandoning Kripke-Putnam semantics,
illustrates the fact that this author finds particularly onerous that In additionand contrary to Putnams
original intentionsKripke-Putnam semantics are compatible with Kuhnian relativism, and hence does not
entail a mind or theory-independent theory of natural kinds (Ibid, 142). Unfortunately, that a theory is
compatible with relevance is considered its refutation and the basis of a need for more work. The Kripke
Putnam theory apparently endorses a minimalist essentialism that does not do the work of natural kind
essentialism. But, I would ask, are we not precisely in the business of establishing the validity of natural
kind essentialism? And then asking whether an argument, which is compatible with a relativistic argument,
needs rejection or bolstering because it does not justify that form of essentialism and then calling our proof
complete?
189
Kripke, Naming and Necessity, 71. Sourced from Naming and Necessity on Wikipedia.

84
or, more importantly, a series of several finite or infinite sentences whose truth obtains
over the facts by several criteria, correspondence, coherence, practice and authority.
Semantic and theoretical under-determination leads to some peculiarities of translation.
Translation and theorization are impossible without theoretical ladenness then, the
positing of entities and a lower bound required for certainty and justification. As such,
the adjudication of translations and theories happens by virtue of subjective values, such
as simplicity, beauty, coherence, success, best-ness.190
Even the existence of and nature of basic entities themselves are posits,
convenient myths, which allow predictions and discussions. This leads us to the peculiar
fact that analytic and synthetic statements become identical. One stands in the same
epistemic relation to them, because if one establishes criteria for truthfulness, there is no
way to distinguish between a true statement by virtue of language and one by virtue of
empirical fact. The existence of self-determining truth values in a language or conceptual
scheme is a function of the posits in that conceptual scheme. What analytic/synthetic
divide suggests is that there are things which are true in themselves and things which are
contingently true, but both of them are posits within a conceptual schema. That some
statements are irrefutable is itself a posit of a system.191
Even within analytically true systems there are peculiarities, which arise.
Consider first Gdels theorem, which shows that axiomatic systems can never be
complete and coherent. First, given any system of axioms which produces true
190

One theory of theories is that there is an inference to the best explanation possible with data. The notion
of best explanation, however, refers already to the contexts of justification and discovery for which it is
meant to be the criterion of adjudication in the first place. How does one determine which explanation is
best? If it is by reference to its success in prediction, its coherence, its elegance, then now we are back at
square one.
191
The way this is usually given is that analytic statements must be true in all possible worlds, while
synthetics can be false. Yes, it is true that everything is contingent and, in a sense, this is analytically true,
and is the only analytic truth (Meillassoux, Quentin, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of
Contingency, London: Continuum, 2008), but, what is a possible world? A possible world is itself,
definitionally, a posit. Either the world is a thing, or it is not. If it is not a thing, then analytic rules arent
true in it, because it does not exist, truth and falsity is not a property. If it is a thing, it has to exist, in a
sense, somewhere, which, is to say, it exists as a postulate of language and imagination. Inasmuch as this is
the case, saying analytic statements must be true in this world is to say our definition of possible world
includes the fact that analytic statements are true, by our positing. But one protests, analytic statements
must be true! Why, because they must be true in our world. But this is being proven by reference to
possible worlds. Therefore, we are positing analytic statements must be true in all possible worlds, justified
by them being true in our world, justified by all possible worlds. Possible worlds, mind you, that exist as
arbitrary posits within our world.

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arithmetical or logical results, there are theorems within the system which cannot be
proved, which must be assumed and that these assumptions do not reduce to trivially true
and self-consistent statements of logic like A is A or the law of non-contradiction.
Secondly, a system cannot demonstrate its own consistency within its own bounds.192 An
extension of this is that computational systems can never decide ahead of time if they are
going to halt or continue operating forever. The only way to see if a program will run is
to run the program.193
Furthermore, consider mathematics, supposedly the crown jewel of true systems.
Gdel shows that at some point some non-trivial part of mathematics must be assumed.
Mathematics can be expressed in what are the six basic theorems of Zermelo-Fraenkel
Set Theory,194 but the truth of that system can only be proved by positing a more complex
system which, itself, can only be proved by reference to yet a stronger one. Additionally,
there are, even within basic ZF set theory, which describes mathematics as we normally
conceive of it, a series of additional axioms one can accept or reject which are fully
consistent with the first six, but their assumption or rejection produces different
mathematical results,195 such as the famous axiom of choice.196 On a more basic level,
with mathematics easier to explain, a famous example of a voluntary axiom is Euclids
fifth, namely that parallel lines do not converge.197 This axiom can be true or false and
produce a consistent system.
Additionally, there are many logics other than the original logic with which we
are familiar.198 These include ones such as fuzzy logic, which allows for fuzziness in
192

Nagel, Ernest, and James Roy Newman, Gdel's Proof, New York: New York UP, 1958.
Yanofsky, The Outer Limits of Reason, 140. I originally included a large section here on the internal
debates of physics and its philosophy; a discussion of the philosophies of speculative realism and
information-based materialisms. Subsequently, such metaphysical speculation I found to distract from the
main task at hand. Additionally, once I had finished my research, I came across a work by Karan Barad
called Meeting the Universe Halfway (Durham: Duke UP, 2007) which deftly and amazingly deals with the
problems of the philosophy of physics, correlationism, performativity and so forth in a way I never could. I
wish I could add a whole section on it and on speculative realism, but alas, time is short.
194
Yanofsky, The Outer Limits of Reason, 333.
195
Holmes, M. Randall. "Alternative Axiomatic Set Theories." Stanford University.
<http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/settheory-alternative/>.
196
Bell, John L. "The Axiom of Choice." Stanford University. <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/axiomchoice/>.
197
Yanofsky, The Outer Limits of Reason, 259.
198
Priest, Graham, An Introduction to Non-classical Logic: From If to Is, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP,
2008.
193

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truth values and para-consistent logic which rejects the law of non-contradiction, or in
more coherent formulations rejects the fact that the negation of the negation is the
affirmation, instead claiming it is own logic entirely.199
Notice, however, that the problem of axioms and their voluntary nature is not
solvable by typical truth theories. They are the criteria by which correspondences are
decided and therefore cannot be settled that way. They are coherent and consistent.
They produce results. Practice theory and authority theories offer us some way out. If a
practice achieves something relative to a goal, then one could say then that logics and
mathematics are true relative to which goal one is trying to achieve. This is one elegant
solution. I will return to it for the rest of this chapter briefly.
The other solution is to look for a mathematics and logic without foundations.200
Mathematics, David Bloor argues, is grounded in experience, in practice and pointing.201
But experience itself and its organization cannot be a given, for that would require
referring internally to the very experiences one is attempting to elucidate. As such, the
organization of experience is a social question. Indeed, we have already seen that
following a rule requires practicing it in public with reference to a community and it is
decided by showing that one can use the rule. This is a form of practice and authority
theories of truth. If one then accepts that the axioms of mathematics and logic are not
descriptions of reality but rules one follows in public as decided by the relevant
mathematical community, then the foundation problem is irrelevant. In fact, one nontraditional logic, intuitionism, exactly follows this premise.202

199

See pages 389-651 in Goble, Lou, The Blackwell Guide to Philosophical Logic, Malden, MA:
Blackwell, 2001; and pages 389-651 in Jacquette, Dale, A Companion to Philosophical Logic, Malden,
MA: Blackwell, 2002.
200
Benacerraf, Paul, and Hilary Putnam, Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected Readings, Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge UP, 1983; and Putnam, Hilary, Mathematics without Foundations, Journal of Philosophy 641, (1969): 5-22.
201
Bloor, David, Knowledge and Social Imagery, London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1976, 129; and
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, G. H. Von Wright, Rush Rhees, and G. E. M. Anscombe, Remarks on the
Foundations of Mathematics, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978.
202
Jacquette, A Companion to Philosophical Logic, 513. Also consider relevance logics (Ibid, 609), which
argue that traditionally logic assumes that all truth values prove each other in a sense. Thus the sky is blue
is proof that 2 + 2 = 4. But, one could say, this is not relevant. Relevance logics takes Quine seriously and
says that maybe a criteria for truth should be relevance, which is itself a non-logic operator, determined by
what Wittgenstein calls family resemblance. Similarly interesting logics are many-valued logics (Ibid,
545), which posit terms other than truth or falsity.

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One last problem, in addition to what, up until now even, is the irreconcilability of
quantum physics and relativism is a related problem, that the interaction needed for
measurement perturbs the phenomenon.203 Paradoxes such as Schrodingers Cat are
famous enough now to not be repeated.204 Suffice it to say, there are a whole class of
phenomena whose existence is necessarily affected by measurement, whose properties
displayed depend on the experimenter and the contingencies of the moment.
Furthermore, there are a class of fundamentally uncertain items, of whom only one type
of knowledge can ever be known, which, with mathematics leads to paradoxes in which
something is and is not at the same time, such as quantum particles and the poor
aforementioned cat. The solution to these problems is the observer effect, but this leaves
scientists uncomfortable. Either these phenomena lead to contradictory results or their
very existence requires observation.205 Interestingly, amending these to the scientific
canon has been argued to be impossible without admitting astrology, parapsychology,
creationism206 a claim to which this thesis is ostensibly responding. Later, I will discuss
Bruno Latours idea of a factish, something which we both create but has causal and
eternal force. Once we accept this class of things as ontologically valid (and perhaps that
all facts are of this performative type) the paradoxes of quantum physics disappear
immediately, just as they do if we abandon the subject object division (from which the
notion of factish follows).

Context-Sensitivity and Interest Sensitivity

Up until now I have addressed forms of relativism about truth which concern
truthfulness being decided by different conceptual systems determining truth values as
well as problems emerging from something like skepticism about rules, externalism about
meaning and the problems of incomplete axioms. Each of these motivate forms of
203

Stengers, Cosmopolitics II, 32.

Ibid, 55. For those who need a reminder, in a more basic physical way, Shroedinger imagined a cat in a
box. There is poison in a vial in the box and the vial breaks depending on whether or not a particle decays,
which it has a perfect 50% chance of doing. Before the box is opened then, epistemically, one cannot say if
the cat is alive or dead. Or, if one prefers what is called complimentarity, Bohrs interpretation, the cat is
both alive and dead, but only because of the measurement apparatus by which we have engaged with it.
See Barad, Karen, Meeting the Universe Halfway, Durham: Duke UP, 2007.
205
I discuss the ontological aspects of this problem in an above note.
206
Stengers, Cosmopolitics II, 21.
204

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practice-based, assumption based, community based and interest based relativism. There
is a brand of relativism, however, which states x knows that p is contextually sensitive
in an empirically distinctive way.207 Context-sensitivity begins with logical properties
implied and touched upon earlier, that truth-values are modalworld sensitive, and
temporaltime sensitive.208 Setting aside the problems with possible worlds209 and the
fact that space and time are perhaps outdated or false concepts210 this is in common sense
terms obviously true. Statements reference reality through indexicals such as I, you,
here, this and so on. Thus if I say it is raining right now, the truth or falsehood of the
statement depends on what the now refers to. In a sense, what I am saying is it is
raining herePortland, ORand now2:24 PM on March 18th 2014. If I say the
statement later, it may be false. Indexicals refer to subjects, spaces, times and contexts.
The question is whether or not it is raining here and now is the same proposition at
different times and places, or expresses, instead, a translation, as I did above. This
context-sensitive relativism expresses the idea that the truth of a proposition consists in
its content and circumstance and secondly, the indexicals reference, which determines
the truth-value, can either be part of the content or the context of the sentence.211 The
point is that a sentence derives its truth-value from its way of referencing. When an
indexical is inserted into a proposition, it makes the sentence, un-reduced, true or false
relative to the context it has inherited as content. Here, now, I, you and so on all make
the content of a proposition true or false relative to the propositions felicity with regard to
its reference. A proposition is circumstantially relative if one says, just, it is raining
which is true or false depending on the circumstance, but that is only inasmuch as
circumstance implies indexicality. That is to say, if it is raining in Bangladesh and not in
Portland, if I say it is raining it is true, but one would typically evaluate this sentence as
207

Stanley, Jason, Knowledge and Practical Interests, Oxford: Clarendon, 2005, 16.
Rcanati, Franois, Perspectival Thought: A Plea for (Moderate) Relativism, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007,
33.
209
Quine, From a Logical Point of View.
210
Again, outer limits, beyond measure as in Morton, Timothy, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology
after the End of the World, Minnesota UP, 2012. Namely, the fact is that space being continuous produces
logical contradictions, but so does, perhaps, it being discrete. Furthermore, there are scientific results,
which show that space is discrete but also possibly continuous. Space itself is non-local, as with spooky
action at a distance and multiple times are co-present due to the peculiarities of relativity and the speed of
light.
211
Rcanati, Perspectival Thought, 33-34.
208

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false, because the here and now itself a reducible indexical is derived from pragmatics
and a relevance criterion. Pragmatics is non-semantic, however. They are performative212
and are determined by correct use within a language community.
There can be thus be a case for knowledge being context-dependent, though this
actually interests me less. Considering one last instance of this, the same indexical can
be used in a proposition more than once and mean different things as can an object of
reference. Again the semantics of the sentence are the same but the pragmatics derived
from use is different.213 We have thus encountered the ideas that truth is relative to a
frame and relative to a context. The main rebuttal to context-sensitivity is the notion that
arguments of this sort are just confusing language and are abusing the slipperiness of it.
Some people who make this argument though, make the more interesting argument that
knowledge statements, while not context-sensitive are interest-sensitive. This is a very a
basic argument, namely that if knowledge is defined as justified true propositions, than
justification takes on an epistemically relative definition.
Whether or not one is justified in saying something is not readily made objective.
Simply put, justification is dependent on acceptable criteria for acceptance. One is
justified in doing something if they have done it correctly, that is if they have followed
correct procedure. So, yet again, semantics becomes pragmatics and becomes relative to
a context of use and practice within a community. There is another sense in which
justification is relative, however, that is not distinctively relativist, which is that
justification is relative to ones interests.214 Jason Stanley gives five examples, involving a
couple wanting to know if a bank is open, as they need to deposit money. He gives five
versions, low stakes, high stakes, low attributor-high subject states, ignorant high stakes,
and high-attributor low-subject stakes. Low stakes implies they do not need to deposit
and high stakes implies they have no money left in their account. The situations involve a
subject and an attributor. Where the two are unspecified, they are the same, that is, it is
concerned with the subjects knowledge ascriptions to herself, and otherwise they refer to

212

Austin, J. L, How to Do Things with Words, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1962
Stanley, Knowledge and Practical Interests, 62.
214
Ibid, 4; and Ibid. 5.
213

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someone else. Except where ignorance is specified, the subject knows the state of their
bank account.
In the low stakes account, Hannah does not need to deposit money, her bank
account is full, but she drives past the bank on Friday and sees a long line so decides she
will deposit the next day, Saturday. Reasoning that she was the bank two weeks ago on
Saturday, when she says, I know the bank will be open tomorrow she is correct.215 In
high stakes, Hannah and her wife have no money left and reasoning similarly, her wife
points out in contrast that banks readily change their hours (this evidence is implied but
not stated in the first) and thus Hannah reasoning I dont know the bank will be open is
correct. 216 In ignorant high stakes, Hannah does not know about her banks status,
Hannah saying I know the bank will be open is false, as the hours changing point
obtains and Hannah cannot afford to not deposit the money, but is unaware of that and
being unaware of that does not have the required info (info presumably, which is relevant
to the question and she knows is relevant) and thus is not justified. In the attribution
cases, a friend Jill reasons that Hannah knows the bank will be open in a bid to see her
there, having seen Hannah at the bank two weeks earlier. The stakes being high and the
problem of hours obtaining, Jill believing Hannah knows the bank is open tomorrow is
false. Finally, in the last instance, Hannah calls her friend Bill and asks if the bank is
open, in this instance, he had been to the bank two weeks earlier and thus says yes.
Hannah reasons, correctly, Bill doesnt know if the bank is open.
The point is very simple, that justification is relative to the burden of evidence
imposed by the context of the situation. Furthermore, the epistemic conditions of a
situation involve relevance, itself a non-epistemic feature, which is additionally context
sensitive but is context-sensitive in a way that is distinctively relevant to ones interest.
Interest here refers to the fact that there are graded levels of needs and of stakes. As
such, the proposition of Stanley is that epistemic statements are relevant to the form and
quantity of interest, its magnitude. As Stanley points out though, this really amounts to a
statement about the relationship between semantics and pragmatics as I discussed

215
216

Ibid, 4; and Ibid. 5.

Ibid, 4; and Ibid. 5.

91
above.217 I would argue that because of what is discussed above, epistemic statements are
also relative to the content of ones interests, what one wants to achieve and furthermore
this is subject to criteria of relevance, success and norms of rule following which are
decided in reference to community, practice and authority. Context based relativism is
mostly not relevant to my argument, except as it highlights the important of pragmatics
and practice.

Know-How
Interestingly, Stanley devotes another whole book to the idea that know-how is a
form of knowledge.218 Of course, the bias here is that knowledge here means
propositional knowledge. His claim amounts to this, that know-how sufficiently
constitutes know-that if given a person s, an action F and a method w, For every s and f,
s knows how to F iff for some way w of F-ing, s knows that w is a way to F. Depending
on the weakness of strength of the claim it can amount to the notion that propositional
content must precede an action, or on the weaker side that knowing how to do an action
consists in several kinds of propositions. Of course, though, animals can act.
Furthermore, I think we intuitively want to say animals can have knowledge, but to say
that animals can have propositional content is a stretch. Another version of this claim is
to divide know-how and know-that but to assume that there is a form of know-that
intimately suited to know-how and know-how consists in the know-how but also the
possibility of rationally reconstructing the propositions for know-how in a know-that
form.219 As such, it is not so much that know-how consists in know-that, but that knowhow, if it is successful, is successful because it followed a rule and that rule, again, is
publically given before the public and the community.220 As such, if one can successfully
ascribe reasons to an action to make it conform to a rule for an agent we want to suppose
is a member of the relevant action community, and these rational reconstructions cohere
with the set of rules for their inaction, then we can suppose that there exists a know-that

217

Ibid, 13.
Stanley, Jason, Know How, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011.
219
Steinberger, The Concept of Political Judgment, 218.
220
Ibid, 223.
218

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component to know-how; in other words, action and explanation are forms of intelligent
performance.221
The interesting thing of the structure of knowledge being relative to interests and
know-how being a form of that kind of knowledge is its implications about meaningful
action. The very nature of the relationships described here is going to allow me later to
rebut the claim that relativism is a form of subjectivism. There are, in brief, two
perspectives I have discussed relating knowing how and knowing that. There are many
who believe that the propositional accounts of action are severely misguided, usually
working in the tradition of Heidegger and Wittgenstein.222 These accounts point to the
fact that reflection and propositional content themselves only make sense with reference
to embodied practical activity in the world. Furthermore, the world does not present
itself immediately as objects; rather, objects exist relative to our goals and needs of the
situation. Furthermore, language itself only derives from meaningful use within a
community. As such, even our private capacity for propositional knowledge is highly
social and relative to a frame. It would seem then that what is primary is values, interests
and practices, which derive explicable meaning from the fact that they are embedded in a
history and tradition. Note that the concept of intelligent performance just detailed works
in either scenario. These accounts are not contradictory either, though when given forms
of primacy, they become at odds. Not much depends on the philosophy of mind here.
Though I am usually more sympathetic to accounts that seek to derive consciousness
from practical activity than vice versa, here, the distinction is not as important. Also,
note that within the propositional account of action, know how is a form of know that, but
know that, according to the same offer, derives justificatory power from interests.
Although perhaps interests can be explicated in propositions, I see no reason why they
must be. As such, these accounts can become collapsible into one another. The main
thing to take away is that there is a fundamental relationship between knowledge, truth,
practices, rules, interests and goals. The structure of action and of propositions derives as

221

Ibid, 243.
Braver, Lee, Groundless Grounds: A Study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2012; Dreyfus, Hubert L, Being-in-the-world: a Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I,
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991; and Dreyfus, Hubert L, "Why Heideggerian AI Failed and How Fixing
It Would Require Making It More Heideggerian," Artificial Intelligence 171.18, (2007): 1137-160.

222

93
much from pragmatics secured arbitrarily by communities and tradition as it does from
the semantically logical properties of language. Furthermore, problems of fundamental
axioms reduce to problems of meaningful action within a community, namely, precisely
this relationship between know-how and know that.

Relativism
The goal of these explications of theory, context and interest sensitivity, as well as
knowledge of how to do things is to lay the groundwork for a meaningful kind of
relativism. At base, again, there are axioms of mathematics and logic, which can be
chosen arbitrarily. Similarly, there are different methods of acquisition of knowledge,
which are axiomatic. Steven Hales discusses the acquisition of knowledge by intuition,
religious revelation and hallucination. They all have the same structure of explicable,
foundational, basic and justificatory schema. Just as one cannot convince someone with
rationality to be rational, for rationality is a criteria of justification for convincing
reasons, it seems that we are unable to prefer, rationally and noncircularly any one of
these ways to the others.223 Attempting to step outside of a coherent system to then
establish a system from a Gods eye view will always result in this problem. This is due
to two things I have discussed already, the theory ladenness of every proposition,
including elementary ones of fact and that the no system can prove itself and must take
some axioms as given and, in some instances, there are choices between these givens that
one must accept or reject without evidence that has already been achieved through these
systems. Finally, I discussed earlier skepticism, which sometimes emerges as a solution
to this problem, but as Hales puts it succinctly skepticism about knowing philosophical
solutions is not a satisfactory solution, not because such skepticism would put
philosophers out of work, but because such skepticism is self-applicable and finally
results in a knower paradox.224 I like to think of this as the fact that skepticism is all or

223
224

Hales, Steven D, Relativism and the Foundations of Philosophy, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006, 976.
Ibid, 97.

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nothing and thus begs the question it is exactly formulated to answer, presupposing its
own consequent.225
Now simply put, the main argument against relativism is that it is self-refuting.
Everything is relative means everything is relative is relative or the claim that
everything is relative to a frame is relative to a frame.226 Now, the claim that everything
is possible can be decomposed into a semantic structure, which will force it to have the
same problems, as everything is relative. This would seem to obviate the possibility of
possible worlds.227 Instead, Hales argues we should say, Everything which is true is
possibly true which entails there are possibly true things and so on. The basic argument
against universal relativism then is to say that if one claims that everything is relative to a
frame, one has made an absolute claim, which thus refutes itself, or, one is forced to say
the claim that everything is relative to a frame is relative to a frame which would seem
to suggest there is a frame against which absolute truth exists. This, with the assumption
if something is relatively absolute it is absolute, forces the same contradiction. Two
solutions are given here. One is to assert that everything is relative to a frame is true
relative to a frame and there is a frame against which there is absolute truth is true is
coherent by rejecting that the frame in which absolute truth is true is true absolutely
outside of that frame. Another way of achieving this move is to go back to my point
above of when picking between systems as if one is outside of system will always lead to
this kind of incoherence and arbitrariness. The absolutist says if one steps outside of ones
frame, one sees that one has to accept absolutism, but, it is easy to see that the absolutist
has not stepped out of a frame of thought, language, meaning or a conceptual scheme. In
fact, it is impossible to do so. Thus, we have a sort of conundrum, it seems that
relativism leads to a contradiction but that absolutism is impossibility, as it opens to a
relativistic rebuttal.
225

Thus, skepticism charges that knowledge being possible presupposes its own consequent, but this is true
for skepticism both, but only in a condition of possible knowledge could we assert either and thus there is a
reason internal to the possibility of knowledge that gives it a foothold because of that reasons presence
within skepticism too.
226
Ibid, 99.
227
Ibid, 100. Interestingly, the abandonment of possible worlds leads back to the Quinean destruction of the
analytic/synthetic divide, which forces theory ladenness and thus a form of relativism. Thus to refute
relativism by its self-contradiction is to force the equivalent thing on possibility and creates the arguments
above all over. This is of no matter to this particular argument though.

95
Hales rejects these approaches and instead does not want to deal with the
incoherence of relativism, as he understands it as he strongly accepts that whatever is
relatively absolute is absolute.228 Instead, in analogy to his possibility claim, he says,
everything which is true is relatively true. This allows for absolute truth, for, an
absolute truth is relatively true still.229 I believe therefore that there are multiple ways of
dealing with relativism as a philosophical idea. There are many motivating reasons,
stemming from the primary chapters and this one for believing in relativism as a solution
to problems. Furthermore, once within the conceptual framework of relativism, one can
charge the impossibility of stepping out and thus render the absolutists attempts to
counter relativism meaningless. On the other hand, one can make a form of relativism,
which, like some formulations of set theory, includes a form of a self-exception rule,
which renders it coherent and consistent but seems to lack internal motivating reasons for
acceptance, though, perhaps, if theories of truth are treated as testable, it can derive use
from its practice. Finally, one can assert a conceptually weak form of relativism, one in
which the scope of its domain is not decided ahead of time, but can do the work of
relativism that one usually wants to. As such, it is merely sufficient for my argument that
these solutions exist.
Mild relativism also has empirical support. That science proceeds through
competing conceptual changes that organize and buttress representations in thought and
theory is supported by the vast literature on cognitive science of science and science
education.230 It is an empirical fact that the human mind arranges data according to
frames, conceptual schemes and so on and that these schemes impose top-down order on
the basal facts involved. Furthermore, it is an empirical fact that scientists cannot shed
individual biases when doing scientific work231 and that emotional and aesthetic concerns
228

Ibid, 100.
Additionally, one can claim, everything, except this claim, which is true is true relative to a frame.
This is a coherent way out. The problem is one can always respond with doubts as to their being legitimate
motivating factors here at work, why assume this at all then? I actually like this solution, as it bears
resemblance to Russells paradox where he showed the notion of normal and abnormal sets is ill-formed.
As such, I think debates about relativism and truth show us that our concept of truth, analyticity, relative,
everything etc. may be ill-formed, but that is just me.
230
Thagard, Paul, and Scott Findlay, The Cognitive Science of Science: Explanation, Discovery, and
Conceptual Change, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012, 193-281.
231
Giere, Ronald in Hackett et al., The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, 45; Klahr,
David, Exploring Science: The Cognition and Development of Discovery Processes, Cambridge, MA: MIT
229

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as well as rhetoric play a role in the actual adoption of scientific theories.232 Furthermore,
studies show that if scientists approach data with an explicit theory, reflexively
formulated they are more likely to come to the right conclusion, even if their theory is
wrong than if they try to come to the table with no theory at all.233 The cognition involved
in science is also fundamentally distributed,234 value-driven235 and socio-culturally
performed and scaffolded.236 In actual fact, these studies show, science reflects who is
doing it, through the influence of guiding metaphors, cultural values, social institutions
and previous theories. This is done in several ways. One is that values and metaphors
constrain which questions are asked, about what questions are asked and what methods
are used. This creates a path-dependent space where later research becomes very difficult
to un-entrench. Because the search space of the world in infinite, it its necessarily the
case that some programs and results of research are not explored and become harder and
harder to do so as time goes on. Though unavoidable in theory, this can be mitigated in
practice. The fact is though that theories are chosen, results are explained and described,
certain details are ignored and some aspects of reality nearly or actually impossible to
conceive because of the influence of cultures, values, power and metaphor. These results
are true though, in that they can provide the basis for further research, stand within the
realm of certainty of statistics and can result in machines based off of them. One could
protest that this does not change the way things are, in actual fact, but the problem is that
facts consist in descriptions of reality, and these descriptions of reality can both be true,
but limited and biased by a perspective and create a situation in which further facts are
assimilated into the current system based on a previous bias.237 Furthermore, in the case
Press, 2000, 61 and 268; Medin, Douglas L., and Megan Bang, Who's Asking?: Native Science, Western
Science, and Science Education, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013, 27.
232
Medin and Bang, Who's Asking?, 5; and Giere in Hackett et al., The Handbook of Science and
Technology Studies, 270-71.
233
Klahr, Exploring Science, 203 and 206.
234
Giere in Hackett et al., The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, 270.
235
Medin and Bang, Who's Asking?, 62-63; and Thagard and Findlay, The Cognitive Science of Science,
283.
236
Giere in Hackett et al., The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, 270; and Medin and Bang,
Who's Asking?, 75.
237
In Haraway, Donna Jeanne, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern
Science, New York: Routledge, 1989, Haraway details how primatology reflected cultural values. Franz De
Waal once pointed out that had we discovered bonobos first our entire self conception may have been
different. We would have struggled to assimilate the violence of chimps and of the human species into our
notions of the peaceful bonobo rather than trying to write the bonobo off as an exception.

97
of research on humans, our theories about humans actually affect human behavior238 and
to a lesser extent with animals this is true too239 and who knows the extent to which we
affect the physical properties of the world which change based on how they are
observed.240
Of course, empirical facts about cognition do not result in normative claims of
how science should be or the nature of truth but they do demonstrate that necessarily in
practice that relativism discussed here and paradigms discussed below do discuss how
science actually does occur, even if its not how it should. I propose the following idea
though. If it is the case that in actual fact, as the results of sociology, anthropology,
history and cognitive science show, that relativistic and paradigm based discussions of
science are true descriptions of how science proceeds and that it cannot really proceed
any other way, then certainly, even if there is an objective truth we have never
experienced it, it is an abstraction and it does not exist concretely in the world as such.
Furthermore, the ontological status of abstractions is suspect without a form of idealism.
Mathematics exists in practices and we can point to them and the machines based off of
them. We, however, can only ever point to relative truth and intersubjectivity when we
want to reference objective truth and objectivity. As such, we have never experienced
objective truth, it is a posit of our system and even if it is a necessary one, we have no
empirical evidence for its existence, nor a coherent metaphysics of its ontology. Later,
when I discuss Latours critique of the nature culture divide and his discussion of
assemblages and networks, this must be kept in mind. We have only ever experienced
entanglements of nature, sociality and language, or nature and culture. We have only
ever experienced entanglements of subjects and objects. Thus we may posit as
abstractions nature, culture, subjects and objects and perhaps they render our systems
more coherence, but they have no empirical status as such, not even in the way
mathematics does, for we can point to mathematical practices, while we can only point to
238

See Hacking, Ian, The Social Construction of What?, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999 on what he
calls the looping effect, where in humanistic, scientific or social scientific facts about humans affect their
behavior. Also MacKenzie, Donald A, Mechanizing Proof: Computing, Risk, and Trust, Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2001 for the performativity of economic (and thus social scientific) models.
239
Animals behave differently in captivity than in the wild, but even in the wild behaviors can be elicited
subconsciously by researchers.
240
See Barad, Karen, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter
and Meaning, Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2007.

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assemblages of practices in this case. While the absence of evidence and, at that, the
impossibility of evidence is not evidence of absence, nor evidence of impossibility, its
the closest thing to that, especially when there are other motivating reasons to discard the
theory at hand, for a more substantial, predictive and coherent concept.
Indeed, to dispute the relative and social nature of scientific knowledge requires
that one is committed to the hypothesis that nature directly causes truth in science, or that
we can judge the history of science by reference to its success in producing truth.241
Alternatively, one can argue that social theories of knowledge are impossible, for
knowledge about knowledge requires details of content, specifications of result, which, if
had, are that knowledge itself.242 This was Poppers famous argument against the social
sciences, but it is false. In sequence, the causal theory of truth cannot address that nature
give us, even in objectivism, truth and error in kind and their division requires some
external source by which to divide them, as internal to the experience is only the data
which is yet to be organized. The teleological theory implies that all sociality can explain
is the spread of wrong ideas, but right and wrong ideas lie on a continuum. If, for
example, one does not accept Kuhns theory, to be described below, then Newtonian
physics is not different, it is wrong, and, as such, its spread cannot be accounted for by its
correctness, unless, it is by reference to its instrumental correctness, in which case, the
problem is mooted by the other direction. Instrumentality is extremely difficult to discern
absent the social conditions of the contexts of discovery and justification. Finally, the
argument from future knowledge would imply that if any theory now required something
yet to be proven, or an unknown postulate, or implied something we later would find to
be false or incomplete, then knowledge on that subject is impossible. The problem is,
instrumental, causal and teleological theories of truth assume a cumulative and direct
connection between nature and knowledge, which, if assumed, raises problems of
induction, rule following, the necessary incompleteness of information, the differentiation
and classification of data, entities and reality and the fact that relative to any future theory
an old one, however good, must be judged as either necessarily false (in which case

241
242

Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery, 17.

Ibid, 19.

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everything is false) or instrumentally true, which undercuts a causal and nonsocial
account ahead of time.
While questions of metaphysical, epistemic and linguistic relativism are far from
settled, at least I hope I have shown that the social, the contextual, the linguistic and the
normative are fundamental to discussions of truth, semantics, knowledge, epistemology
and so forth. It suffices then, to follow with a truly social theory of truth, which is
attentive to the problems of cognition, practice, language and epistemology raised above.
As such, I will now discuss Kuhns theory of science and of paradigms. He represents
the last link in the chain of analytic philosophers who have problematized truth. All of
the foregoing analyses serve to buttress his argument, but, importantly, they also all stand
alone, later to be mobilized in my discussion of Latour and finally the relationship
between epistemology and politics which suggests the relationship between science and
democracy.

Subsection D: Interregnum on the Subject/Object division

My discussion of Wittgenstein, Kripke and Peirce originated in an
argument I made about Heidegger allowing us to abandon the subject/object division. 243

243

This essay and my thoughts on Wittgenstein, Kripke and Peirce all come from the same essay. The
premise of it was: Heidegger shows us how much easier it is without S/O division. Heidegger shows us
how a philosophy could work without S/O and what it would need; time, history, tradition, language,
sociality and so forth. No I think therefore I am, because doubting is already impossible. Then, I show
how our thoughts need to use rules and language to work at all, which needs others. Rules require
communities, practices, discourses and history. Thus, even, if say, Chomsky, is right, we still need others.
Histories of language based on this idea include The Symbolic Species by Terrence Deacon; The Origins of
Human Communication, Why we Cooperate, and A Natural History of Human Thinking, all three by
Michael Tomasello; More than Nature Needs by Derek Bickerton ;Not By Genes Alone by Boyd and
Richerson; Thinking in a Hostile World by Sterelny; and Evolution in Four Dimensions by Jablonka and
Lamb, as well as the embodied embedded, extended and enacted mind traditions including Humberto
Mauratana, Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, Anthony Chemero, Andy Clark, Michael Wheeler, George
Lakoff, Derek Hutto, Erik Myin, Thomas Metzinger, and Alva No, as well as biologists Robert Reid,
Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin and so forth, lending scientific credibility to this claim. The social
psychological work of Lee Ross, Richard Nisbett, Philip Zimbardo, Timothy Wilson, Antonio Damasio,
Mark Solms and Jaak Panksepp. Philosophers, Bruce N. Waller and Derk Pereboom, extend this. Finally,
I talk of Peirces notion of what I call extrospection, a sort of predecessor to cognition psychology and
behaviorism, showing how thoughts always reference behaviors, states and so forth and causally one
cannot separate the origin of a thought from inside or outside, that the means that even at the start of
thought one cannot begin the causal chain shows how the inside/outside dichotomy fails. Thus,
Wittgenstein, Kripke and Peirce provide conceptual evidence for Heidegger (and also Dreyfus and all of
the above thinkers).

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Ostensibly, I argued that the subject/object division in its very formulation crafted
problems that are by nature unsolvable. I feel that because I discussed those thinkers and
because of my discussion of know-how above and correlationism below, that I should
include some thoughts on the critique of the subject object division, which is almost
isomorphic to my thoughts on relativism, namely that, accepting the division makes it
almost impossible to argue against it, despite the multitude of problems it raises, but, I
argue, accepting it is a choice and a system that ignores it does better at solving
philosophical problems, meaning there are pragmatic reasons to not indulge the division.
The Heideggerian account of know-how provides an alternative to the one above and
with the argument about rule following and private language is a powerful
methodological alternative to subject centered philosophy. Furthermore, Latours
philosophical system is premised on overcoming the subject/object divide and thus this
discussion may prove useful to that. This section, however, is optional. It provides one
way of coherently unifying all of the preceding materials and very easily allows for my
arguments about the relationship of truth to politics, but my argument may proceed
without it and this section should only be read by those who want more in-depth
discussion of some of the problems raised above. The classical conception of the subject
as an individual atom separate from its world generates the plethora of epistemic,
metaphysical, ethical and aesthetic problems that belie the entirety of Western thought.
Stepping through such a division grants an immense amount of philosophical freedom.
Unfortunately, it seems impossible to banish the subject, that ineffable core which we
conceive of ourselves to be. Heidegger leads the way by constructing a path through the
division and taking us to its consequences. His proof, however, is only partial and his
strengths remain in describing what an alternative system would look like, presupposing
the completion of the proofproviding only an inkling of a direction to go toward that
proof. Luckily, philosophical notions about rules, forms of life and the causal
relationships between cognitions render the concept of subject meaningless and
intractable, with Heideggers notion of Daseinhis replacement for the subjectas
fundamentally in the world, as fundamentally a world itself, the only sensible alternative.
The who of everyday Dasein is to be obtained Heidegger claims, in that
kind of Being in which Dasein maintains itself proximally and for the most part namely

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Being-in-the-worldthe basic state of Dasein by which every mode of its being gets codetermined.244 Dasein, literally translating to being there, is being-in-the world. Dasein
is as much in the world as it is the constitution of this world. Dasein and the world seem
to be a hodgepodge of confused concepts. Dasein is the rough analogue to that which is
called, in traditional philosophy, the subject. This, however, is a very unfortunate
designation, because although it useful to conceive of Dasein as similar to the self
indeed, in each case Iis this entity,245 Heidegger claimsthe very concept of Dasein
is an alternative to facile conceptions of subjectivity, which have pervaded western
discourse fervently and without repose. Heidegger uses Dasein as move through the
division between subject and object, the single greatest source of confusion in
metaphysics and epistemology in Western philosophy.246Dasein is to be distinguished
from others beings by a couple key components. Dasein is such that in its very
BeingBeing is an issue for it247 and it always understands itself in terms of its
existencein terms of a possibility of itself.248 Dasein, as such, is the only being whose
being is constituted by how it conceives of its being. Dasein is necessarily interpretive
hermeneuticand it makes little sense to speak of Dasein as anything but what it249
interprets itself as using the raw materials that furnish its conceptual repertoire of selfdefinitionthat, which is later revealed as Daseins world, the world, which, seemingly
paradoxically, Dasein, to some extent, is. Dasein, as hermeneutic, is undifferentiated
non-decomposableand its in this non-differentiation that Dasein exists in

Heidegger, Being and Time, 153.

Ibid, 150.
246
Much of this paper is influenced by the Hubert Dreyfus reading of Heidegger Being and Time in Beingin-the-world: a Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1991. Dreyfus was certainly the first one to explicitly outline what Heidegger was doing with the
subject/object division and was the first to successfully suggest a parallel between Wittgenstein and
Heidegger. Dreyfus also was the first to import philosophy of mind talk, like mental states, propositional
content, habit and so on, and in that sense any use of that talk is indebted to Dreyfus. Dreyfus, like
Heidegger, but perhaps more openly, merely suggest what a philosophy without a subject/object division
would look like without actually proving it. In that sense this paper goes beyond his project of
interpretation and instead seeks explanation and defense. This project reached its fore in Dreyfus "Why
Heideggerian AI Failed and How Fixing It Would Require Making It More Heideggerian."
247
Heidegger, Being and Time, 31.
248
Ibid, 32.
249
This it is troubling, because, as we will see, the interpretive power is not limitless. Dasein is
constituted by history and other such structures. Perhaps, it would be better to say what Dasein interprets
itself as given the horizon of possibilities provided by history, culture, language, biology and so on.
244

245

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everydayness.250 Everydayness is nearly synonymous with averageness,251 the state
Dasein inhabits when it operates online in its world.
One must understand the being of man252 as that being which must constantly
interpret itself based on its interactions with and in its world, using the categories
provided for by its world. Man, however, exists in average forms everyday, immersed in
the world it inhabits, such that, the problems of categorization and knowledge are sidestepped by a type of understanding known familiarly as know-how. Dasein is absorbed
in the world253 and, as such, Dasein has Being-in-the-world as its essential state.254
There, however, is no self that contracts relationships with its surrounding world.
Daseinnot so much a thing, but a relationshipbecomes the process of world creation
itself. Furthermore, Dasein is never free from being-in and thus only sometimes
[having] the inclination to take up a relationship toward the world. Taking up
relationships toward the world is possible only because Dasein [is] being-in-theworld.255 Daseins existence in the world frames its ability to contract a relationship with
objects256 in the world. There is no self and then a world, comingling but independent,
instead, the self is itself, in some sense, a world, something which constitutes its being by
interpretation and action. The world is an onerously vague concept, which seems to lead
nowhere, but that is precisely because the world is concealed. The world, properly
understood, is the background against and in which Dasein does everything that it does.
Precisely because the world functions it does not appear. The mode of
conspicuousness Heidegger claims, [has] the function of bringing to the fore the
characteristic of presence-at-hand in what is ready-to-hand.257 The background in which
we operate only appears as such when something goes wrong. A toolreadiness-to-

250

Heidegger, Being and Time, 69.

Ibid, 68.
252
The use of man here is also unfortunate, as it is the only rough analogue in every day speech to Dasein.
Hannah Arendt, a student of Heidegger, once remarked that the reason she did not practice philosophy, but
political theory, is that philosophy is about man in the singular and political theory about men in
general. This is closer to Heideggers position.
253
Heidegger, Being and Time, 80.
254
Ibid, 80.
255
Ibid, 13; and Ibid, 84.
256
Again, unfortunate.
257
Ibid,104.
251

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handis understood as a broken toolpresence at handbecause it is recalcitrant258 to
our moves. We operate smoothly, as Dasein-in-the-world, until it becomes apparent to us
that our world is not letting us go about our goals as we please. In this sense, the world
comprises equipmenttools we use for something. Equipment, always valenced, exists
for something. That for-something is not explicitly revealed because its revealing indexes
its brokenness. Equipment exists in a totality, inasmuch as our world exists in a totality,
as there is no such thing as an equipment. To the being of any equipment there always
belongs an equipmental whole,259 a totality of references and uses in which the
equipment exists. The world is that totality of uses, backgrounds and practices that make
existence possible, the background through which individualsboth selves and objects
can emerge. Everything in the world exists for-the-sake-of260 something. Dasein,
always immersed in this world, comes to terms with it as a world only if the world breaks
down.
The world is not just uses and tools, but others, as wellother Daseins and thus
other worlds. Being-in is Being-With-Others and Dasein is Dasein-with261 always,
Heidegger notes. Heidegger eschews attempts to view this understanding of others and of
objects as cognitive or propositional in nature. Others are encountered from out of the
world, in whichDasein essentially dwells.262 Heidegger warns that theoretically
concocted explanations of the Being-present-at-hand [broken tool-ness] of Others urge
themselves upon us all too easily; but over against such explanations we must hold fast to
the phenomenal facts of the vase which we have pointed out, namely, that Others are
encountered environmentally.263 Dasein encounters everything environmentally.
Daseins world is co-constituted by its relationships with other worlds. All worlds are coconstituting. Dasein is never alone. Dasein is always with other Dasein and always exists
in a web of meaning, of symbols, of uses, of ideas and of history.
We have our answer to what Dasein is then; the self of everyday Dasein
Dasein immersed in the world in its most fundamental wayis the they-selfDasein as
Not the recalcitrance of Kants noumena, positivisms objective reality, Platos forms, or even Sartres
and Husserls world.
259
Heidegger, Being and Time, 97. Emphasis mine.
260
Ibid, 116.
261
Ibid, 155.
262
Ibid, 155.
263
Ibid, 155.
258

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constituted by its relationships among the totality of sociocultural, meaningful
structures.264 Dasein is dispersed into the they265 and exists for the sake of the they
the they, which articulates the referential contextthe worldof significance.266
Fundamentally, Dasein encounters entities by freeing them for a totality of involvement
with which the they is familiar,267 the totality of involvement previously named the
equipmental totality. Dasein is inherently social, inherently meaningful, inherently using
and inherently interpretive and, as such, the world consists in everything that structures
Dasein: language, culture, history, biology, sociality, economy, relationships,
nourishments, death and so on. Understood as such there is no sense in which there is an
objective reality with which Dasein contracts business, but a hodgepodge and
interlocking mixture of categories, practices and designations, which totally comprise the
world which Dasein, in some sense, is. With this totality Heidegger notes, the world
announces itself.268 The genius here is that this is precisely how one would need to
conceive of a philosophical anthropology wherein the subject object dichotomy fades
away. One is not stuck with stodgy realism, because there is no world without Dasein, but
indeed, there is no Dasein without a world. There is no world without other Daseins and
there are no other Daseins without average ways of encountering the world. There are no
average ways of encountering the world without equipment and there is no equipment
without other equipmentuses and valences. Instead of there being a reality, then, and
individuals running through it, hopelessly seeking to match mental propositions with
actual events, there are only collections of meanings, of uses, of people and of objects.
There is no ways to use an object except for something else, and in this sense, objects
dont exist, uses do. Even when used scientifically as to understand a law, this still carries
a telos, and as such, exists as an object for Dasein not as an object in itself.
The worldhood of the world, however, does not melt into complete relativism
either, without bite or analytic merit. There have to be things,269 which can be useful, and
there have to be others with whom this web of significance is weaved. In this sense,
264

Ibid, 167.
Ibid, 167.
266
Ibid, 167.
267
Ibid, 167.
268
Ibid, 167.
269
Unfortunate, I mean here something between equipment and readiness-to-hand.
265

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history and meaning precede and create Dasein. It is via this history and meaning that
Dasein can free objects for study, and find properties of the objects in and of themselves.
It is precisely on the ground of Dasein (mans) historicity that Dasein can conceive of the
ahistorical; it is precisely because the world recedes behind Dasein, functioning as a
significant totality, which Dasein, because it is the interpreteron the leash of other
Daseinand the doer (and thus creator), that Dasein can even stop to reflect on its illusory
independence. It is out of the immersion of that particular being within all beings that the
possibility of the conception of non-immersion can even arise. There is no epistemic leap
that must be taken, no pictures to match on to reality. There is only the world; the world
is always already there.270
For all its philosophical maturity, however, Heidegger merely outlines a theory of
how a breakdown of the subject object division could look and indeed provides the best
possible one, but Heidegger does prove that the subject does not exist. The residue of the
feeling of something like phenomenal content or qualia remains. It remains for those
beingsnamely usclassically conceived of as subjects (and for Heidegger as Dasein)
functionally impossible to conceive of our subjectivity banished. Indeed, it seems so
obvious that subjectivity exists; it is very sensation itself, that ineffable core which it is
contradictory to say does not exist; that seems to amounts to saying I believe I have no
beliefs.
The resolution to this problem comes from the equivocation entailed by
propositions about beliefs. Heidegger flat out denies that the way in which we relate to
the world is at all constituted by something like propositional statements, traditionally
thought of as goals, beliefs, desires and so on.271 This is not to say that we do not have
such a capability. Heidegger understands the extent to which it seems our cognitive
substratum is infected by some linguistic parasite. Heidegger makes clear, however, that
accepting this being-in-the-world ontology reveals such linguistic internalities to be
supervenient on a more primordial substratum. In talking Dasein expresses itself not
because it has, in the first instance, been encapsulated as something internal over
against something outside but because as being-in-the-world it is already outside when
270

The Heideggerian phrase which has so entered the canon it exists not even as his phrase anymore.
Again, Dreyfus began this project, using such philosophy of mind talk, elaborated a lot more in Dreyfus,
"Why Heideggerian AI Failed and How Fixing It Would Require Making It More Heideggerian".

271

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it understands,272 Heidegger claims, pointing to the fact that there is no image of the
world and then its expression, but the very making of an image of the world is itself a
form of expression and relation to the world constituted in action and being-withothers. Heidegger calls propositional beliefs knowing in contrast with understanding,
the more primordial means of relating to the world. He claims that we always conduct
our activities in an understanding of being, and that only out of this[can] arise both
the explicit questioning of the meaning of Being and the tendency that leads us toward its
conception.273 This vague understanding of Being despite being not easily formulated
or explicated is still a fact,274 that is to say, it is irresponsible to dismiss know-how as a
valid form of knowledge; it is only on the basis of know-how and its elaboration that it is
possible for know-that to arise. One must tacitly understand rules in order to implement
them successfully.
Furthermore, we have no power of self-reflection or self-knowledge as individual
subjects. Charles Sanders Peirce claims that we have no intuitive power of
distinguishing an intuition from a cognition determined by others,275 as in, because we
only ever have access to the cognition as it immediately appears to us, there is no sense in
which one can distinguish its causal origin. Did the sensation arise from a more
primordial sensation or from an exterior vantage point? Because of this, there is never
any ability to distinguish whether or not cognition is genuinely causally internal, and that
is to say, there is no internal criterion inherent in thought that allows us to understand a
thought as genuinely ours. One can only ever reason about internal cognitions based on
external evidence because internal demarcating criteria are sorely lacking. It follows from
this that all understanding of the self via self-consciousness is always ultimately
understanding via other-consciousness. Whether we reason about ourselves on the basis
of behavior, distinction, language or any other criteria, we are reasoning on the basis of
externality and ultimately on practice. This perhaps, it seems, does not pose a
metaphysical rejoinder to the traditional notion of the subject, but it does, one must
admit, prevent any real epistemic discussion of it, as such. While it is certainly possible
272

Heidegger , Being and Time, 205.

Ibid, 25.
274
Ibid, 25.
275
Peirce, Writings of Charles S. Peirce, 200.
273

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that something like an individual subject with ineffable experience exists, it is
meaningless to talk about it; the only way to ever reason about such a subject is via the
very external criteria and explicable actions that one wishes to explain away.
Our existence, Peirce points out is reasoned from the existence of the outside.
Solipsism is epistemically in tractable. Peirce claims that although we are more certain
of our own existence than of any other fact and many argue that a premise cannot
determine a conclusion to be more certain than it is itself and hence, our own existence
cannot have been inferred from any other fact, that the first premise must be admitted,
but the second premise is founded on an exploded theory of logic. A conclusion cannot
be more certain than that some one of the facts which support it is true, but it may easily
be more certain than any one of those facts.276 Our very existence, and experience is
derived from the external substratum on which it rests. Our only certainty of our
existences comes from that web of equipmental significances in which Heideggers world
and Wittgensteins nebulous forms of life inhere. While seemingly only an epistemic
limitation to the notion about subjectivity and not an aspersion cast on its existence, the
entire notion of the individual subject is reasoned from the premise, reaching back to
Descartes, that knowledge of self is the only primary and un-doubtable knowledge. That
premise becomes untenable; there is no supplemental reason, then, to believe in the
subject as the starting point, but only as extra philosophical embellishment or flourish.
Notice that, like before, the problem of epistemology disappears if the subject object
division is relinquished from the outset, rendering the question of self-knowledge
irrelevant to the existence of the self.
Concomitant with the overturning of traditional Western metaphysical and
epistemic problems is the overturning of Western ethical and aesthetic problems. One no
longer feels the biting loneliness of the Cartesian world when one understands that one is
always fundamentally being-with-others. Of course, with that comes the understanding
that one is not simply an individual atom that can wish his way around. Heidegger
illuminates the extent to which existentialism, as traditionally conceived, remains
fundamentally Cartesian and Western, in that, in its formulation of agency and freedom,

276

Ibid, 203.

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it seeks to wish away the fact that Dasein is fundamentally Being-in-the-world. So
although Sartre acknowledges, existence precedes essence he draws the erroneous and
opposite conclusion that this means subjectivity is the starting point.277
Because we are precisely not alone in the world, Heidegger claims that a persistent
calladdresses Dasein as Guilty!278 and that this Being-Guilty is a way of Being
with Others in the field of concern.279 Because Dasein is fundamentally being-withothers and fundamentally care and concern, Dasein is fundamentally guilty. Guilt is the
realization for Dasein that although one is ultimately always responsible for ones actions
and for making oneself through meaningful action, one is completely in debt for the
creation of the self and for the background and network of practices and equipment which
make such self-creation possible. Heidegger provides a new avenue of ethics and
aesthetics, or meaning, for our lives, in that he illustrates that we are not so alone in the
world, forcing us to reorient the idea of the ethical agent as that of the unbounded subject
and the idea of meaning as that of personal fulfillment. Furthermore, there cannot be a
disenchantment of the world if Dasein does not view or interpret itself as disenchanted. In
this, the world itself sparkles anew as its vitality can only be drained given a series of
subjectsconceiving themselves as suchwho wish it to be that way.
The entirety of Western philosophy has been encircled in a series of conundrums,
epistemic, ethical, metaphysical and aesthetic, which arise from the fundamental notion
of the subject object division. Heidegger allows us to step through that division and into a
new philosophical world where such problems disappear. This alone is evidence for the
superiority of the Dasein as being-in-the-world position. Heideggers proof remains
partial, but his discussion of the ramifications remains complete. But given our
understanding, since Wittgenstein, of meaning, rules and forms of life, and given our
understand since Peirce, of the knowledge of interiority, we can see that accepting the
notion of the subject as traditionally conceived makes that very conception of the subject
metaphysically meaningless and epistemically unnecessary and that, ironically, those
problems can be resolved by understanding Dasein as Being-in-the-world; that
277

Sartre in Guignon, Charles B., and Derk Pereboom, Existentialism: Basic Writings, Indianapolis:
Hackett, 20012, 92.
278
Heidegger , Being and Time, 326.
279
Ibid, 327.

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fundamentally in order to conceive of the subject antithetical to Dasein, the necessity of
Dasein and its grounding is presupposed in such a conception. We can thus, take a step
back and relieve ourselves of such ontological baggage and experience a world not so
lonely or disenchanted.
Contrasting280 with the normal political picture of liberalism is the Arendtian
conception of politics and agency. Arendt, as a philosopher, like Beauvoir, operates in the
post-Heideggerian and post-Nietzschean framework. As such, she is especially attuned
to a post-metaphysical philosophy,281 or at least a philosophy without the subject/object
division. Inasmuch as this is true, Arendt recognizes the ramifications of Heidegger for
ethics and politics far more than Beauvoir does, who, I have argued, remains
fundamentally Cartesian. Arendt acidulously deals with the sort of despondence and
worry about the lack of human agency and meaning with a political resolution writing
that it is as spurious to deny human freedom to act because the actor never remains the
master of his acts as it is to maintain that human sovereignty is possible because of the
incontestable fact of human freedom.282 Here, Arendt takes on Beauvoirs ideas from
both ends, as she argues that just because man does not control his world, it does not
mean he is not free, but vice versa, that this freedom does not guarantee some robotic,
disembodied autonomy of the existentialist variety. No man can be sovereign, Arendt
writes because not one man, but men, inhabit the earth,283 referring to the inherently
communal and inherited nature of man; man, should he exist, only does so by virtue of
men in general.
Arendt argues that embodiment is fundamental to the human and his political
condition as the earth is the very quintessence of the human condition, and earthly
nature, for all we know, may be unique in the universe284we are tethered to the physical
world in which we live, our nature as embodied beings is structured by the material
conditions which create the boundary conditions of our action and thought, action and
thought which are inherently plural as men in so far as they live and move and act in this
280

This part of the paper is from the same class, but from a different paper on Arendt as a critic of
Beauvoir.
281
This thesis was first articulated by Villa, Dana Richard, Arendt and Heidegger: the Fate of the Political,
Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1996.
282
Arendt, The Human Condition, 235.
283
Ibid, 234.
284
Ibid, 2.

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world, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to
each other.285 Beauvoir and Arendt coincide on the uniqueness of each human and of the
human condition, but differ in that Arendt thinks this uniqueness precisely unites
because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same
as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live286 but, Arendt cautions, this uniqueness
presupposes others, and the natality of the human species, the notion that we as a species
will live on and carry meaning forward. Furthermore, this uniqueness presupposes a
world which shapes us, in such a way that we do not have the power to shape ourselves
and stems from the fact that men are conditioned beings because everything they come
in contact with turns immediately into a condition of their existence,287 the fundamental
fact that it is precisely because men are not free in the sense of completely self-shaping
and precisely because men are not free inasmuch as they are embodied that men are able
to be the unique and free beings which Beauvoir so lauds us for.
Arendt defines man as a political being in contrast to a social being. Social beings
are individuals who prance around and make contracts; political beings have a public
realm, which precedes them as individuals.288 Precisely, the realm of the polisthe
political realmis the sphere of freedom289 inasmuch as the private realm is the realm
of our embodiments limitations. It is only in the private that we can starve and only in
the private where we can worry about not being meaningful, because in the public it is
with others that we share the world and, as such, we are immortal. Beauvoir who lauds
the private realm and mans own narcissistic meaning making neglects the fact that a
man who lived only a private life, who like the slave was not permitted to enter the public
realm, or like the barbarian had chosen to not establish such a realm, [is] not fully
human.290 The political realm, the realm in which we are specifically not lonely, is
where we can take action, and this is Arendts solution to the seeming meaninglessness of
the private: the immortal and unexpected nature of the public and action which takes
place there. The fact that Arendt claims man is capable of action means that the
285

Ibid, 4.
Ibid, 8.
287
Ibid, 9.
288
Ibid, 27.
289
Ibid, 30.
290
Ibid, 38.
286

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unexpected can be expected from himseemingly resounding with Beauvoirthat he is
able to perform what is infinitely improbable.291 This improbable action which
guarantees are freedom is distinguished from fabrication in that it is never possible in
isolation. Arendt argues that the popular belief in a strong man who, isolated against
others, owes his strength to his being alone is either sheer superstition, based on the
delusion that we can make something in the realm of human affairsor it is the
conscious despair of all action, political and non-political, coupled with the utopian hope
that it may be possible to treat men as one treats other material.292
The relevance of all of this is that suggestions and concerns about private
language and the nature of the subject-object divide do a lot of philosophical work. They
foreclose nave realism, skepticism and absolutism as possibilities and force a sort of
relativism upon us. Furthermore, they fundamentally link the project of metaphysics and
epistemology to ethics and politics. In sum, through the route of Heidegger as interpreted
through the 20th century analytic tradition, following through with Arendt, the relevance
of whose work we have already seen, my later discussions of Latour and the fundamental
relationship of truth to politics, science to democracy become wholly noncontroversial.
Unfortunately, this account, while compatible with the preceding thoughts on analytic
philosophy and with the following thoughts on Latour and science and democracy, is
itself a controversial account and thus, serves either as a weak ledge to stand on, or an
alterative route with offers firmer ground.

Subsection E: Kuhn and Scientific Paradigms

This problem with truth obtains regardless if one believes in coherence, practice,
and so on, not just correspondence. Whether or not something performs a technological
or practical effect is subject to the same problem of norms and extra scientific values of a
subjective nature as is correspondence. That coherence theories of truth are subject to a
subjective and dare I say that bogeyman, relativism that all the rest of these are. The
point is thus: theories, of which facts are one variety, are themselves determined to be
291
292

Ibid, 178.
Ibid, 188.

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true relative to non-factual claims about value, relevance, simplicity, beauty, justness of
fit and so on. In its more groundbreaking formulation, Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions,293 that science operates in two forms, normal and revolutionary
science. Science at any given moment is governed by a paradigm or a set of paradigms.
A paradigm is a set of laws, but is also in addition a set of claim about what can
qualify as a law and what is discoverable and discovered, in sum, it contains within it
those normative claims about simplicity or a similar motivating factor for theory
selection. Paradigms are subject to the Quinean problem that they all accept the same set
of facts equally well, one can only claim superiority over another by describing a larger
set of facts, but the very admissibility of the new facts which would up-end a theory is
determined from within the boundaries of the paradigm already. Any paradigm when
faced with facts discomforting to its results can merely conjunct those facts with the
theory as anomalies and can do ad infinitum. At the expense of predictive power, one
maintains coherence and correspondence. Normal science is the solving of problems
raised by the paradigm. A paradigm P, contains a set of claims C1, C2, C3,Cn and these
claims each suggest certain predictions or ask certain questions or leave a fact
unexplained or need a fact to fill the place in the theory. Normal science is determining
the answers the concrete questions raised by the paradigm at hand, Eventually, normal
science starts to accrue results which differ substantially from the paradigm at hand and
the paradigm will accumulate the aforementioned conjuncts. Someone may then proffer
a new paradigm, a set of theories; predictions and so on, which explain the whole new,
set of finite facts itself.
That Kuhns ideas presupposes Quinean and Wittgensteinian notions is clear as
Kuhn employs Wittgensteins [and Quines, I might add] version of the analytic
conception of language to argue that, because the meaning of expressions takes shape
only within the contexts of applied conceptual or theoretical frameworks, there is no way,
in principle, that persons seeing the world from different frameworks can either
communicate or share essentially similar experiences.294

293

Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Arrington and Glock, Skepticism, Science, Quine and Wittgenstein in Wittgenstein and Quine, 97; and
Romanos, George D, Quine and Analytic Philosophy, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983, 90.

294

113
Inasmuch as one is accepting the new facts, which contradict the old paradigm
from within the framework of the paradigm itself, without a method of conjunction, one
runs the risk of contradiction, or incoherence. Thus, one much denies the status of the
new facts as facts at all, or sees the paradigm shift. Any new paradigm, though, is
equivalent to the other one from within the perspective of the old paradigm, the one from
within which people understand the world, which, as from Quine we know all facts are
theory dependent, so, as much as would like an objective vantage point from within
which we can stand and pick and choose between paradigms, one is only oriented to new
paradigms through the lens of ones one current paradigm. So, one must either accept the
new facts with a now incoherent or inconsistent ad hoc theory, or one can shift paradigms
entirely. Because one has already understood all the facts through an old paradigm,
though, Kuhn claims, it takes a scientist not committed to the old paradigm, which,
means that, given the leaps needed from incoherence to coherence requires an entirely
new paradigm, for a new set of finite facts admits a new theory entirely if all of the fact
are to be admitted therein as facts, as valid within the theory at all. Kuhn then makes a
sociological claim: because from within the perspective of the old paradigm, the new
paradigm makes no sense, and because facts themselves are always determined with
reference to external value judgments, the old guard of scientists will be committed to
their paradigm, the new paradigm requiring a relinquishing of emotional commitments,
something like loyalty, which, though extra-theoretical are no less justified than say
simplicity and the like and, as such, they have no motivating reason by which to accept
the new theory.
The main problem raised by Kuhns theory is that he does not provide a
mechanism for shifting between paradigms, nor do paradigms seem to account for the
resounding success of putting science into practice. As such alternative interpretations of
the Kuhnian notion have been reformulated. For example, there is the radical
metaphysical anarchism of Paul Feyerabend,295 which is of no consequence to my
thesis, as his belief is that anything goes and that all paradigms are radically mutually
incommensurable. What Kuhn failed to address is that there may be meta-paradigms in
ones culture, or, at least a meta-paradigm of science itself, that lends connections between
295

Feyerabend, Paul, Against Method, London: Verso, 1988.

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the specific content claims of different scientific theories. This displaces the problem
further back. At some point there must be totally incommensurable paradigms. This is a
possibility somewhat easy to entertain, in that there could be separate cultures or people
divided by history almost completely incapable of understanding or believing each other.
One could also entertain a species of alien perhaps which obviously has communicative
skills and something like science, but does not have the ability to communicate with
humans.
Nonetheless, even Quine, whose theory of radical translation would seem to
necessarily imply this kind of mutual incommensurability believed that, for example, just
because theories are determined by non-scientific factors and that, within limits, an
infinite number of theories are correct does not mean everything is fair game. The set of
finite facts over which theories obtain are in fact delimited, in the last instance, by the
fundamental objects and sense data we posit in our system. Furthermore, the extrascientific criteria of beauty, simplicity, elegance, pragmatism and so on, while, in a sense,
non scientific, at least provide in their consistency, a mode of understanding to which
their arbitrariness is irrelevant. Furthermore, in a sense, the impossibility of translation is
dealt with my Wittgenstein and Kripke on the problem of rules and private language.
Only when absolute certainty and a-theoretical reason obtain is translation impossible.
Perhaps even meta-paradigms are not necessary across cultures or in my thought
experiment if there is a sufficient amount of enculturation and sociality inherent in a
species. While, in a sense, the possibility of everything being a mistranslation exists, a
form of skepticism, which is born from an ahistorical desire to have absolute certainty
and objectivity, only gives its necessity. Even those who believe in the sanctity of
science find paradigms challenging though, for example, saying things such as
philosophy of science was scandalized by the suggestion that competing theories might
be incommensurable with each other. If two conceptual systems such as those
comprising the oxygen and phlogiston theories of combustion are radically different, then
rational comparison and assessment of them becomes difficult if not impossible.
Subsequent discussions have shown that claims of radical incommensurability in the
history of science have been greatly exaggerated. Although competing scientific theories
may indeed occupy very different conceptual systems, there is usually enough

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conceptual, linguistic and evidential overlap that rational assessment of the comparative
explanatory power of the two theories can take place.296 This assessment takes place
within a book analyzing the cognitive science of science and notice that it doesnt refute
the claim of the possibility of equally explanatory incommensurable paradigms, but states
that, in empirical fact, scientists have been lucky enough to have been embedded in the
same meta-culture, maybe even one that all humans share,297 but it still by virtue of the
happenstance of a shared world that translation exists. Kuhn and Feyerabend would be
abusive to their own concepts if they really forbade there being some concepts common
to multiple paradigms, or there being meta-paradigms. For example, I could not imagine
a community of fully-grown adults in the Pleistocene ever being able to commensurate
their worldview with say quantum physics. It would be difficult for us to talk to 5th
century BC Zoroastrians. Maybe, though, even with the medieval era, our conceptual
schemas are aligned enough to work.
Nonetheless, a mechanism for scientific revolutions is important to entertain.
There have been substantial attempts to do this.298 Some argue paradigms shift for
rational reasons,299 others by a process of rational reconstruction,300 some through the
problem solving process itself, as in, through the dynamics of normal science301 and
others through sociological approaches.302 Tied up with the problem of paradigm shifts is
the ontology of paradigms itself.303 Those engaged in these two discussions are often the
same. My commitment to the specific idea of the paradigm and paradigm shift is not
strong and my solutions to the problem are implied but will also be addressed in

296

See Thagard and Findlay, The Cognitive Science of Science, 235. They cite Kuhn, The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions; Problems of Empiricism, Feyerabend; Science and Values, Larry Laudan; Faraday
to Einstein, Neressian; and Conceptual Revolutions, Thagard. Not cited here.
297
Importantly, a culture or aspect of it could be universally held but still contingent. This is a flaw of
cognitive science at times. That a cultural form exists everywhere does not mean it emerged from the
structure of evolution, the brain or cognition. That said, there are probably aspects, which do, such as
something like universal grammar, or a general Bayesian intelligence, which acts functionally as such.
This does not refute relativism or paradigms either, though, but merely shows how the solution to radical
translation lies in the lucky form of our empirical bodies.
298
Hacking, Ian, Scientific Revolutions, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1981.
299
Popper, Karl in Lakatos, Imre, and Alan Musgrave, Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge UP, 1970, 51.
300
Lakatos, Imre in Lakatos and Musgrave, Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, 91.
301
Toulmin, S. E. in Lakatos and Musgrave, Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, 39.
302
Feyerabend, Paul in Lakatos and Musgrave, Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, 197.
303
Lakatos and Musgrave, Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge.

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particular later on. Suffice it to say, there have been attempts to operationalize the notion
of paradigms in social scientific research304 and the success of these attempts lends
credence to the theories at hand. The master of this approach is none other than Bruno
Latour. His solution to the problem of paradigms and revolutions is to offer a new
approach based in networks, what he calls modes of existence and practical constraints of
sociality, institutions, technologies and so on. What is important is that Latour is
addressing the problems raised by analytic philosophers and Kuhn and at times making
the same claims. More importantly, he offers a second path to the same conclusions,
which motivate the later sections of my argument. For now, it is sufficient to note that an
alternative to paradigms and language games will be offered that deals with the same
material and furthermore that a substantial claim inherent in or implied by Latours work
which motivates my ideas is that relativism, rather than being motivated by skepticism as
positivists like to think, is actually its solution, that skepticism only arises for positive and
realist approaches. Furthermore, that relativism is not subjectivism will also be argued.
Substantially then, my approach is to give the positivists what they want: a firm
justification for science, but my approach is non-foundationalist and furthermore is
explicitly linked to politics.
The existence of paradigms and their function and role is clearly disputed.
Scientists often take to them because they allow for a good way of explaining disjuncted
scientific knowledge to others, thus functioning as boundary work, but these same
scientists would not appreciate the thesis relativistically. Again there are strong and weak
forms of paradigms and their existence. There is a socio-historical reading of paradigms
and a philosophical one. There is a cognitive theory of paradigms and a pragmatic one.
The weak theory of paradigms sees them as interpretive communities. There is
crossover possible between paradigms that render knowledge cumulative by function of
reference and internal cohesion. Weak paradigms are interpretive, representative and
guiding rules, procedures, methods and conceptions that, at base, amount to something
like disciplines. The thesis that science is disunified is even compatible with weak

304

Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life; Shapin, Steven, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in
Seventeenth-Century England, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994; and Shapin, Steven, The
Scientific Revolution, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

117
paradigms.305 Though the scientific method, the idea that one proposes a theory, designs
an experiment and then tests the theory and explains it with reference to preceding
knowledge is a useful concept, one that does great boundary work, it is hard to see how
the variety of scientific practices can be made to conform to that model. Psychology in
the lab, psychiatry in the office, medicine in the clinic, paleontology in the field,
primatology in the jungle, sociology in the process of surveying and data collecting,
anthropology in the depths of practice, physics in space or in the lab or in giant
government funded research projects, neuroscience in the fMRI machine are disparately
connected. Weakly, they all have different paradigms, for they consist in different
methods of data collection and analysis, different starting presuppositions, different tools
of analysis, different institutions of practice, different goals, different theories and so
forth. The mutual intelligibility of the different disciplines is thus then guaranteed either
by the existence of a common objective reality, to which they all refer if even they
interpret differently, or to commonalities in paradigms, or due to meta-paradigms and
cultural unity. Unifying the sciences is itself a form of practical epistemic boundary
work and both begs normative questions at the same time it is probably best answered in
practice. In the weak form, there is a sociology of science, but there are also rational
reasons for shifts between paradigms and the two do not mutually exclude, except one is
empirical and the other justificatory and one can be the means to the other.
The strong theory of paradigms means that the paradigms are incommensurable.
There is no way to understand one paradigms models, facts, entities and so forth in
another, without some form of translation that renders those aspects in the purview of the
other paradigm, if that is even possible. As such, this would not be making equivalent
but a form of radical translation.306 Some argue that incommensurability is a
contradiction, though translation is possible between languages, especially if the
standards of proof are lowered, while admitting that a translation can be completely
wrong. Bilingualism renders this easier, though does not obviate the main problem.
Thus, there are those who may be bilingual in scientific paradigms, able to shift between
conceptual systems, if their existence is not just forced upon us but accepted or rejected
305
306

Galison and Stump, The Disunity of Science.

Davidson, Donald, "Radical Interpretation Interpreted," Philosophical Perspectives 8, (1994): 121.

118
with regard to rational or pragmatic criteria as well. I think radical incommensurability is
possible, in a sense. The world of physics and biology is not explicable within the world
of creationism, except as the world of creationism appropriates the idioms of the other
but endows them, through their novel usage, with almost completely different meanings,
bearing a causal relationship and intention of referring to the same things at hand, while
not necessarily doing so. Furthermore, creationism qua creationism is not explicable
within physics. It is perhaps said that creationism is non-predictive, but that is not
necessarily true. The God of the creationist world can test the faith of his subjects by
giving them ample opportunity to predict with the tools of physics. This would create an
odd scenario in which the predictive power of a hypothesis does not lend to its truth for
truth here is not the truth of reason (the truth which both science and social
constructivism use!) but of revelation.307 If revelation conceives of itself as scientific it
does so by virtue of a reason tethered to revelatory epistemology, which makes possible
translation without commensuration. I am of the opinion that incommensurability as a
notion is a logical problem, extending from the Quine-Duhem hypothesis and the
indeterminacy of translation, but, as each of those problems begat practical solutions, so
it is for commensuration. Thus, we can ask, as an empirical question, how attempts at
commensuration, even if, in strict theory, they are doomed to failure and from there
answer questions about the ontology of paradigms themselves. Incommensurability
should not threaten scientists, for it just means they must learn to use rhetoric and find
ways to appeal to peoples thoughts without reference to the internal criteria of science
which they are trying to prove anyway. Giving reasons is a process not a product and
incommensurability a statement of logical fact, with translation as its pragmatic
dialectical opposite.
If paradigms are socio-historical, they can be either weak or strong, but they do
not purport to discuss the ontology of science or epistemology, but rather a social
scientific fact of its own kind. Humans, thus, are stubborn, confirmatory creatures.
There is reason that can motivate facts and justify theories, but this isnt how theories
change, even if they are reasonable. As such, paradigms are a useful empirical
hypothesis for sociologists and historians, and, as such, have produced good results.
307

Feyerabend, Against Method; and Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theological-Political Problem.

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Thus within the paradigm that evidence assures theory, paradigms are secured
sociologically by their own definition. Being socio-historical does not obviate
ontological considerations, as paradigms can be of both a practical and social and also
theoretical and constitutive nature. As such, paradigms can thus be a fact of scientific
practices and their fundamental nature and thus exist as an empirical mechanism of
change and semantic definition. Perhaps a position where paradigms ontologically
describe science but not practically is possible. This would entail that paradigms exist
differentiating scientific actors, but rationality still serves as motivational evidence, but
somehow rationality itself is either variant, or somehow that theories are co-equivalent
does not threaten the operation of reason at all. I do not know of anyone who entertains
this idea, except, perhaps, myself and, in a variant, Habermas,308 as I one could recognize
rationality and reason to be the property and process of translation, explanation and
giving reasons itself. Thus, people could live in incommensurable world, but, reasons
given, even interpreted within a radically different framework could produce something
like a leap of faith and do so with some regularity. A Born-Again Christian would be
perfectly at home in this idea and scientists may not be, but it is not an impossibility,
merely a complex way of looking at an old problem.
Finally, paradigms can be conceived of as cognitive schemas or a set of practices,
either embodied or explicit. They also can be both. Inasmuch as paradigms are cognitive
schemas, they are so because of problems of epistemic relativism quite independent of
metaphysical relativism. This is the argument, mentioned above, that epistemology is
context or interest sensitive and again represents the ontological relativistic arguments of
Quine. The idea of theory as separate from practice, however, is perhaps useful
conceptually, but entails a radical disjuncture between the our actions in the world and
our ability to explain them. Clearly we can explain our actions, even if those
explanations are wrong.309 As such, reflection clearly has the capacity to handle action
and maybe action can be based on reflection (that is an empirical question). As such,
though, the cognitive scheme idea is insufficient if not tied to a theory of practice. As a

308
309

Habermas, Jrgen, The Theory of Communicative Action., Boston: Beacon, 1984.

Steinberger, The Concept of Political Judgment.

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set of practices, paradigms are quite similar to Pierre Bourdieus habitus.310 For
Bourdieu, ideology, taste, ethics and so forth exist as embodied, subconscious and
habitual properties within an individual actor, made meaningful by her community, such
that, because action presupposes epistemology, the actor takes the cultural to be
natural.311 Thus for Bourdieu, we fundamentally act in the world and then seek to justify
it, which is action and reflection upon action. We may also reflect on reflection and act
based on our reflections.312 I suppose pure cognition is possible, once action has
bestowed meaning upon it, which is the same as saying that rational reasons for
testimony are possible once some testimony has been taken on faith. This makes the two
causally and somewhat ontologically interpenetrative, but maybe does not, a priori,
render their ontological separation impossible. That said, cognition makes no sense
without action, at least at some point, and action always accompanies cognition in
precedence or reflection, in fact and maybe in theory as well, which leads Harry Collins
to argue that learning to become part of, or helping in the conceptual development of, a
particular paradigm group, is doing something, in the same sense that absorbing the
conceptual structure that makes, say, logical inference natural is learning to do
something.313 This Wittgensteinian position argues that all types of knowledge, however

310

Bourdieu, Pierre, Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1977.
Note the similarity to Dreyfus Being-in-the-world: a Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time,
Division I interpretation of Heidegger.
312
I am a personal believer that the action/reflection dichotomy is the most fundamental one in philosophy.
There is a gulf between the two, because for action, reasons can only ever be imputed, and when done so,
that is reflection anyway, but clearly action exists, and exists without reflection. (Dreyfus, 2007. Hutto and
Myin). I thus imagine a four-square. Action/Action, Action/Reflection, Reflection/Action and
Reflection/Reflection. The first is being-in-the-world and readiness to hand, embodied action based around
affordances in the world (The visual theories of James J. Gibson. Also, Harman, 2002). The second and
third constitute praxis, the acting on reflecting and reflecting on acting. Praxis, by uniting the cognitive,
ethical, practical and so forth illustrates the interesting relationship between facts and values. Facts are
constituted or assumed by action and declared by reflection, but action operates according to values, unless
disrupted, in which case one reflects on action. Pure values could only exist in action/action and pure facts
only in reflection/reflection (and this is why Hegel liked it so much. Self consciousness for him as for
Husserl seemed to established the world within us, just as it did for Descartes). But fact/value hybrids are
the only thing which exist for praxis, and we live in the world as praxis, with the poles of a/a and r/r
existing conceptually as a result of reflection needing them for coherence, or action requiring its opposite. I
think this is what Latour means when he says subject and object do not correspond, but are two poles which
emerge from the modes of existence in which we engage the world, that is to say, the network of actants
exist and subject and object emerge from that networks self-observation or enaction, posits that render
coherent, as ontological others external to the network at hand.
313
Collins, H. M, "The TEA Set: Tacit Knowledge and Scientific Networks," Social Studies of Science 4.2,
(1974): 165-85, 167.
311

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pure, consist, in part, of tacit rules which may be impossible to formulate in principle.314
Notably, understanding empirically that tacit knowledge is diffused and constituted in
networks of people, which are nothing more than some conceptual way of categorizing an
actual set of social relations, means that Collins both think paradigms exist and consist
in non-explicable concepts, but that does not mean they are incommensurable.315 In part,
the possibility of commensuration occurs because of those who have the tacit knowledge
of both of the relevant paradigmatic groups at hand. I think this illustrates perhaps that
cognitive commensuration and practical commensuration may be independent problems
and thus, because of Quine-Duhem and the indeterminacy of translation, it may turn out
that strictly reflective and cognitive schemas, that is, semantic statements of
interpretation, theory and fact that elide their fundamental connection to the problems of
action language is meant to solve may be incommensurable, while, via practices,
immersion and embodiment316

Section III: Latour and the Problem of Truth

Up until this point we have encountered a hodgepodge of related ideas mainly
stemming from the analytic tradition in philosophy. The majority of them problematize
our normal understandings of truth, knowledge, theory, science, fact, value and meaning.
Many of the claims build or rely on each other, but many of them complement without
requiring the others. In sum these claims are:
1. The distinction between analytic and synthetic facts is tenuous
314

Ibid, 167.
Ibid,181.
316
There may exist body language and it may not be private. Furthermore, biology, even as it must be
filtered through culture, perhaps can, by empirical fact render some sort of basic body language universal,
existing primarily through something like the simulation theory of mind, in which affect and empathy are
the result of ones body mimicking another and then the brains reflective capacities analyzing that data to
decide on the mood and meaning of the other involved. See Antonio Damasios Descartes Error and Ian
Apperlys Mindreaders and Michael Tomasellos Origins of Human Communication. This is an interesting
hypothesis, that even with nature only as existent in culture, there is some relationship between the human
body and human language that renders intelligible tacit capacities for empathy, that are, in a sense, preinterpretive and thus allow for a mild sort of translatability between all humans that isnt translatable once
expressed linguistically or culturally, though, if by luck the relevant groups impute to those affective and
bodily cues the same meaning or at least enough of one to be made intelligible in conversation, then the
problem of radical translation is solved, because in a sense, a proper dictionary for translation existed ahead
of time. This is all speculation, but it provides an interesting counterpoint to the other thoughts.
315

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2. All claims are theory-laden
3. Facts underdetermine theories
a. Translation with full certainty is impossible
b. While some theories are disbarred, there are strictly speaking, several
(and some would argue infinite) true theories describing the same
facts, as judged by typical theories of truth such as coherence,
correspondence, practice and authority
4. Choosing between theories must make reference to external criteria such as
simplicity, beauty, parsimony and so on
5. Following a rule is impossible without an external community to guarantee its
success
6. Meaning in words derives from a linguistic division of labor which baptizes
them and their subsequent use within a community
7. All theories contain unjustifiable axioms and no system can prove its own
coherence
8. There are multiple possible logics and additional mathematical axioms which
create equally useful systems
9. Claims are perhaps context-sensitive but more importantly are interestsensitive
10. There is a fundamental relationship between know how and know-that which
either consists in one or both of the following
a. Know-how consists in propositional knowledge or at least suggests the
possibility of rational reconstruction within the horizon of a specific
community
b. Know-that itself is only possible because of the pre-existence of a
community, language and pragmatic interaction with the world
11. It is possible to construct a form of relativism which is both coherent and
strands on equal footing to realism in one of the following ways
a. Claiming that all things are true relative to a system, while eschewing
the meaningfulness of the fact that absolutists would claim that this
leads to a contradiction by showing that that realist claim itself
assumes a vantage point outside of a conceptual scheme, thus
assuming what it is trying to prove
b. Biting the bullet and claiming that the only absolute truth is the
otherwise relative truth of everything else and motivating this with
concerns of pragmatic usefulness, the problems inherent in absolutism
and internal coherence
c. Or, assuming a weak form of relativism, in which the claim is that all
claims which are absolutely true are also relatively true (and thus that
most, if not all claims can only be relatively true. This position can
contain in strong form, formulation b).
12. Scientific knowledge rather than representing the world or cumulatively
generating knowledge instead operates within conceptual schemas, images
and institutions and generates knowledge through social practices, discourse
and so on. These schemas are called paradigms and suggest that science
progresses in two ways, basically, by problem solving and revolutionarily by

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shifting paradigms. A weak form of this theory is consistent with and implied
by all of the and some sub-combinations of the aforementioned claims. In its
strong form it lacks somewhat of a mechanism for shifts in paradigms, which
itself then suggests a weak form and a strong form. Either of these
formulations suits my following arguments, though Bruno Latour himself
addresses this problem be reformulating it.
I will now address Bruno Latour who is, in kind, a philosopher, sociologist and
anthropologist. Bruno Latour emerged out of a climate that produced the discipline of
science and technology studies (heretofore referred to as STS). There had already been
an extant sociology of science, as well as a history and philosophy of science. The
problem was, these disciplines were either too highly charitable to the sciences, as with
positivism or too highly critical. On the one hand, one had Karl Popper and the Vienna
School who asserted that science was the most coherent and correct way of accumulating
knowledge about reality.317 Additionally, western sociology of science consisted
primarily in Robert K. Merton who studied scientific values and institutions, but
completely non critically.318 On the other hand, Ludwig Fleck described what he called
the genesis and development of a scientific fact, Gaston Bachelard the various
scientific regimes of knowledge, Michel Foucault following in his footsteps and
discussing genealogies of ideas and different eras epistemes and Thomas Kuhn whose
work we have already seen.319
It seemed then that the philosophy surrounding science attempted to relativize it
or firmly set in on the ground as the only legitimate form of knowledge. Additionally,
social studies of science also performed these moves. Strangely, philosophy, sociology
and history did not attempt to discover what scientists actually did. Indeed, this problem
permeated through the entirety of academia and seemed to pertain to all discourses on the
social, on the scientific, on the historical and so on. Latour, mid way through his career
had this to say on the problematic nature of disciplinary divides, worth quoting in full:
317

Popper, Karl R, Conjectures and Refutations; the Growth of Scientific Knowledge. New York: Basic,
1962. A.J. Ayer was famous for asserting a radicalized version of Wittgensteins Tractacus. Only
scientifically validated facts were real and had truth values, everything else has to be interpreted
behaviorally.
318
Fleck, Ludwik, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1979; and Merton, The Sociology of Science.
319
All of this work is important but exists in citation in the rest of the literature I address. It is not so
important I interrogate the ideas here. Of note, Barbara Herrnstein Smith in Scandalous Knowledge
discusses the entire history of pre-postmodern relativism in a chapter named as such.

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The critics have developed three distinct approaches to talking about the world:
naturalization, socialization and deconstruction. Let us use E.O. Wilson, Pierre
Bourdieu and Jacques Derridaa bit unfairlyas emblematic figures of these
three tacks. When the first speaks of naturalized phenomena, then societies,
subjects and all forms of discourse disappear. When the second speaks of fields
of power, then science, technology, texts and the content of activities disappear.
When the third speaks of truth effects, then to believe in the real existence of brain
neurons or power plays would betray enormous naivet. Each of these forms of
criticism is powerful in itself but impossible to combine with the other two Such
a patchwork would be grotesque. Our intellectual life remains recognizable as
long as epistemology, sociologists and deconstructionists remain art arms length,
the critique of each group feeding off the weaknesses of the other two. We may
glorify the sciences, play power games or make fun of the belief in reality, but we
must not mix these three caustic acids. Now we cannot have it both ways. Either
the networksdo not really exist and the critics are quite right to marginalize
them, or segment them into three distinct spheres: facts, power and discourse; or
the networkscross the borders of the great fiefdoms of criticism: they are
neither objective nor social, nor are they effects of discourse, even though they
are real and collective and discursive Yes, the scientific facts are indeed
constructed, but they cannot be reduced the social dimension because this
dimension is populated by objects mobilized to construct it. Yes, those objects are
real but they look so much like social actors that they cannot be reduced to the
reality out there invented by the philosophersThe agent of this double
constructionscience with society and society with scienceemerges out of a set
of practice that the notion of deconstruction grasps as badly as possibleIs it our
fault if networks are simultaneously real, like nature, narrated like discourse
and collective, like society?320
Bruno Latour problematizes the notion of truth, showing it to emerge from
custom and opinion, to be constructed, socially and otherwise and to be political in its
formation. If this scholarship is sound, which the sociology and history of science have
320

Latour, Bruno, We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993, 5-6.

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judged it to be, then it poses a set of pressing issues for political life. If science, being the
modern standard for truth, is political and constructed, what basis is there for its primary
inclusion in the discourse of politics? Why should religion not have equal footing to
science, for example? We are left with a conundrum, either science should rule politics,
or there is no criterion for its exclusive inclusion. Latour, himself, has struggled with this,
as he also maintains. That these conclusions emerge from his discourse is important, but
the journey by which Latour came to these conclusions elucidates quite a bit about his
thought.
Latour began his career by trying to rectify the fact that discussions of science
seemed to proceed as if they had never encountered a scientist. In his path breaking work
Laboratory Life, he did ethnographic work with his colleague Steve Woolgar as a
neuroscience lab, which later won the Nobel Prize in medicine. The sub-title of the work
is the Construction of Scientific Facts but originally when first published it was the
social construction of scientific facts321 a term which they dropped because the found it
too loaded with baggage irrelevant to their main points. This is not because science is not
thoroughly social, it is, nor that sociality doesnt play a role in scientific facts, because it
does, but that asserting the primacy of the social in fact construction is to take the social
for granted and furthermore to give it an ontological primacy it doesnt merit. Indeed,
science proceeds socially and cannot continue without the burden of sociality as many
positivists would like to thinkas it is fundamentally social in nature, but this is because
the social is something intrinsic to science, not extra, to be added or which manipulates
the fact creation process.322 As described above, Latour eventually came to the
conclusion that human life and its relationship intellectually with the world can be
described as a highly interpenetrative series of networks comprising linguistic, social and
natural aspects. Later on, Latour conceived of a new series of philosophies and
methodologies called Actor-Network-Theory and later a Theory of Modes of Existence,
which I will describe later. Suffice it to say, they both have a strong sociological and
philosophical implication.

321
322

Ibid, 7.
Ibid, 21.

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Latours main advantage is that his theory is grounded in practical concerns.
Much of Latours work cannot necessarily be elucidated as a series of philosophical
propositions deriving from logic or rational reconstruction, but rather as empirical
hypotheses, a research program. Sociologists and anthropologists like his work because
it seems to successfully explain not only how science works, but also how politics,
religion, sociality, economics and other fields work as well, though without explaining
too much. Scientific theories, even highly philosophical ones, are judged usually not by
their philosophical coherence but by their success in generating useful and interesting
research hypotheses and theories. Consider Einsteins theory of relativity or
Heisenbergs uncertainty principle. Both of these theories lacked philosophical
coherence at their time of establishment but led to highly successful scientific hypotheses
and then later were mined for their philosophical import. I believe Latour should be
considered in a similar fashion.
Latour and Woolgar proposed that scientists construct facts in the laboratory.
This claim becomes less onerous if one realizes that Latour does not believe in the
subject-object division, instead taking human thought to be fundamentally embedded in
the world. The philosophical pedigree of this idea is rooted in ideas like William Jamess
radical empiricism323 or Heideggers notion that human life consists fundamentally in
being-in-the-world.324 Fundamental to this notion is the idea that the world is always
already there, as Heidegger would put it, or what is now termed correlationism325, which
is the notion that man cannot conceive of the world apart from the strictures of his
thought. This claim amounts to the fact that one cannot think the unthought, a notion,
which dates back to Kant. This claim is, by fiat, true and though troublesome for some,
follows from the discussions of theory-ladenness, conceptual schemas, meaning-in-use
and relativism discussed above. Latours version is an attempt to precisely understand
this fact of mans correlation to the world, but in a way that does not result in shameless
idealism. Nonetheless, as an empirical claim, which is more important right now, the
idea emerged from what Latour witnessed in the laboratory. The first important aspect of
323

James, William, Essays in Radical Empiricism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1976.
Dreyfus, Hubert L. Being-in-the-world; and Heidegger, Being and Time.
325
Harman, Graham, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making., Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2011b.
Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency.
324

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a laboratory is its inscription machines,326 whose function it is to take an aspect of reality
decided upon by a scientist and translate it into a form which can be manipulated or
analyzed, such as numbers, pictures, signals, stains, images and representations. This is
wholly noncontroversial. The knowledge of how to use machines, recognizing if
machines are working correctly, of how to relate to machines and the inscriptions they
produce and the rules of relating to other scientists is largely tacit, though sometimes
explicit and is variously called culture, or paradigms, here Latour making his first
reference to Kuhn.327 A paradigm, for Latour, is what later in his career he calls a matter
of fact namely the beliefs that are central to the mythology [of the lab or scientific
discipline] are noncontroversial and taken for granted, and only enjoy discussion during
brief guided tours of the laboratory provided for visiting laymen.328 Fundamentally, the
operation of inscriptions devices relies on previously accepted and produced facts and
theories, also made from inscription devicesLatour takes a practice and technological
theory of truth, as well as somewhat of a consensus and social one. Inscription devices
can be used to write papers or to make points in the literature on the basis of a
transformation of established arguments into items of apparatus. This transformation, in
turn, allows for the generation of new inscriptions, new arguments and potentially new
items of apparatus.329 Even in positivistic accounts of science, theories are judged by
their capacity to produce new theories and machines are understood to operate according
to theories, which mean, as such, this, too, is wholly non-controversial.
The problem for [scientists] was to persuade readers of papersthat its
statements should be accepted as fact,330 which is to say, scientists collect inscriptions,
which are transformations of reality into signs, particularly math and then among
themselves argue for the best explanation which, in turn, they argue to the rest of the
world. A scientific fact is produced when scientists successfully convince other scientists
326

Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory, 45, An inscription device is any item or apparatus of particular
configuration of such items which can transform a material substance into a figure or diagram directly
usable by one of the members of the office space.
327
Ibid, 54.
328
Ibid, 55. This idea bears striking resemblance to Heideggers idea of a broken tool. Normally we take
the equipmental pragmatic nature of reality for granted, until things break down. See Harman,
Graham, Tool-being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects, Chicago: Open Court, 2002.
329
Ibid, 66.
330
Ibid, 8.

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that their inscription collection and analysis is the best, which leads to other scientists
building new inscription collections based off of these and making new machines to
collect them. A fact only becomes such when it loses all temporal qualifications and
becomes incorporated into a large body of knowledge drawn upon by others[a fact], by
definition [has] lost all history.331 A fact obtains over objects and discusses their creation
and it can be said to exist solely in terms of the difference between to inscriptions. In
other words, an object is simply a signal distinct from the background of the field and the
noise of instruments.332 The main debate for scientists is whether a fact exists out there
or is instead an artifact a result of human, machine, measurement or sample error.333
Notice that reality is recorded and described using devices. The incorrect use of these
devices can create results, which are not true, but a machine is decided to be working
correctly by reference to the fact that it coheres with previous understandings of the
reality at hand or produces reliable and consist results. As Hume showed, though, one
cannot use the internal structure of empirical arguments to prove their causal relation.
Notice then, that science is in the same position as that of following a rule or solving
problems within basic science as with a paradigm. If a machine starts to produce results
that do not cohere with a scientists understanding, this could either prove that their ideas
or wrong, but there is also simply no eternal external guaranteed reference point that can
prove that a machine did not produce its results by chance every time. Transcriptions of
reality are language, a set of signs, and, as such, suffer from the same problems as that of
a private language. Technological creations are only meaningful within a social and
linguistic language community, which can verify their reliability. That results have to be
verified as reliable and not artifacts with respect to previous results is analogous to the
problem of how novel results within the problem solving horizon of basic science can
lead to paradigm shifts. Within any current paradigm or set of rules for meaning,
language and inscriptions, there is simply no referent outside of those rules and practices
and the inscriptions themselves to guarantee that what is being analyzed is a fact or an
artifact. That is to say, one cannot appeal to reality to settle a dispute, because the very
proof of having had represented reality is the coherence of a current set of transcriptions
331

Ibid, 106.
Ibid, 127.
333
Ibid, 179.
332

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with previous transcriptions of reality, or a set of motivating facts which should lead one
to adopt new transcriptions and rules of their analysis over old ones. Park Doing writes
In his 1985 book, Changing Order: Replications and Induction in Scientific Practice,
Harry Collins asserts there is a fundamental regress in experimental replication. If a new
phenomenon is purported to be discoverable by experiment, and an experiment is
constructed to do so yet does not, there is no way, in principle, to determine whether the
fault lies with the experiment or with the assertion of the undiscovered phenomenon,
because the phenomenon may, after all, not be discoverable! Conversely, if the
experiment registers the phenomenon, it could be an effect of the instrumentation.334
In sum, one can protest yes but reality dictates! This is easy to see as analogous
to the under-determination of theories. There are perhaps a class of rules about
transcriptions, usually called theories or paradigms, which seemingly could be ruled out
as false by scientists or even laymen, but as long as transcriptions and their analysis are
consistent with previous ones or a new one that can retroactively explain the ones before
it, that theory is on equal footing with all others of equal explanatory import and the fact
is that the under determination of theories by facts means that there are multiple mutually
consistent and predictive analyses of this sort.
In sum:
1. Scientists record what they deem to be reality
2. Recording of reality occurs in a process of translation and transformation of
material phenomena into manipulable symbols which reference it
3. These machines of transcription can be literal machines or human beings
4. As with any symbols, the position of these transcriptions is that of rules and
private language and their adjudication cannot be made, because of the
epistemic and metaphysical problems internal to language games and
concomitant practices, with reference to the facts themselves because that is
exactly what is trying to be settled

334

Doing, Park, Velvet Revolution at the Synchrotron: Biology, Physics, and Change in Science,
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009. 32. Godin and Gingras makes the explicit point that this is a rehearsal
of the problem of skepticism, but, skepticism as outfitted by Wittgenstein as a metaphysical, not epistemic
problem (Godin, Benoit, and Yves Gingras, "Experimenters Regress: From Skepticism to
Argumentation," Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 33.1, (2000): 133-38). Allan
Franklin How to Avoid the Experimenters Regress argues that the specific case of gravity waves
detectors does not motivate the claim about the experimenters regress, missing the point about skepticism
and rule following (Franklin, Allan, "How to Avoid the Experimenters' Regress," Studies in History and
Philosophy of Science, Part A 25.3, (1994): 463-91).

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5. As such, the success or failure of transcriptions and their analysis occurs in
reference to what scientists previously understood to be true or, being
underdetermined, with reference to a new set of explanations which explain
previous transcriptions, but to which the transformation must be motivated by
extra-scientific factors such as simplicity, breadth of explanation, depth of
explanation, elegance, beauty, persuasiveness and convincingness to other
scientists.
Latour extends these theories in key works Science in Action, Give Me a
Laboratory and I will Raise the World, and The Pasteurization of France. Latour argues
that science consists in black boxes, or what we call facts and what he later calls matter of
fact. But there is another science, that is science being made, or what we would call
laboratory work and what later Latour calls matters of concern. This is the Janus face of
science, science in action versus science in reflection.335 Sciences Janus has four
dialectic dictums just get the facts straight versus get rid of all the useless facts,336
just get the most efficient machine versus decide on what efficiency should be,337
once the machine works people will be convinced versus the machine will work when
all the relevant people are convinced,338 and finally when things are true they hold
versus when things hold they start becoming true.339 The Latours first empirical rule of
method is that one must always distinguish between science when it is finished and when
it is being made.340 Science proceeds by controversies341 and the results of these and
whether or not they are settled is decided always in retrospect, that is to say, we are not in
control of our results and thus the sociologist of science must trace how a fact is used in
later users hands.342 In other words, one cannot simply point to research, because the
active, situated work on the part of researchers as they negotiate the contingent, messy
life-world of the laboratory cannot be found in the final official published description of
the episode, which reads like a high school textbooks account of the scientific method,
with its orderly sequence of hypothesis, experiment and results. The question, again, is

335

Latour, Bruno, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society, Cambridge,
MA: Harvard UP, 1987, 4.
336
Ibid, 7.
337
Ibid, 9.
338
Ibid, 10.
339
Ibid, 12.
340
Ibid, 15, Latour, 1987.
341
Ibid, 22, Latour, 1987.
342
Ibid, 29, Latour, 1987.

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how, precisely, does the fact that this work took place and was subsequently erased relate
to the status of the particular technical fact claimed by scientists in their publication on
that subject?343 Scientific results elide the messy practice that went into their
construction and produce the image of a scientific method rather than a method of settling
controversies as well as the subsequent further negotiations, which will necessarily occur
afterward.
Settling controversies is much like politics, one recruits friends344 refers to former
texts and established knowledge345former knowledge which, if doubted, excludes you
from the relevant community is what Latour now defines as a paradigm,346 and one is
charitably cited by later users.347 Science, being adversarial, consists in its artifacts being
established and then attacked and through their fortification becoming fact.348 These
rules of controversies propel Latours second rule of method, to not look at intrinsic
qualities, but, instead, to look at the series of transformations which occur to a fact.349
Latour details a series of these transformations in his essay about Pasteur, Give Me a
Laboratory and I will Raise the World. Pasteur had to first anchor himself in society to
show that there was a controversy that he could solve, establishing a vantage point.350
This process consists in capturing others interests, showing them how this controversy is
relevant to them, in this case, farmers, scientists and government workers.351 One invited
these interests in by showing ones weakness, trying to lure others to stake their claims,
but then one must move from a weak to a strong position, namely, by reifying a relevant
aspect of the world into laboratory form, so that it can be controlled and studied.352 The
laboratory must be expanded to a macro-level, showing that the reified and specific
results of the lab actually obtain in the world, ostensibly challenging other interests to

343

Doing, Velvet Revolution at the Synchrotron, 27.

Ibid, 31.
345
Ibid, 33.
346
Ibid, 35.
347
Ibid, 38.
348
Ibid, 45,
349
Ibid, 59.
350
Latour in Knorr-Cetina, K., and M. J. Mulkay, Science Observed: Perspectives on the Social Study of
Science, London: Sage Publications, 1983, 143.
351
Ibid, 144.
352
Ibid, 14.
344

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turn the world into a series of laboratories, each studying the same problem.353 The
laboratory allows the scientist to dissolve the inside/outside dichotomy by showing the
world that a controversy exists outside, flipping it so that it can be manipulated inside
(the lab) and then flipping it again to show how the world consists in the laboratory and
its results.354 This proliferation displaces the previous actors drawn into the controversy
and establishes new interests and stakes. Now, a fact has been produced and to be
overturned new controversies have to be established drawing in the actors and interests
created in the transformations just performed. The displacement of actors, inscriptions,
interests and meanings and the erasure of the series of transformations that resulted in it
is what we call the establishment of a fact.355 In sum what is made in the laboratory
never really leaves the laboratory. Rather, it is the laboratories that proliferate, and they
do so in placeshospital, the food processing industries, government agencieswhere
the scientific proposition is to become relevant. Wherever a science appears to have
spread we find that it is the devices, practices, the features of sampling and
measurement, the rules of interpretation that have been successfully adapted and
implanted.356 The converse of the experimental regress is the fact that all instances of
use are a form of experimentation. Every bureaucratic form checked off, if relevant, is a
source of verification, which, though not outside the system of verification, to which one
wishes they could make reference as a guarantor of certainty, is a diversification of
method, serving as a form of verification for practical reason.
Returning to Science in Action, Latour details laboratories, reprising much of the
previous work. He posits that laboratories consist in inscriptions,357 spokesmen358 and
trials of strength,359 namely, shows of force by inscriptions, machines, scientists and their
interaction. Disputation of the result of a laboratory consists in the creation of a counterlaboratory, a new element here.360 In a sense, because all labs create or involve
themselves in controversies, if only to settle them and even if they are very small, all
353

Ibid, 150.
Ibid, 153.
355
Ibid, 157.
356
Stengers, Cosmopolitics II, 57-58.
357
, Science in Action, 64.
358
Ibid, 70.
359
Ibid, 74.
360
Ibid, 79.
354

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laboratories are counter-laboratories. Counter laboratories succeed by borrowing black
boxes, already established facts and theories and their pre-existing force361 and attempt to
make the actors of previous labs betray their allies,362 and shape new allies.363
Laboratories appeal to nature but the analysis of a laboratory cannot for reasons discussed
above, namely, the Janus face here that nature is the cause that allowed controversies to
be settled versus nature will be the consequence of the settlement which leads to the
third rule of method that since the settlement of a controversy is the cause of Natures
representation not the consequences, we can never use the outcome Nature to explain
how and why a controversy has been settled.364 In sum, one cannot refer to the outcome
of a rule or a semantic effect if one is trying to figure out if one followed a rule, for any
semantic effect and result is consistent with an infinite number of rules. The appeal must
be made to outside the rules and its effects and the user thereof, to the community, which,
perhaps by fiat, decides the correctness or falsity thereof. Again, in this analogy, one can
see that rule following is constrained but in the sense that, we know that a person who
says 2 + 2 = 5 is not following the rules of addition, but if they say 2 + 2 = 4, we cannot
be sure either way. Even accepting an objective view of nature, nature gives us both truth
and error in kind, and it is beyond the epistemic resources of an individual to distinguish
them as such, for, without some immediate reference, social in nature, distinguishing
them ahead of time, one blindly charges as an empiricist into an unsolvable problem of
induction and regress.365
The rest of the book details arguments already seen. The main takeaway point is
that science consists in inscriptions, translations, the shoring up of allies, both human and
non-human, the establishment of interests and controversies and attempts to show in
ones laboratory and its subsequent possible translations that ones solution is the most
satisfying to the relevant interests and stakeholder for the purposes of settling the
controversy. All metaphysics for Latour is transformation. It is the effects of an object
and how it used that decides what it is as well as deciding what the user is. The fact is

361

Ibid, 80.
Ibid, 83. That is to say, look your machines actually make these inscriptions!
363
Ibid, 86.
364
Ibid, 99.
365
Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery, 14-15.
362

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that in building alliances one is transforming ones own interests as well as those of ones
allies.366 Latour proposes that the fundamental ontology of the world consists in actants,
ties and networks. Networks comprise actants tied to each other in novel ways. The
fundamental forces of causality in the worlds are inscription or representation,
transformation, alliance or challenge and so on. The world we know is a series of settled
controversies into black boxes, that is to say, manufactured networks and of controversies
being generated, opening black boxes or creating new ones. Settled facts are the result of
the creation of networks. Fundamental to the settling of facts and their looking real and
ahistorical is that the detours, translations, transformations and the history of alliances
and wars is hidden from view, obfuscated, gone. The reason then scientific facts look
more real than social scientific facts or the humanities, is that scientific facts very easily
hide their history of transformations, while social science largely studies human alliances
and the humanities, in interpretation, are nothing but the meta-reflexive study of
transformations. Thus, because they have a harder time hiding their histories and politics,
they appear less real or strong. The hardening of soft facts and vice versa consists in the
mapping of associations or their obfuscation.367 As such, the fundamental questions of
social science are who is associating with who, what is at stake (cui bono), who is tied to
whom, what is the relevant scale, what are the transformations being made, what are the
black boxes assumed and what is the controversy they are meant to address and what is
the network at work here.
Detouring briefly from Science in Action, it is useful to discuss what is Latours
case study of this new paradigm, Pasteurs discovery of microbes. The complete analysis
of this is done in his work The Pasteurization of France. In this work, Latour describes
what amounts to political interactions between key players, which are doctors, hygienists,
farmers, the French public, microbes and many others.368 Philosophically, Latours main
point in this work is what he calls irreduction369 the notion that the world consists in
366

Ibid, 103-145.
Ibid, 206-209.
368
Latour, Bruno, The Pasteurization of France, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988. The first section,
War and Peace of Microbes, (3-146) details this. Latour performs this analysis for technology in Latour,
Bruno, Aramis, Or, The Love of Technology, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1996, which I will not detail
here.
369
Latour, The Pasteurization of France, 153.
367

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objects, what he term actants,370 which are constantly trying to recruit friends, fight
enemies, exist comfortable and continue to do so. These objects all have agency, which
is not privileged to humans. Here he outlines his philosophy in a way very similar to
Wittgensteins. I will elucidate it here in list form:
1.
2.

3.

Nothing is reducible to other things intrinsically; another actor

must transform it. All things can be made to measure or
represent other things, through the right transformations.371
Reality consists in resisting trials, that is to say, all things are
equally real, but not all real things are equally powerful. Reality
is precisely the capacity of an actant to resist an attack and it
does so by enlisting allies, both human and nonhuman.372
Reference, knowability, equivalence and measurement cannot be
known in advance, but instead are the result of a process of
translation and transformation between two actants in a
network.373 As such, discussion of external referents is
meaningless, because referents exist as touchstones for actants
to use in disputes.374

The rest of this chapter outlines theories of force, of arguments, of rhetoric, of

translation, of controversies and their settlement, of analyzing society, culture and
economy and so forth. While extremely interesting and to be touched upon later, these
are in effect elaborations of all the principles outline above in Laboratory Life, Science in
Action and the Pasteurization of France. In sum, the fundamental idea here is that when
scientists (or social scientists and humanists even) do their job, they link up a unique
combination of material fact, inscription, tacit knowledge, interpretation, fact, value,
politics, rhetoric, influence and so on, in such a manner as to strongly link them. He
posits that all things are equally real but not all real things are equally powerful. Mickey
Mouse has no one to defend him should he be threatened, whereas the Higgs Boson has
the large-hadron collider, the particle physics community, high end quantum linear
algebra, the European Union, some elements of the US Government, the scientific news
media, and the grant structure of Switzerland to back it up. For Latour, non-human
objects can be actors, or actants as he calls them, and thus, calling construction social
does violence to his aims, which is to show that scientific facts can be constructed only
370

Ibid, 158.
Ibid, 158.
372
Ibid, 159.
373
Ibid, 167-169.
374
Ibid, 166.
371

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through alliances of the social, cultural, linguistic, natural and historical and most
importantly, that these alliances, though strong, fall from view once complete.
Latour usefully outlines his theories of modern society and its relationship to
his previous discussions of facts in the works We Have Never Been Modern, On the
Modern Cult of Factish Gods and Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? We Have Never
Been Modern is the source of the large block quotation above. The fundamental
contention of this work is that modernity is premised on the severability of nature and
culture. But nature and culture are the result of associations and their success, not the
producer thereof, especially as the fundamental ontology of the world consists in actants,
their associations and their transformations. As such, because we have never separated
nature and culture, we have never been modern. For Latour, there is no divide between
nature and culture.375 Indeed, the project of modernity, that which includes both science
and democracy was predicated on the notion that we could safely cull apart the natural
and the cultural, the social and the linguistic; both science and democracy depend on it,
for they need there to be a mono-naturalism with a multi-culturalism. Science and
democracy then become the arenas in which the mono naturalism is discovered and the
multi-culturalism is disputed, argued and used to implement nature. The fact of that
matter is though, that subject and object are not so easily divided, the evidence being that
most problems of philosophy emerge from this distinction. Subjects are a special kind of
object and this is true regardless if one is a materialist, like Marx, for whom subjects are
objects with praxis,376 an idealist like Peirce, for whom matter is concretized mind377 or a
Heideggerian, as mentioned above. But, in addition, the extent to which humans are
deprived of agency by both the natural and social sciences is ostensibly a moot point
when one realizes that the agency sufficient for causal and social explanation can be
applied to objects as well. When one wanders through a university and sees the
buildings, the students, the classes, the research, the grant writing and cafeteria and then
says where is the university378 one is in the same position as when on gets tripped up by

375

Latour, We have Never Been Modern.

Marx, Karl, Friedrich Engels, and C. J. Arthur, The German Ideology, New York: International, 1970.
377
Peirce, Writings of Charles S. Peirce.
378
Gilbert Ryle famously makes this argument in The Concept of Mind. Latour in Hackett et al., The
Handbook of Science and Technology Studies.
376

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the fact that the links in the chain of religion are not religious and in science, not
scientific. Similarly, the natural, the cultural and the social each are composed of
elements of each other and are not cleanly separable. One will never find a human that is
free from language or sociality.
What is above called the correlationist circle379 is the notion from Kant and Hegel
that one cannot think the unthought, that as soon as one does they are trapped within
thought again, the same argument I used against being post-metaphysical. The problem
is, this traps us within the linguistic, the social and the real and not just the epistemic, or
even the epistemic at all. Man can never think the world without language, and cannot
discursively understand the social except through language. Language itself cannot be
meaningful without the social and furthermore is not anything without the substratum of
the real, the meat of brains, which makes cognition. What is there to talk about though, if
there is not a reality to objects independent of man? These objects clearly precede us and
in that sense require us to think of them as agents and of possessing a reality all their
own, but not the one of noumena versus phenomena, for just because we are required by
the evidence to understand the real as something beyond us in one sense, that still does
not obviate the fact that the real cannot be understood except as through the social and the
linguistic and furthermore that, as subjects, we are but one type of object.
We are deluded by the belief that just because we create something, a fetish, it
cannot be real or eternal, like a fact.380 Latour proffered that just because we construct
things does not mean they do not have a life of their own. Inverting the Feuerbachian and
Marxist point that we make fetishes where there are none, Latour coins the term factish,
to indicate a combination of the fact and the fetish.381 Latour himself struggled with the
fact that his ontology seemed to suggest that science is but one way of knowing. Hed
have merely gone into the street and asked someone, or, at least had his chauffeur do it.
Still, however, Latour is trying to have his constructivist cake and eat his saving the
planet from Climate Change too. Because Bruno Latour problematizes the notion of truth,

379

Meillassoux, After Finitude.

Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods.
381
Ibid.
380

138
showing it to emerge from custom and opinion, to be constructed, socially and otherwise
and to be political in its formation, he it poses a set of pressing issues for political life.
We are left with a conundrum, either science should rule politics, or there is no
criterion for its exclusive inclusion. Latour, himself, has struggled with this, as he also
maintains. Recently, Latour finally let his writings on construction of facts, matters of
fact versus matters of concern, actor network theory and so on to catch up with him. He
penned the above-cited mea culpa, Has Critique Run out Of Steam, where he proposes
the Matters of Fact vs. Matters of Concern argument. Matters of concern are
controversies, one side of the Janus face and matters of fact are their other side, their
resolution.

Latours worst fear is that in showing that matters of fact are settled matters

of concern, he has armed his enemies with the ability to critique very important research
into climate change, green energy, evolution, medicine and so forth. That is to say,
Latour radicalized through a micro-sociology the concerns of analytic philosophy, which
I discussed above and in doing so unleashed the very problem that this thesis is trying to
address through those arguments.
Some of Latours solutions are resolutely unsatisfying. Evidently, the fact that
science and politics is of the utmost important to Latour led him to write the book The
Politics of Nature. Extending his argument from above, rejecting the nature/culture
divide, he argues that political ecology must let go of nature and its concerns with its
representations in order to truly be able to succeed.382 Addressing his earlier
formulations, Latour argues that political ecology consists in convoking the collective
that is in the active process of politics as the formation of community, rather than politics
as a settled community engaging in discourse and argument.383 Largely the argument here
is one which Latour cannot answer. For the most part, this work merely rehashes his
other ideas, the notion of representations as reified transformations, the role of
spokespersons and the necessity of exploring the power of speaking for another, as itself
a metaphysically potent form of transformation, the importance of political associations
of humans and nonhumans, each with spokespersons and interests and the being satisfied
with the world in process, as a more or less settled and articulated collective, that is a
382
383

Latour, Politics of Nature, 9.

Ibid, 53.

139
network of currently settled black boxes we call facts, groups, factions and so on and the
networks they form with the controversies to be address, namely problems of policy,
science, academia, sociality and so forth.384
One novel idea Latour does proffer here links up to earlier discussions of the
incoherence of the fact value discussion. He proposes that politics and communities
consist in the power to take into account and the power to put into order. The power to
take into account comprises the question how many are we and has two
commandments one, formerly contained in the notion of fact, [do] not simply the
number of propositions to be taken into account in a discussion what he coins as the
semi-obvious neologism perplexify and two formerly contained in the notion of
value, make sure that the number of voices that participate in the articulation of
propositions is not arbitrarily short circuited what her terms consultation. The power
to arrange answers the question can we live together? and similarly consists in two
commandments, the first, formerly contained in the notion of value is discus the
compatibility of new propositions with those which are already instituted, in such a way
as to maintain them in all the same common world that will give them their legitimate
place a process he calls hierarchization and second, formerly contained in the notion
of fact, once the propositions have been instituted, you shall no longer question their
legitimate presence at the heart of collective life or institution.385 Foreshadowing my
later discussions of institutions and the conditions within democracy that allow is to
internally make science the correct epistemic reference point he proposes normative rules
deriving from the deconstruction of fact and value that can make for a successful making
of human collective life into a process as well as the guarantee that science is properly
used to help us all. In sum, one in representing others must charitably and fully represent
their stakes, interest and takes. Secondly, the conversation must finish of its own accord,
and one cannot exclude voices, even ones that may be unreasonable. Thirdly, rational
reconstruction must be performed as a collective in order to make sure the common world
exists as a coherent epistemic and political project. Finally, matters of concern that

384

Ibid, Convoking the collective 57; Spokespersons, 62; 69; Associations 70; Articulation and
peace 82; and 87.
385
Ibid, 109.

140
become matters of fact shall not have their legitimacy questioned, though this is premised
on the fact that those, which become the heart of collective life are the right ones. One
can see that these ideas are very useful and fundamentally link up epistemology and
politics in the direction of politics, as before his discussion of science politicized
epistemology. That said, Latour did not succeed in his project, as he did not formulate a
way to incorporate these demands, which is why he wrote his most recent book Inquiry
into the Modes of Existence, which I will address last.
Latour turns to what he calls Eco theology386 in an attempt to link back up objects,
animals, instruments of measurement and inscription with the man on the street again, to
show how his ontology does not full allow relativism, for, the networks within which we
embed our relations to construct facts admits a degree of compassion for actants other
than ourselves, with conditions like Climate Change to be truly apocalyptic. Though
objects have agency in and of themselves, there is a meaningful sense, in which, due to
the correlationist circles highlighted above, we construct them as much as they construct
us and thus saving our history is a necessary and owed thing. This perspective comes off
much like the late life mysticism of Heidegger where he proclaimed man is the herald of
being and language is its house. The fundamental proposition of his essay Will the Non
Humans Be Saved is that we must take the needs of non-humans seriously and by this he
means religiously.387 As such, Latour seems to propose to answer the religiously
pernicious challenge to science and democracy that seemingly emerged from his work
with religion itself. I survey much of this work, not because I find his solutions
convincing but to analyze in full the breadth and depth of his career. As it stands, the
main works of importance discussed thus far to the project here are Laboratory Life,
Science in Action, The Pasteurization of France, We Have Never Been Modern and Why
Has Critique Run out of Steam. I mention The Politics of Nature, On the Modern Cult of
Factish Gods, Will the Non-Humans Be Saved and Inquiry Into the Modes of Existence to
show that Latours concerns are very much my own and that in his career he produced
some very radical, empirically useful, philosophically salient and interesting ideas, but

386

Latour, Bruno, "Will the Non-Humans Be Saved? An Essay in EcoTheology," Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute 15, (2009): 459-79.
387
Ibid, 460.

141
ones which in problematizing truth led to exactly the problems I am trying to solve. It
seems then that both realism and constructivism offer us no way out of our dilemmas!
Before finishing with Latour and moving on to solve the problems raised above
through both analytic philosophy and Latours postmodern anthropology, it is important
to discuss Latours more convincing analyses of the failures of his project and the
solutions which will provide certainty later on. Latour wrote Reassembling the Social as
an attempt to rethink social theory. He addresses the problem that seemed to emerge
from the fact that sociology could explain religion, art, culture, and gender and so on with
great facility, but hit a wall with science. This led some to proclaim science
fundamentally different, but for Latour, this instead suggests that our notions about
religion and art were wrong in the first place and that those things, which involve social
forces, should receive the same charity of explanation. He identifies five sources of
uncertainty. The first is that there are no groups, only group formation.388 This is to
address the problems noted above, the social cannot be used to explain as it is what is
trying to be explained, just as the settling of controversies cannot be made with reference
to nature as nature is the result of settling controversies and politics cannot take
community as pre-given and the source of arguments as community is the result of
politics and argumentation. The second source of uncertainty is that action is
overtaken389 which is to say that action is, in part, opaque to the actor, but, because of the
moorings of perspective and the need to account for meaning in analysis, both for
humans and nonhumans, this opacity extends to the social scientist trying to analyze it.
The third source of uncertainty is that objects have agency,390 which is confusing because
it is what makes the social construction of science less onerous and a coherent notion,
while at the same time rendering analyses of the social fully incomplete without their
attention to the natural forces at work. The fourth source of uncertainty is the
distinction between matters of fact and matters of concern391 which addressed above is
the fundamental Janus faced nature of conflicts and adversarial epistemology. That the
world is fundamentally different from the perspective of action and the perspective of
388

Latour, Reassembling the Social, 27.

Ibid, 43.
390
Ibid, 63.
391
Ibid, 87.
389

142
reflection is a fundamental problem. We are trying to discuss action but we are always in
the position of reflection, we may not reflect as unreflective beings. Correlationism
strikes again. The last source of uncertainty is the nature of reflection itself, what he calls
writing down risky accounts392 which is to say that we are always occluded by our
prejudice and reflective capacities as these are the means by which we analyze the world.
Further analysis of these results in texts about texts and does not then offer us the object
in itself that we want. This is not to say that reflexivity is a bad thing, it certainly should
be included in accounts and the solution to relativity is always more relativism.393 But,
as with society as process not product, we are never done, nor could we ever be. The
impossibility of finality renders our attempts, if one sticks to the traditional notions of
realism and absolutism, useless.
Finally though, Latour gives us four solutions to skepticism. I am going to later
address the fact that relativism is not subjectivism, though the answer has been hinted to
above. From an analytical relativism point of view, skepticism presumes a position
outside, a view from nowhere, which assumes the solution to the problem that it is
formulated to address and as Latour addresses, this is the case with our risky textual
accounts never being complete. Latour writes:
When Descartes asks us to take seriously the question whether or not the people
walking in the street might not be automats, the only sensible answer should have been:
But Ren why dont you go down in the street and check for yourself? Or at least ask
your valet to go check it for you? Ego cogito might be open to question, but why dont
you try cogitamus?394
Just as in analytic philosophy the constraints of realism and absolutism produce
the impossibility of translation, skepticism emerges from a notion of absolute knowledge
consisting in subjects representing the world as is, without the burden of subjectivity.
Latour offers what he calls four sources of certainty time, instruments, colleagues and
institutions.395 Time allows for certainty because in time associations are formed and, in
392

Ibid, 121.
Ibid, 122.
394
Latour in Hackett et al., The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies but this pagination is from
<http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/99-HANDBOOK-GB.pdf>, 18.
395
Ibid, 7.
393

143
fact, in a sense, time is the product of transformations of associations. It is by mooring
objects in history, giving them a lineage that certainty can be achieved. Opening a black
box does not destroy the facticity of the fact, but by showing its procession, guarantees it.
Instruments guarantee certainty through their reliability, their methods of transcription
and translation, their embodiment of theory and their allowance of black boxing certain
matters of fact in order to produce precise and reliable inscriptions in issues of concern.
Of course, as discussed above, instruments are Humean and Wittgensteinian nightmares
without rules, which, of course, are provided by the aforementioned time and community,
or colleagues. That reality is produced through discussions in time involving instruments
recording transformations is not then a free pass to subjectively create the world anew,
after all, that people must be convinced and that convincing is important to establishing
reality does not mean that people can be convinced of everything. Finally, institutions do
much of the work of philosophy for us, as concretized habits, traditions, methods and
language.
The importance of Latour is that his ideas result from an anthropological and
novel way of thinking about the practice of science and knowledge production more
generally and that they accord with the discussions of the problems of truth above as well
as directly addressing them and proving them. But as discussed, the question of truth and
politics is why we are discussing the problems of realism, relativism and truth in the first
place and we now see that Latour as well as the aforementioned accounts of truth seem to
raise the very problems we are trying to solve. Latour, at least, attempts to provide
solutions to questions at hand and, for the most part, he fails, though, in his analysis of
sources of uncertainty and of certainty he hits on a very important point.
In the next chapter I am going to argue the following points. First, using criteria
internal to practice, discourse and relativism outlined above, as well as Latours sources
of certainty, I am going to argue that relativism is not subjectivism, for reasons both
epistemic and political. I am going to then discuss the problems with skepticism and the
usefulness of institutions. I am going to argue that due to the nature of truth, of facts and
values and because of Latours arguments about the political nature of science, that
epistemology and politics bear a fundamental relationship to each other. In its weakest
form, this is the idea that every system of epistemology contains and implies a set of

144
claims and habits that suggest ethical modes of behavior and political modes of
organizing community. Every political system, in turn, provides a set of claims and
habits that are distinctly epistemological. This combined with the fact that subjectivism
and the importance of institutions will lead us to a relationship between epistemology and
politics that though relativistic is on firm ground. Finally, I will give a weak formulation
of the solution I have been aiming at this whole time. I am going to argue that the
relationship between truth and politics, epistemology and politics suggest a fundamental
relationship between science and democracy. I am going to discuss the ways in which
science is fundamentally democratic and democracy fundamentally scientific. I am going
to then argue that based on other motivating reasons for accepting each alone, we should
accept both together and show that, in doing so, we establish a reciprocal foundation for
each other that both soothes Latours anxieties and addresses the problems of
foundations, rule following and relativism addressed in the first section.

Chapter 3: Political and Epistemic Systems

Recap.
I have now introduced my thesis, by formulating the basic terms of the
relationship of truth to politics. I argued there are two formulations, the classic and the
modern, the latter of which consists in the question of the relationship between science
and democracy. In the classic formulation there were roughly four perspectives: the
absolutist or technocratic, which argues that truth should take precedence over politics,
the skeptical, which agrees, but thinks we have too limited access to truth for this to
work, the traditionalist which argues that truth erodes custom and the pluralist which
argues truth is oppressive. All four of these positions hold the same stagnant views on
both truth and politics, believing them to be almost defined oppositionally.
I discussed, in addition, basic definitions of politics, science and democracy and
found some more useful than others, though all captured key features. I furthermore
highlighted that the skeptical, traditionalist and pluralist accounts all presuppose the
absolute one. The traditionalist and pluralist accounts, if to be made coherent, collapse
either because of the absolutists arguments or into the skeptical ones in order to defeat
them.
I discussed problematizations of truth, politics and science in the twentieth
century. In the first part, I discussed analytic philosophers conceptions of truth and
science and showed how they could give us a conception of truth which is relativistic,
though still does what we want truth to do as a concept, while not sliding into
subjectivism or skepticism. Furthermore, I addressed the fairly revolutionary ideas of
Bruno Latour on politics and science and tried to argue that, in a sense, they are what
follows from the analytic conception of truth.
In this section, I am going to more forcefully argue for some of the claims
above as well as get to the key project of my thesis, which is discussing the relationship

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between science and politics. At base, I wish to argue that epistemology and politics are
fundamentally related, either in a weak form, in which a finite set of epistemic and
political systems range over each other or in a stronger form, arguing that the two sets are
roughly equivalent. This latter claim will remain, for the most part, implied by what I
have to say, but its explication will have to be put off. Nonetheless, central to my
argument is the notion that epistemically, science is democratic and politically,
democracy is scientific. Because they both address key features about each other and key
intuitions of ours about politics and epistemology and bear a strong relationship to each
other, I argue that we ought to accept either and thus both as our grounding. The central
implication of these claims is that the status of a hard scientific fact is no more coercive
than that of a soft political fact backed by consent and coercion.

Section I: Relativism is Not Subjectivism, or Nave

Skepticism
I will now get to the main thrust of my argument. At the risk of losing sight of the
past, I will reprise my main argument. In my introduction and first chapter I outlined the
problem of truth and politics. At base, this is an ancient problem stemming from the fact
that traditional theories of truth imply that should truth and politics come into contact,
truth should always win. This brought on several solutions, the traditionalist, the
pluralistic, the absolutist and the skeptical.
In order for my argument to be of relevance, pluralism and traditionalism cannot
be true as accounts, even if realism is true. Realism itself is challenged by skepticism and
constructivism. Ultimately, my argument should work from any premise, but it is
important now to discuss the role of skepticism, especially in it institutional form and
following that, the role of academia, one of its main instantiations.
Briefly, I would like to return to my analysis of the traditional responses to the
problem of truth in politics. The main first responses were that of realism and its natural
suggestion, skepticism. Realism suggests that truth is real, accessible and that therefore it

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should govern politics. Realism begs the question though that this thesis is trying to
answer, namely, if we are to allow truth in politics, what do we consider the truth and
who do we consider to have access to it? Should the criteria for truth be internal or
external to politics and if external; how do we adjudicate that? Furthermore, if truth truly
does suppress free discussion of opinion as the pluralists says, or erode tradition as the
traditionalists say, must truth then play a different role in politics? How do we decide,
politically, to which realism we will subscribe?
The easiest response to realism is skepticism. Skeptics either believe we do not
have access to the truth, that we have limited access to the truth or in an extreme form
that there is no truth. Most people are skeptical toward epistemic systems other than their
own. Science, for its part, attempts to be skeptical even about its own knowledge
products. Skeptics may thus believe that truth should play a hesitant role in politics, or
that there can be no universal criteria for its applicability. Nonetheless, if this is true, the
political system has to decide pragmatically sometimes whether or not a specific fact or
class of facts is admissible and thus skepticism, being more an epistemic accompaniment
to realism (which is both an epistemology and metaphysics) forces the same questions as
realism. If the only things which we can trust is the subjective truth of our immediate
sense experience, or in a more extreme form, that we are only certain of our own
individual existence, then we are stuck. We must then never act or make rules for how
we can still validly draw inferences and conclusions
Pluralism, as we have seen, is mainly a rebuttal against strict realism. It argues
that because truth suppresses opinion, it is inimical to the public sphere. Arendt,
however, argues that basic facts should be admitted. Here is the problem with this
though. This implies that in order for the pluralist account to work, there must be some
form of truth applicable in the last instance, on which opinions can be based and which
can settle disputes. Any criteria for fact though that does not divide facts into basic
subjective sense impressions and any and all facts of a higher order are subject to the
skeptical rebuttal, of either Hume or Descartes. If elementary facts are required, but
these facts are of a higher order than sense impressions and can be collectively agreed
upon, pluralism must provide an account as to why those facts are a legitimate
ontological category, as to why some extrapolation of causality and some public certainty

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is allowed, but not more than that. Is the fact that the Germans invaded Belgium on a
certain day really less controversial than gravity? Thus, pluralism must either be a form
of skepticism or must be incoherent and by fiat. It can provide no criteria for which facts
are suppressive and which are not, except again by reference to the internal workings of
the political system, which brings as back to square one for establishing what those
criteria are.
Traditionalism is the view that truth erodes tradition. If it is the case though that a
truth erodes tradition, why should tradition take precedence? If one makes the argument
that a tradition may be better for a community than a policy based on truth, is it sophistry
to suggest then all that person is saying is that there are two truths applicable here, one of
a non political fact and the other a political fact and the latter is the more important one?
That traditions must be revised slowly with regards to facts against is only a pragmatic
and still truth-based claim. Traditionalism cannot find any support save in the very
tradition in question which is meant to be defending with reasons and to someone set on
the truth or against the tradition this is unconvincing. Traditionalists sometimes vary
their arguments and say that because human mastery is impossible and knowledge
forever uncertain, traditions or changes, which occur within traditions, are a safer and
better bet. This, one can see, is either just skepticism or against subject to my earlier
criticism, that the traditionalist is deluding themselves as to their stance. Traditionalists
thus are impugning facticity in general or are making arguments about factual truths
themselves.
Thus, we can see that all positions classically mobilized to deal with the problem
of truth and politics do not really do so, either moving the issue to another level, or
misperceiving himself or herself. Ostensibly, what I mean to suggest is that all classic
and some modern formulations of the problem of truth to politics fall into the realist or
skeptic camp. In the last century, however, both realism and skepticism have been highly
problematized. I addressed earlier the problems with truth. As for the problem of
skepticism, I say this, either it is false, in which case I can proceed, or it is true but still

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needing criteria for action396, is irrelevant, that is, as en epistemic position.
Institutionalized skepticism, however, is a very important part of a democracy, but that is
precisely because it is not wholesale skepticism, but like the Neuraths boat mentioned
above takes aim only at one broken plank at a time.
So my problem began with the fact that realism seemed to suggest the
subservience of science to politics. Traditionalism and pluralism demonstrate the
political insufficiency of realism, but skepticism ultimately takes the reigns. Skepticism
is often used to motivate relativism, as some of the accounts I mentioned above indicate,
but skepticism also raises the same problems as relativism. It is for this reason that a lot
is at stake in demonstrating that there is a habitable form of relativism that is neither
subjectivism nor skepticism. The relativistic rebuttals to skepticism and subjectivism
take many of the same forms. I have touched upon many of them already and this is
largely a rephrasing thereof.
The first objection I will address is the correlationist one. Correlationism begins
with Kant. Kant demonstrated the futility of trying to think about the world free from
human thought, for to do so would be to think the world as if one is not thinking about
the world, which leads to a performative contradiction. Notably, one can think about
thinking about the unthought and thus can posit the idea of the world as it is unthought,
but it is forever foreclosed to us. That it is forever foreclosed to us makes it somewhat of
a conceptual fiat. Thus Kant proposed the thing in itself/thing for us distinction, but this
does not really work. If things in themselves are inaccessible, then first, we cannot know
that they are things in themselves at all, which is a contradiction, as we are then saying
we know about something we cannot know about. That said, Kants first point is true.
We have no access to the world except through our access to it. This is tautological.
Quentin Meillassoux who coined the term correlationism thought that evidence of the
396

It seems one of the only ways to take skepticism head on is through the Kantian approach of establishing
noumena, things in themselves and phenomena, things as they appear. If and when we cleave these, we get
into a problem I mentioned earlier citing Nietzsche, that foreclosing the actual forecloses the realm of
appearance too by definition, for, we then have no means by which to establish the realm of appearance as
appearance. More importantly is Hegels rebuttal to Kant, which is basically that, all things are either
things or arent. If one considers knowledge that a thing exists knowledge about a thing, then it is a
contradiction to say that there are things that exist of which we have no knowledge and thus the foreclosing
of noumena seems impossible. I find Quines notion that things exist according to a conceptual frame an
elegant way of dealing with both absolute knowledge and skepticism.

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worlds vast age and time without humans posed a problem for correlationism, though
notably, he said we cannot escape the correlationist circle either. As such, he proffers
something like my solution, where some kind of absolute knowledge as understood
through our conceptual apparatus must be possible, but unmediated access is not. This
kind of objection is common such as arguments of the form scientific evidence strongly
suggests that the universe is more than 10 billion years old, but representations
constructed by humans have existed for less than a million. Thus we can infer that there
was a world existing independent of human representation for billions of years.397 This
same author, however, goes on to admit that this inference does not show in itself that
truth cannot consist in a relation only among representations, because a proponent of
[this] theory could simply maintain that there were no representations and hence no true
representations until intelligent humans evolved [T]he aim of representations should be
to describe the world, not just to relate to other representations. My argument does not
refute thetheory, but it shows that it implausibly gives minds too large a place in
constituting truth. Unfortunately, it doesnt as this author contradicts himself.
The way things are is itself a posit as is the world independent of human
representation. We may even believe these are necessary posits in order for our
conceptual system to work. Their truth, however, cannot be validated. The existence of
a universe before humans is perfectly fine, but we still only know of the universe before
humans through instruments and machines and recordings and transcriptions created by
humans, through human rules, subject to our conceptual representations. Latour proposes
an interesting metaphysics in which non-human actors, his actants, can observe, in a
rudimentary way. All causality is vicarious398 and consists in transformation and so on.
As such, the world independent of human thought is a world independent of one kind of
thought and representation which simply is an extension of how objects and particles and
nodes in networks are already doing work of information gathering, translation,
transcription and transformation. This line of thought is interesting but is not necessary
to this argument.

397
398

Thagard and Findlay, The Cognitive Science of Science, 82.

Graham Harmans term in Harman, On Vicarious Causation. Collapse II.

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Suffice it to say, there are multiple correlationist circles. Firstly, we cannot
conceive of the world except as through the notion of our conceptions of it, we cannot
think the unthought. Secondly, we cannot conceive of human thought without language,
for our thought is fundamentally linguistic and to linguistically conceive of non-linguistic
thought poses similar problems. As such, we cannot conceive of the world outside of
language games, which decide them. Third, we cannot conceive of language without the
social, for then we would have a private language which would be impossible, unless we
want to conceive of a language without the certainty of meaning, one where we arent
sure that we mean what we mean, but this then poses a problem for us. Fourth, we
cannot conceive of the self without a world, for otherwise we are just the world, the
solipsistic view, but one which is incoherent. Fifth, we cannot conceive of any of this
without the positing of the world, for to say there is no world is to also performatively
contradict oneself. Thus, Latour was right, we must posit the imbrication of the
linguistic, the social and the real all along! The supposition of sociality and language
presupposes an inheritance of traditions and practices which render them meaningful and
a world in which they are practically embedded.
Thus we encounter our first rebuttal to both Cartesian skepticism and absolutism.
The Cartesian skeptic thinks he conceives of the world without the world. Before
Descartes has even gotten to his exercise of being unable to doubt that he doubts, he has
presumed the meaningfulness of thought and of doubt, which presupposes others, as well
as the meaningfulness of being at all which presupposes the world. Descartes error is to
think he can conceive of skepticism outside of the bounds of tradition, language and
meaning, which are necessary to render the possibility of skepticism in the first place!
Notice, the structure of this argument is much like the one discussed in the context of
relativism, The absolutist says to say everything is relative results in an absolute and
thus it is a contradiction or if everything is relatively true to a frame, then there is a
frame in which things are absolutely true and thus there is a contradiction! The
relativist, however, can point out that the absolutist is thus asking someone to step outside
of a conceptual frame in order to imagine choosing between conceptual frames, as if it
were cognition which preceded conceptual frames and allowed us to choose between
them, rather than conceptual frames which render cognition meaningful in the first place

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such that we can discuss the problem at all. It is a fact that the belief in absolute truth is
occurring within a conceptual frame. The absolutist is trying to argue that there can be
truth outside of a conceptual frame, but through a conceptual frame. At the worst, this
renders relativism contradictory in implication and absolutism contradictory in practice.
One cannot step outside of a conceptual frame, however, to mediate and choose
between them in the first place and on this count, relativism is correct, absolutism has no
way to solve this problem. Absolutism is right though, that relativism conceived in
certain ways leads to a contradiction, though to mediate on that presupposes the
possibility of stepping outside of a conceptual frame at all. The insufficiency of global
relativism and the incoherence of absolutism suggest the need for something else.
Remember, though, that weak relativism all things which are absolutely true are
relatively true and bite the bullet relativism (which weak relativism can entail) that
every claim, except this one, is relative to a frame evade this problem. Weak relativism
is undeniable true. One asks why bite the bullet relativism should be accepted, but by
now I think it should be obvious why, there are reasons extrinsic to the claim itself,
namely the incoherence of other alternatives and the success of a research program rooted
in this form that motivate us to accept this formulation.
I would also like to re-state the fact that absolute truth, the world without our
representations of it, the subject without objects and objects without the subject, and pure
instantiations of the social, linguistic and real, or the natural and cultural are abstractions.
Mathematics is an abstraction, but again, luckily, its axioms refer to a series of publically
demonstrated practices. One can do mathematics. One cannot do pure subjectivity or
absolute truth. There are, in empirical fact, only ever assemblages of the subjects and
objects, nature and culture, language, sociality and reality, intersubjectivity instead of
objectivity and so on. These abstractions lack ontological coherence or standing. We
cannot say they exist except by virtue of the human mind. We would then be forced into
saying that absolute truth independent of the human mind exists by virtue of the human
mind. Thus Latours attempts to move us beyond the subject object division, the nature
culture divide and so on are rooted in empirical fact.

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Latours argument argues that there is no evidence for nor can there be evidence
for absolute truth, we can only point to relative truth. There is no evidence for nor can
there be evidence for objectivity, we can only point to intersubjectivity. There is no
evidence for nor can there be evidence for subjects without objects or objects without
subjects, we can only point to subjects in the objective world and objects as conceived
through subjectivity. There is no evidence for nor can there be evidence for anything
involving humans that is not simultaneously involving language, sociality and reality, we
can only point to their networks. There is no evidence for nor can there be evidence for
thought without bias, or language and practice without a tradition which precede them,
we can only point to multiple prejudices cancelling each other out and humans with
histories. What is the use of an abstraction to which we cannot point in the world in
actual fact? The absence of evidence or the impossibility of providing it is neither the
evidence of absence nor the evidence of impossibility, but it is the closest possible thing
to that. Thus, the burden is on those who use these abstractions to show that they are
conceptually necessary and, if so, have to be approached with great caution and a lot of
reflexivity.
A lot of what this perhaps highlights is that there are fundamental problems with
how we conceived of many of our oppositions in the first place: nature and culture,
subject and object, relative and absolute, representation and reality. I am unaware of very
many solutions. For example, I have found ways of describing reality that posit our
fundamental way of relating is non-representational, such as with Hubert Dreyfus, Andy
Clark, Enactivism, Embodied-Embedded-Extended Cognition and so on very productive,
but their very source of critique in representations seems to stem from the impossibility
of non-representational conceptions.399 Speculative realism is a movement in philosophy,
which seeks to address the problem of correlationism, but it too struggles with it. It either
takes a tack as proposed above, that the correlationist circle is unavoidable but that
absolute knowledge is possible and there is one absolute, that of contingency400 or posits
vicarious causation and the notion that all objects have representational capacities as with

399

Though, these should probably be judged by the fact that they are very good for generating empirical
solutions.
400
Meillassoux, After Finitude.

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Object Oriented Ontology.401 Suffice it to say, abandoning the subject/object division has
been a goal of mine for some time, but what more and more seems to be the case is that
the reasons for abandoning it stem from argumentation internal to its methods of
describing the world in the first place. Abandoning it as a starting assumption leads to
produce results, but results in incoherence if it tries to butt heads with its opposite.
Though the success or failure of my project does not depend on these problems, that they
seem indissoluble, almost new antimonies of reason is part and parcel of much of the
conceptual work that must be done to defend relativism, while accepting knowledge.
All of this shows that the relativistic consequences of the analytic philosophers
discussed above, such as externalism about meaning, interest based relativism, the
traditional, discursive and practical basis of rule following, the extra-scientific
adjudication of theory and so on, render truth relative in one sense or another, but they do
not allow for everything to be the case. To posit that relativism is subjectivism and
allows for fair game of every type of claim is to presume a space outside of relativism
that is being problematized in the first space. Additionally, skepticism does this as well.
What the preceding arguments show is precisely Otto Neuraths boat. Relativism is not
the claim that there is no truth, but that truth consists in the boat one is using to sail upon
the ocean and one cannot see the boat from all sides; attempting to do so requires a view
from the ocean, which results in drowning. One may not get out of the boat, but it is also
useless to deny the existence of the boat or the ocean upon which it floats, just as
imagining access to that ocean or the boat without the boat is a contradiction in terms.
Furthermore, skepticism, that is testing the weakness of planks in hopes that the ocean
does not burst in,402 by building and re-building different parts of the boat while standing
on different parts of it. Eventually, the boat will be completely different from the boat
that existed before. The mutuality between these two boats can only occur by reference

401

See all citations from Harman.

This is what Zizek argues Lacans idea of the real, symbolic and imaginary are. The symbolic is our
conceptual apparatus. The real is that which cannot be conceptualized and the imaginary is the phantasmic
element used to fill in the gaps. When the real intrudes into the symbolic, that is, in Kuhns terms, when
the problems of basic science have been too much to handle, the imaginaries sutures get ripped apart and
the symbolic must be reformulated. Zizek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989;
Zizek, Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London: Verso, 1999; and
Zizek, Slavoj. Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso, 2012.

402

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to the different instantiations, which existed in the middle. Politically, and this is very
important later, we are in the same position and this is exactly what democracy posits!
Democracy does not think we can escape the boat of community, but attempting
to scrap the whole thing and start anew results in our failure. Note, this metaphor does
not foreclose revolution either in science or in politics and that is because of one more
possibility. Either by gathering materials from the oceans while someone sails or by
taking apart part of the boat, one can builds a new boat in the hull of the old and throws it
out into the ocean. This boat either will be then a complete re-assemblage of part of the
old boat or is built from materials completely foreign to the structure of the old boat, but
have been acquired only by virtue of having had been sailing upon it. Furthermore, one
must be very sure of the sanctity of the structure of that boat when one throws it out into
the ocean. This is why one can adopt a theory, which conceptually allows for empirical
results, which later force the abandonment of that theory, even without a meta-theory to
guarantee inter-operability. Similarly, radical disjunctures can occur between political
systems, but probably only if the new system is built with a degree of patience, collective
will and collection through the resources of the old political system.
If we recall Latours four sources of certainty, they are time, colleagues,
institutions and instruments. I take this to be a formulation of much of what I said earlier.
Colleagues is to say sociality. Instruments is to say technology and practices.
Institutions is to say politics and traditions. Time is to say that humans have to act,
namely that even if skepticism is, in a sense, true, one must continue to act which
requires presumptions of some kind. It is true, these things do guarantee certainty for we
cannot presume ourselves outside of their purview.
Quickly, I must address the only objection perhaps possible to my arguments
about the guarantors of sociality and language.
It may be objected that it is impossible to separate the beliefs I form by the direct
exercise of my own powers from those I get from the exercise of the faculties of others.
After all, we acquire language, concepts, and the tools for making judgments from other
persons. Is it even possible to adopt a policy of acquiring and justifying ones own
beliefs by the use of ones own powers?

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I think the answer is yes. The important issues if not whether we acquired beliefs
in our pre-reflective state from other people, but whether we can retreat to an extreme
egoist positions once we start reflecting.403
In other words, the question is not the history of our concepts but whether or not
our concepts once acquired can be used to doubt. The analogy he then uses is someone
who acquires political concepts from her parents and then uses those to change her beliefs
about morality and politics. This analogy does not hold. The person in the position of
using the resources of previous moral beliefs to become skeptical about those who gave
them to her is using an entire conceptual system and is not scratching that entire
conceptual system to begin again. Furthermore, it is not just that we empirically acquired
our language and thought from others, though this is true, but that philosophically,
semantics and thought are only meaningful if others, a community, a language and
practices exist. Furthermore, consider someone who gained a concept through a history
and then doubted the history of acquiring that concept. I suppose this is possible, but
only in those instances in which the history of the concept does not play a role in the
ontology of it. That is to say, some concepts histories are central to the definition of that
concept, as the discussion of Putnams externalism of meaning indicated in the earlier
chapters. Furthermore, consider the concept of history itself, which means the causal
lineage that occurred to produce something in this instance. This is conceptually
impossible without the reference of things that occurred; otherwise it is nonsensical.
Because the series of events which lead up to the formation of the concept of history are
the only ones the person has, to state that they did not happen is to state that one has a
concept of history by virtue of things occurring but that not the ones which one thought
had occurred, despite those being the only reference point by which they could form that
concept in the first place.
Luckily, the author of the above quotation is actually in the game of defeating this
epistemic egoist view. The argument the author makes is quite convincing, namely, we
can be in the position of skepticism or we cannot be. To be in the state of global
skepticism invites the rebuttal of Descartes as well as my rebuttal to Descartes above.

403

Zagzebski, Epistemic Authority, 153.

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Thus we have reason to not be skeptical about ourselves. If we are epistemically
conscientious which is defined as using [ones] faculties in the best way one can in
order to satisfy [ones] definition of truth we will, a posteriori, come to the conclusion
that other normal humans are in the same position with respect to epistemic powers (and I
would argue, maybe even have to a priori accept this). If we are to treat like cases alike,
then if we trust ourselves we should trust those humans we believe to be similarly
conscientious. We may doubt the individual conscientiousness of one person but not
coherently of people in general, but trust is the default position.404 Under the assumption
that [there is] no relevant difference between [ones] general epistemic faculties and those
of others, [one] ought to have the same attitude toward their faculties as [one] does
toward [ones] own.405 The general principle is that insofar as [one] trusts [herself] in
virtue of having certain properties, [she] owes the same trust to others whose possession
of those properties is something [she] discover[s] when [she is] behaving in a way [she]
trust[s].406
There is one final argument about relativism, subjectivism and skepticism. It
stems from previous considerations on trust, epistemic authority, institutions, community
and so on and will concern much of the rest of this thesis, namely that ones political
system, in virtue of implying, entailing and fostering epistemic claims, habits and virtues,
similarly guarantees epistemic trust and consistency. This argument is nonfoundationalist. It is not of the form, one should not be an epistemic skeptic, but is of the
form, if one is in a political system, one should trust a certain epistemic system, or
perhaps a series of them, which will importantly lead to the fact that democrats should
trust scientists.
In order that a political system exists, humans must be organized into a
collectivity, or a community. Pragmatically and empirically, individuals cannot survive
without others. Furthermore, we have seen that communities consist in practices and are
the guarantors of semantic meaning. Politics consists fundamentally in traditions and
institutions of organizing human kind. Both philosophically and empirically, the
404

Ibid, 55.
Ibid, 56.
406
Ibid, 57.
405

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possibility of Crusoe surviving on an island presupposes, as Marx says, the whole of
England. Furthermore, existing in a community presumes that humans act certain ways
to each other, or within certain bounds. Acting in certain ways to people buttresses and
often assumes conceptual schemas about interaction, normally called ethics. Politics
furthermore consists in publically adjudicating interests, discussing problems and
constituting ones own subjectivity by and through reference to the collective resources
provided to a person to do so.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.

8.

If we are to exist together we must have a baseline of trust in each other,

that we will take care of one another, or, in the least, not harm one
another
Trusting one another presupposes a criteria and method by which one
can adjudicate trust
Furthermore, humans must interact with each other to survive which
requires trust in other humans carrying out their word, providing
information and so on.
Again, this presupposes a criteria and method by which one can
adjudicate trust
These methods of trust require the assumption that others have the same
faculties to evaluate trust and furthermore similar or the same standards
or at least a way to discuss those standards in public
In sum, the very existence of a socio-political community presupposes
an intimately connected set of ethical and epistemic claims involving
interaction.
If we trust humans to be reliable enough to not harm us (in the weakest)
or to help us (in the strongest), to be able to make the same evaluations
and to be honest enough to adjudicate these baseline conditions, then we
must have trust in each others capacities to evaluate reality, claims
about knowledge and reality and meta-claims concerning these.
Therefore, the existence of political community presupposes epistemic
trust in communal and other individuals authority as well as a method
by which to either adjudicate when to trust others or a method by which
to discuss methods by which to do so.

Inasmuch as any political system must establish interests, the state of affairs and
the ability to plan around those interests and the state of affairs to do things and
furthermore, because inaction is not a choice, communities must do things, then the
community must have a collective epistemology about the world, about practice and so
on or a method by which to adjudicate such concerns. If our political community is
successfully enacting policies, or we presume that it ought to (and ought implies can)
then we must believe in a baseline epistemic system or meta-epistemic system for policy.

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Because policy concerns the adjudication of interests, we must have a system by which to
establish interests and points of view, and, as such, we must have an inter-subjective
mechanism for guaranteeing the world, those who inhabit it and methods by which the
collective can manipulate the world.
Finally, there is no a priori reason to suppose that the process of covenanting
enough to establish institutions, time, communities and so forth is substantially
ontologically different from the covenants, which secure the success of scientific
instrumentation or mathematical axiomatization.407 Inasmuch as politics consists in
publics, institutions and traditions and the success or failure of science and truth consists
in publics, institutions and traditions, to suppose that these sets are different ontologically
or in practice requires a posteriori evidence of the case, which is to say, there is reason to
suppose like things are alike, that the traditions which guarantee politics are ontologically
similar in virtue of being traditions to the ones which guarantee science, though they
may, in practice, be different traditions, though, again, due to the collective and coherent
nature of traditions, that they are different has to be supposed. In sum, simplicity,
coherence, ontological similarity and so on force us to suppose that the conditions in
which politics consist are ontologically similar to those which guarantee science and that,
without further investigation, a good working hypothesis is that in practice they are the
same too.
Inasmuch as politics thus commits us to the necessity of making certain epistemic
and truth claims and a political system constrains human behaviors and thoughts and only
allows a certain set of claims or meta-claims to be valid, existence within a political
system, at least when one is operating within that political system, which is any time one
is in public, is collectively acting, is enacting policy, is adjudicating interests and so on,
one is foreclosed against global skepticism and relativism. One must be in the position of
Otto Neuraths boat and furthermore, must decide on precisely how to elucidate its
architecture.

407

My adviser wants to make sure I note that this argument and point 6 above are recapitulations of the
Hobbesian discussion much further above.

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In effect, the skeptic and the all is fair game relativist can only exist in the private
realm, lest they break the trust of the public community, which guarantees their life,
safety, and the very meaning of their words and thoughts. With this prelude in mind, I
am going to discuss the nature and role of institutions and especially institutional
skepticism in my argument, and the specific institution of the Ivory Tower. I will then
reprise the pieces of the argument that suggest the mutual suggestibility of epistemologies
and politics and finally show how science and democracy are each in the range of what
the other suggests and that by reference to intuitions internal to both science and
democracy as well as external to normatively good things functional to both, that, in my
weakest formulation, there is a strong case for there being a fundamental relationship
between science and democracy.

Section II: Time and Technology

Because I generally find Latour convincing, I would like to discuss briefly his
other sources of certainty, time and instruments, or what I label technology.
Time for me refers to several things. First, it refers to practical action and thus
practical reason, which is to say, people must act. We are, as Sartre would say,
condemned to be free.408 We can adopt a globally skeptical attitude and then sit back and
do nothing and die, sure, but this is not probable or a very coherent position to hold.
When Descares doubts, Latour implores him to go to the man on the street and ask him,
or at least have his valet do it he is making a claim about practical reason, trust and
ones community.409 Radical skepticism writes Steven Shapin, cannot survive the short
trip from the solitude of the study to the street, as, indeed, David Hume recognized
writing The great subverter of Pyrrhonism or the excessive principles of skepticism is
action, and employment, and the occupations of every day life.410 This is furthermore
Luhmanns point about communication, which is that one cannot doubt something within
a community without also creating a speech act, which is now part of the communicative
408

I believe this has entered the common lingo.

Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, 50.
410
Shapin, A Social History of Truth, 20. Humes Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion 1751-55, 134 not
cited here.
409

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structure of the community.411 Heideggers claim that time is the horizon of all being,412
Arendts that human life consists in action, which presupposes history and a world,413
Wittgensteins claim that doubting must stop eventually,414 and Berger and Luckmanns
notion of the social world experienced as objective415 are all variants of this point.
Action must happen. Choosing not to act is an action and thus we are stuck in a
correlationist circle of action too. Time as a physical concept may not exist or may be
co-equivalent with space416 and the simultaneity of things previously thought bounded by
the speed of light, or the co-existence of two temporal orders in different regions of the
galaxy and universe aside417 do not change this fact. It may be mathematically important
to conceive of reality in a four dimensional space, where then, as such, time happens all
at once, so to speak, but the facts of entropy and quantum indeterminacy render this a
little more complex and suspect. Things must happen. Until the obliteration, somehow,
of all time and matter, should that be possible at all, the world proceeds. Even if one is
an occasionalist, monadologist or presentist418 the novelty of every moment and its sole
reality consists in the fact that things have changed, as these exist only to solve the
problem of change. This notion is as old as Heraclitus. All is flux is really a meditation
on the constancy of inconstancy and is what leads Quentin Meillassoux to argue that the
only absolute is contingency, that all other laws of logic and reality can change at any
moment (though to suppose they must or will is a category error), reasoning that
contingency itself is not contingent for the facts of infinite regress, but everything else
is.419 That humans must act means that humans consciously either presuppose a theory of
reality and its knowledge, or unconsciously do so, either in cognitive content or
retroactive imputation and this is unavoidable. Thus while absolute certainty is
411

Luhmann, Niklas, Theory of Society, Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2012; and Luhmann, Niklas, Theory of
Society, Vol. II. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2012.
412
Heidegger, Being and Time.
413
Arendt, The Human Condition.
414
Wittgenstein, Wright, and Anscombe, Remarks on the Foundation of Mathematics.
415
Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality; a Treatise in the Sociology
of Knowledge, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966.
416
Einstein, Albert, The Meaning of Relativity, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1955; and Heisenberg,
Werner, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science, New York: Harper, 1958.
417
Baggott, Beyond Measure; Maudlin, Tim, Philosophy of Physics: Space and Time, Princeton: Princeton
UP, 2012; and Morton.
418
Known as occasionalism. Hinchliff, Mark, "A Defense of Presentism in a Relativistic
Setting," Philosophy of Science 67.S1, (2000): S575.
419
Meillassoux, After Finitude. Harman, Quentin Meillassoux.

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impossible, just as free will is almost necessarily a myth,420 it is impossible to act globally
as such, one can only turn skepticism of knowledge or of will on individual actions or
thoughts and to do so requires a position somewhere else in the world. Acting skeptically
presupposes a non-skeptical practical reason. This is not to say that skepticism or even
global skepticism are impossibleif they are possible, it is because of the human capacity
to nearly non-meaningfully reflect on reflection which posits a possible world with a
view from nowhere as a suppositionbut are always constrained by practical reason.
One, in turn, cannot be pragmatically skeptical. Ones actions imply certainty of a sort,
even if one is cognitively skeptical or uncertain of an outcome. This may even be the
most rudimentary certainty, if I act, something will happen. This is Leibnizs law of
sufficient reason, though this is what Meillassoux above tries to refute, though the
absolute nature of contingency implies that in the thought experiment wherein sufficient
reason is lifted such that action is without effect, it would be hard to argue that the
epistemic status of the agent is one endorsing this view and, somewhat by fiat, would
require the person to be certain that something will occur, or certain of the facts of
contingency.
Time also refers to phenomenology and process. One cannot step outside of
history or time. Actions and thoughts always occur in time. One can attempt to think
outside of time, but then one is merely thinking of thinking outside of time. Infinite
regresses are only possible is the view from nowhere, which the necessity of time
prevents in the first place, and, as such, the temporality of human existence guarantees, as
a form of certainty, that, at any moment, a chain has temporarily stopped, that things are a
certain way. This is not a form of absolutism, for absolutism assumes stepping outside of
the very temporal scheme I am proposing. Time, then, means actual time, as a physical
property, but more importantly the phenomenological existence of time, as described by

420

Derk Pereboom argues that there is precisely one and only one metaphysical arrangement that could
guarantee free will, something he calls agent-causal libertarian indeterminism. He motivates the fact that in
all other systems, including other indeterminate metaphysics, cannot give us free will (Pereboom,
Derk, Living without Free Will, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge UP, 2001). Bruce Waller shows that given
any metaphysical system, the empirical facts seem to forbid a coherent theory of free will (Waller, Bruce
N., Against Moral Responsibility, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011). The Self Beyond Itself is a nice
exploration of ethics, philosophy, and science of this all, focusing on Spinoza.

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Alfred North Whitehead, Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze.421 This again figures along
the lines of action and reflection, for action the world is occasional, every moment its
only supposition for action, but, in reflection, temporality is a constant chain. The
disconnect between these two is what leads to paradoxes, to misplaced concreteness. It is
from the perspective of reflection that Parmenides could demonstrate that the definition
of being entails that no change is possible, that change is an illusion, but that illusion
itself was a sort of illusion, all of being occurred at once and to itself, like an inward
facing movie that happens all simultaneously and it is the perspective of action, or rather,
reflection attempting to grasp action that Heraclitus can demonstrate that flux is the only
reality. In truth, it is the reverse, every moment is its own self-contained Parmenidean422
world of being and their coalescence and phenomenology is the Heraclitean flux of
existence.423
Time finally refers to specifically history and tradition, in the Heideggerian or
Gadamerian sense. Time is the horizon of all being, for the same reason Hegels Geist is
the spirit of history424 as only through history can reason be made manifest. Reason and
history are both process and products. At any moment, one refers to history as a given,
that which, through tradition and causal determination, allows action to meaningfully
occur in a given moment or frame, while one is making history at the same time, like
Tolstoys soldiers in War and Peace who fulfilled Gods will in history, but also were the
very constituents of it. The difference between Marx and Hegel here, then, is slight, and

421

I am thinking of especially Whiteheads Process and Reality (Whitehead, Alfred North, David Ray
Griffin, and Donald W. Sherburne, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, New York: Free, 1978)
and Henri Bergsons Creative Evolution, Time and Free Will, and Matter and Memory (Bergson, Henri,
and Arthur Mitchell, Creative Evolution, New York: Modern Library, 1944; Bergson, Henri, and Frank
Lubecki Pogson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, New York:
Harper, 1960; and Bergson, Henri, Nancy Margaret Paul, and William Scott Palmer, Matter and Memory.
New York: Zone, 1988. Print. Here I also think of Gilles Deleuzes Logic of Sense and Difference and
Repetition (Deleuze, Gilles, The Logic of Sense, New York: Columbia UP, 1990; and Deleuze, Gilles,
Difference and Repetition, New York: Columbia UP, 1994).
422
Kirk, G. S., and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts,
Cambridge, UK: University Press, 1957; Parmenides, "Fragments of Parmenides,"
<http://www.gdufs.biz/Fragments%20of%20Parmenides.pdf>; and Parmendies in Plato and Jowett, The
Dialogues of Plato.
423
Kirk and Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers; Parmenides "Fragments of Parmenides;" and
Parmendies in Plato and Jowett, The Dialogues of Plato.
424
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit; and Kojve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel.

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this is the point of much subsequent literature.425 For, not only from the perspective of a
monism, is the difference between materialism and idealism irrelevant, reality, even if
comprised meaningfully of only mind or matter, is not escapably understood as anything
but our engagement with it, which can only occur against the backdrop of our previous
engagement. Thus for Hegel, Geist is in history, reason finding its own fulfillment, but
this is through the actions of individuals, who socially and politically are establishing
themselves as reasonable Republican subjects. The master/slave dialectic for Hegel is a
distinct way to connect epistemology with politics through time, for the slave makes
history in its quest for recognition from the master, who though initiated history, himself
will be excluded from it, never to be recognized, for he is unrecognizable.426 A person is
constituted through recognition, because a human on his own could never develop reason
or epistemic certainty, could not have meaningful language, and would be able to even
doubt his own existence, pace Descartes, and though would hit a standstill at the doubting
of doubt, would never quite reach the certainty of existence either, trapped in a paradox
where action has no effects, except on a nature which seems mute.427 The slave through
labor creates and with other slaves makes a world which conditions us428 and thus through
pragmatic action creates the world that allows men to thrive and soon, will escape
scarcity, which means that slaves, now in the same position of the master who does not
have to work, is free from the conditions of the nature which he had a role in building
425

Zizek, Less than Nothing. I am also a fan of Cornelius Castioridus Imaginary Institution of Society
(Castoriadis, Cornelius, The Imaginary Institution of Society, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987) and
Roberto Unger on Plasticity into Power (Unger, Roberto Mangabeira, Plasticity into Power: ComparativeHistorical Studies of the Institutional Conditions of Economic and Military Success, Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge UP, 1987a).
426
I typically refer to Robert Pippin, W. T. Stace (Stace, W. T., The Philosophy of Hegel: A Systematic
Exposition, New York: Dover Publications, 1955) and Alexandre Kojves (Introduction to the Reading of
Hegel ) works for reference.
427
Interestingly, then, nature can be said to exist, but only through culture. See What is Nature.
Correspondingly, without the concept of nature, the substratum in which things take place and the
nonhuman world to which concepts refer, culture itself is nothing. Culture requires the other, others, in
general and their communication presuppose a world, a world we call nature. We can, however, abandon
nature as anything other than the presupposed world or the objects and relations, which pad realitys
network involution. (See Ecology without Nature).
428
We are conditioned beings said Hannah Arendt. We also construct niches, says evolutionary biology,
which allow us to evolve and communicate at all. See Fausto-Sterling, Anne, Sexing the Body: Gender
Politics and the Construction of Sexuality, New York, NY: Basic, 2000; Oyama, Susan, Paul Griffiths, and
Russell D. Gray, Cycles of Contingency: Developmental Systems and Evolution, Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2001; and Richerson, Peter J., and Robert Boyd, Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed
Human Evolution, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

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through concrete practical and epistemic action, and, as such, then has the capacity to
recognize, and then, slaves can recognize one another. Thus through concrete historical
activity, the individual subject is made through Geists instantiation is practical acts of
recognition and labor.429
For Marx, the substructure, consisting in fundamental social relationships and
technology, determines cultural superstructure. Similarly, the end of history occurs for
Marx when practical activity has made of mans metabolism to nature an elimination of
scarcity, which, as such, and through the materials made and constructed on behalf of the
bourgeoisie, the masters in this scenario, the proletariat, the slaves, can undercut and
contradict their own conditions of enslavement and through praxis, ethically guided
epistemic practical engagement with the world, can fundamentally rearrange their social
structure and their technologies, to be truly free at last. By collapsing ethics,
epistemology and politics into notions of action, praxis and dialectic, Hegel and Marx
demonstrate our capacity to make the world, in time, through practical engagement with
the world and with each other, that, in part both describes the world (or, rather, history
and what history deems the world to be) and creates it in the future.430
History and tradition then comprise only the concrete actions of all individuals,
their networks and their meanings they impute. For this reason, the Protestant Ethic and
dialectical materialism, not to mention Durkheims social are all compatible,431 but only
because of the sociology of interaction,432 the social physics of human interaction which
form simultaneously,433 a social field constructed through their actions and their
interpretations,434 and are affected by the social, which as a field exerts downward
causation, displaying emergent properties weak or strong, and much like how

429

This is, in my opinion, the thesis of the structural transformation of the public sphere.
Marx, The German Ideology; Marx, Karl, Friedrich Engels, and E. J. Hobsbawm, The Communist
Manifesto: A Modern Edition, London: Verso, 1998; and Marx, Karl, Friedrich Engels, and Samuel
Moore, Capital, Chicago: Encyclopdia Britannica, 1955.
431
Durkheim, Emile, The Rules of Sociological Method, U.K.: Macmillan, 1982; and Marx Capital.
432
Collins, Randall, Interaction Ritual Chains, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2004; Dennis, Alex, Rob
Philburn, and Gregory W. H. Smith, Sociologies of Interaction, Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2013; and
Goffman, Erving, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959.
433
Latour, Bruno, and Vincent Antonin. Lpinay. The Science of Passionate Interests: An Introduction to
Gabriel Tarde's Economic Anthropology. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2009.
434
Latour, Reassembling the Social.
430

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consciousness is understood by many to be a result of recruitment, of fame in the brain435
in a workspace, but is still reducible to neurons, so is history to the concrete material
actions of the members of humanity.436
Because one can never outside of history, only to one side, or backwards, taking
as a given the past of history or one of its present components as a matter of fact, one can
only ever partially consider things as matters of concern. Time then, as the distinction
between action and reflection437, as practical reason, action and praxis, and as history and
tradition, as the social physics uniting the march of history, through meaningful practical
action, of idea and material, guarantees certainty, at least, provisionally.
The other source of certainty is technology. The problem is that technology,
seems at first, to suffer from the experimental regress. Technology can only prove that
which it can be assumed to prove.438 The idea that technology is what drives history is an
old one though, proposed by many people. For example, Marx thought that culture
supervened on a substructure, which, in part, was technological. Marshall McLuhan
insisted the medium is the message.439 Jared Diamond sees history as the product of
geographical influences on our technology, raw materials and domestications.440 Michael
Pollan sees history as the result of our domestication technologies.441 Ray Kurzweil sees
history as a march toward techno-utopian sublimation in a technological singularity.442
All of these theories suffer from the fact that they separate nature and culture, for a
technology is not anything apart from its function and its meaning and interpretations,

435

Dennett, D. C., Consciousness Explained, Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1991; and Dennett, D. C.,
Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005
436
Dehaene, Stanislas, The Cognitive Neuroscience of Consciousness, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.
437
The others to make of the action reflection dichotomy are Freire, Paulo, Pedagogy of the Oppressed,
New York: Continuum, 2000 and Graeber, David, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False
Coin of Our Own Dreams, New York: Palgrave, 2001.
438
Interestingly, having computers do science for us has been a goal since the beginning (see Mechanizing
proof) and recently, scientists programmed a computer, which was able to, with input, analyzing a
pendulum, and so forth, distill Newtonian laws of physics. More interestingly, the computer itself is a
black box, they do not know how it did its theory generating work.
439
McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media, London: Sphere, 1973.
440
Diamond, Jared M, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, New York: W.W. Norton &,
1998
441
Pollan, Michael, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, New York: Penguin,
2006. Note this is the anarcho-primitivist line too, as in the vegetarian myth, endgame and John Zerzan on
various subjects; Ted Kaczynski as well.
442
Kurzweil. Has been disproven. Also see John Gray, who sees history as cyclical but technology as
progressive. Korzybski as well.

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which define its function.443 This is not to say that technology does not drive many things
in history, it does, but always in the context of a socio-cultural milieu, which both renders
it possible and makes it meaningful.
Technology itself is always already cultural and social444 because technology is
defined, in part, by its function and utility, which is defined by a culture; hence the fact
that Chinese discovered and abandoned many inventions we considered to be so
fundamental. The printing press may have made modern Europe and the world over
anew.445 Computer technology and the printing press both were thought to have
unleashed the possibility of a new kind of capitalism, rapidly financial and extremely
efficient446 and the very possibility of socialisms success.447 We cannot forget
agriculture, the green revolution, the compass, microscopes, telescopes, stents, inkjet
printing, nuclear power and so forth. Technologies fundamentally allow us to
manipulated the world in ways differently than before, by either allowing us to utilize
new resources or old ones better, or allowing us sensory or practical access to a part of
the world of which we unaware, or allow us to reconceptualize the world in toto.448 Some
say modernity began with the Copernican revolution, but others say the steam engine, for
with it cybernetics was born.449 Trains, planes, phones, boats, radios, TVs, the internet
and so forth have done more to collapse space and the world, compressing time, distance
and speeding up communication to such a point that, with enough capital, someone can
go anywhere, or contact anyone, or even go to space.450 In, Do Artifacts Have Politics,
Langdon Winner argues that technologies literally embody political programs, arguing
that Robert Moses built, for example, bridges in New York City such that buses, which

443

Bijker, Wiebe E., Roland Bal, and Ruud Hendriks, The Paradox of Scientific Authority: The Role of
Scientific Advice in Democracies, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009.
444
Take, for example, Soviet vs. U.S. cybernetics in Gerovitch.
445
Anderson, Benedict R. O'G, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism, London: Verso, 1991.
446
See Out of the Pits, Mackenzie, Pinch and Swedberg.
447
Medina, Eden, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile, Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2011.
448
Jasanoff and Long, Earthly Politics.
449
Morton, Timothy, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, Minnesota UP.
2012.
450
This idea is in the common world, but has explicated by Edward Soja, David Harvey and in a perverse
way, Thomas Friedman.

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typically carried poor African Americans, could not traverse. He points additionally to
the atom bomb and other such inventions as well. 451
Sally Wyatt conceives of four ways to discuss technology and technological
determinism. The first is justificatory452 which consists in using technology as an
explanation for something that must be the case. This is the historical materialism of the
Wall Street Journal, for example, which sees the productivity gains of technology as
reason to downsize, in fact, almost a moral obligation to do so. Technology makes jobs
irrelevant. High technology may even destroy jobs faster than it creates them.453
Nonetheless, a productivity gain does not necessarily require a downsizing, especially if a
person can be moved, or set to use with the new technology. One sees health costs
justified on the basis on needing new technology (when places without that technology
seem to be doing just fine).
The next type she identifies is descriptive. These technological determinists may
argue that technology proceeds independently of social forces, that it causes social
change, both of these claims, or some limited autonomy of science and technology in
change. Besides descriptive, one can be methodological, using technology as a gateway
to large social discussions, as a means of societal momentum or as something, which, in
use is determinative. Finally, one can normatively describe technological determinism,
which thinking technology has become too powerful, must be heeled beneath social
forces, or stopped before technological instrumental rationality wins out.454
Man, however, has always been a technological species.455 Language and fire are
technologies, arguably. To perceive technology as fundamentally different from us is like
to view beaver dams as non-natural.456 Many argue that technology is an extension of our
bodies, our minds and our selves, that it is illegitimate with a functionalist or embedded
account of humanity to discount technology, however temporary, as separate from our
humanity.457 Humans create technology. Humans endow it with meaning, both through
451

Langdon.
Wyatt in Hackett et al., The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, 174.
453
Aronowitz. Also Randall Collins in Does Capitalism Have a Future.
454
Wyatt in Hackett et al., The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, 167, 174, and 175.
455
Technohuman conditions. Cyborg manifesto. Symbolic species.
456
Buller, David J. Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature.
Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2005.
457
See cited embodied mind people above.
452

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interpretation and use. Humans harness technology, improve it, and use it to analyze the
world or create new technology. In turn, technology functions as a niche construction,
helping to define the form and sometimes content of social, cultural, economic, political
and scientific arrangements. There is online dating, exhortations to disconnect (always
coming from the news media), tech startups and the Internet bubble, nuclear politics and
the capacity to look at brain activation in real time. Technologies modify, amplify, create
or negate aspects of the human world and how it does so depends on what the machine
is and how we interpret it, as much as we can disconnect those things. Modern science
has been called techno-science, because, largely throughout history, engineering and
natural philosophy proceeded independently, but, modern science, with the birth of the
laboratory, united them; now technologies were the results of science and new science
was the result of technologies. That is how an argument over an air pump can stage a
political battle between nominalism and empiricism.458 Mentioned above, Latour
provocatively writes that science requires inscription machines, which is any item of
apparatus or particular configuration of such items that can transform a material
substance into a figure or diagram, which is directly usable by one of the members of the
office space.459
Modern science would be impossible without technology. Technological items
allow us to analyze the world in ways we would have never been able to and they do so
by taking material objects and inscribing them, as Latour says. This is true of the Large
Hadron Collider, but also Excel Spreadsheets, calculators, compasses, fMRI machines,
cameras, microscopes, telescopes, spectrometers and so forth. The problem, of course, is
the experimental regress, that one can never be sure if a technological inscription is an
artifact or a genuine fact. Machines built to detect things can confirm the detection by
bias built into the machine. Inasmuch as machines simulate things, they do so at the
behest of a theory, which can often assume the consequent in the attempt to establish the
cause. Technologies are theories, practical theories, that embody both know-how and
know-what. Both building and using a technology comprises know how and or know
what in distinctive ways that make users of technology members of a community by fiat.
458
459

Shapin and Shaffer, Leviathan and the Air-pump.

Shapin and Shaffer, Leviathan and the Air-pump, 51.

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Hence the discussion of early adopters and so forth. We live in a knowledge society and
risk society460 both of which are the product of techno-science and techno-science is also
the solution. Technology and science, however, are not complete-able endeavors and, as
such, always create new problems or questions where before they solved them.
Technology itself recreates the problem of induction, as the experimental regress.
Furthermore, technology raises the specter of computation, as so much of technology is
computerized today, dedicated to knowledge or design, but subject to the rule of Turing
and Gdel. Technology, similar to induction, raises the problem of instrumentalism, of
the existence of entities which we cannot observe save with the help of those
technological items, and, as an interesting twist on the induction problem, this indicates
how we can never be sure if an entity exists, or is an artifact. The problem is, the
technological apparatus will work just as well if the readings it transcribes are the result
of some sort of fictional entity that is instrumentally useful to assume and use, or if the
item actually exists as conceived. Inscription devices expand the range of epistemic
possibility and therefore raise questions in their own right. The problem is what one
means when they use the term exists when speaking of atoms, genes, electrons, fields
and other theoretical entities in the physical sciences, where the question do they
exist? has in practice the force of is there anything to show for them, or are they
theoretical fictions?461 Technology, inscription machines, which raises, for example, the
question do neutrinos exist? acts as an invitation to produce a neutrino, preferably by
making it visiblethe point and possibility of the relevant technology in the first place
and if one could do this then one would indeed have something to showand the
difficulty of doing it is what explains the particular difficulty of the problem.462
But, what if no such demonstration were possible? Is the absence of evidence,
the evidence of absence? There is an answer usually given by scientists and philosophers
of science: Not at all as it is worth noticing what happens when a demonstration of the
preferred type is not possible because the failure to bring about or describe
circumstances in which one might point and say theres one! need notbe taken as

460

Beck, Ulrich, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, London: Sage Publications, 1992.
Toulmin in Klemke et al., Introductory Readings in the Philosophy of Science, 359.
462
Ibid, 359.
461

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discrediting.463 The important thing is that even if a demonstration with a technology is
not possible, if the technology, using that assumption, produces other important interest
results about reality, or assuming it assists in the process of scientific theorizing and factcreation, one need not discard the entity at hand, as typically the real existence
oftheoretical entities is contrasted with their beinguseful theoretical fictions and
the fact of an initial explanatory success may therefore leave the question open.464 This
theory correctly points out that the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence, in
the instance that a theory is made more coherent by an assumption, which is consistent
with what we know about reality and the theory at hand, about the existence of an object
as a fact or artifact. Remembering ontological relativity we are operating, here, under
the assumption that it is the theory, and thus science itself, which tells us what is or is not
observable465 and therefore drawingthe observational-theoretical line at any given
point is an accident, or more precisely a function of our current state of knowledge, and
the instruments we happen to have available.466 What this emphasizes is that given a set
of theories, paradigms and agreed upon rules and conventions, practices and discourses,
technology can only ever be the source of more certainty.
Laboratories are communities, in which the main political discussion concerns the
proper use and interpretation of technological devices of inscription and their
presentation to the outside world. The debate over fact versus artifact is a question of
induction, of what we know and suppose we can know and thus, though technologies,
given the right theories, allow us to expand or make more precise our discussion of what
we want to term reality, they add no significant epistemic burden, and, as sources of
expansion, are therefore sources of certainty, at least relative to a theory and the
possibility of its disputation. Thus while technology produces knowledge that is
dependent on words, on contexts of meaning in which those who know one another
participate it is not something to regret. Rather than instrumentality being a vice the
possibility of knowing in the absence of a relationshipis a scientific and epistemic
nightmare. Should we regret what takes place in a laboratory, where phenomena are
463

Ibid, 360.
Ibid, 362.
465
Ibid, 369.
466
Ibid, 72.
464

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effectively staged, purified in such a way that they become experimentally meaningful,
acquiring the power to authenticate their representations? asks Isabelle Stengers. No,
because the necessity of a laboratory, of the devices that are used to transform an
empirical fact, subject to a thousand and one interpretations to make experimental
facts does not impl[y] the unknowable character of reality. Usually one assumes
science produces truth and otherwise would have to be some sort of a skeptic, in which
case, that the laboratory and its devices are assumed to produce artifacts is itself already
the product of a theory, just a negative one. Rather than instrumentalism or skepticism, it
is accepting technology as a source of certainty that renders experimentersall the more
realist to the extent that their practice obligates them to fiercely distinguish between
fact and artifact, that is, to distinguish between those cases where reality has indeed
satisfied the requirements that define it as a reliable witness and those where the device
has extended the power of interpretation to produce a false witness who cannot but
confirm reality. As such, it is through technology that laboratory practice, through
technology, which necessarily encodes inscriptions relative to assumptions and
necessarily affects those inscriptions,467 connects reality to the possibility of an
interaction productive of evidence whose meaning can be determined.468

Section III: Institutions and Academia.

Science is fundamentally social. Discursive communities use technical
instruments to buttress rhetorical arguments to one another, tracing connections between
actors and attempt to obfuscate that history in order to produce eternal truth. In the last
section I addressed the fact that relativism is not subjectivism. Fundamental to this
argument is that critiques of relativism as well as skepticism presume that there is a
vantage point outside of conceptual schemas from which to criticize them. Much closer
to the truth is the metaphor of Otto Neuraths boat, which must be constructed and
reconstructed, only from one side at a time. The boat, in this instance, is the social
467
468

In either a trivial, as with say recording radio waves, or non-trivial, as with quantum particles, manner.
The foregoing quotes in this paragraph are from Stengers, Cosmopolitics II, 43.

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institutions of science, which allow for institutionalized skepticism, community
understandings of rules and practices, methods of credit and prestige and mechanisms of
internal criticism that allow for matters of fact to be turned back into matters of concern
in a non-threatening manner. Furthermore, the fundamental connection between science
and politics can be constructed only through institutions. As such, I will discuss
institutions below and the very specific institution of academia.
I mentioned that Bruno Latour had difficult with the question of relativism and
science studies because of the doors it seemed to open. As such, he abandoned or
updated his previous theory of actor-network theory to establish an Inquiry into the
Modes of Existence. Although this book for me added something interesting, it did not
take the normative route I found interesting; Latour was similarly motivated by bogeys
such as climate skepticism, which is the real test of concept for the problem of truth and
politics, science and democracy. Latour elaborates his four sources of certainty: time,
colleagues, institutions and machines. I already discussed machines, briefly, in the
section on Latour and time in the section on skepticism, as it really refers to tradition and
the necessity of action barring day-to-day skepticism. In this section I discuss institutions
and in the next I discuss colleagues. For good measure, Latour begins his discussion of
the modes of existence with an anecdote:
Theyre sitting around a table, some fifteen French industrialists
responsible for sustainable development in various companies,
facing a professor of climatology, a researcher from the College de
France. It is Fall 2010: a battle is raging about whether or the
current climate disturbances are of human origin or not. One of
these industrialists asks the professor a question I find a little
cavalier: but why should we believe you, any more than the
others? Im astonished. Why does he put them on the same footing,
as if it were a simple difference of opinion between this climate
specialist and those are called climate skeptics (with a certain abuse
of the fine word skeptic.) Could the industrialist possible have
access to a measuring instrument superior to that of the specialist?
How could this ordinary bureaucrat be in a position to weigh the
positions of the experts according to a calculus of more and less?
Really, I find the question almost shocking, especially coming from
someone whose job it is to take particular interest in ecological
matters. Has the controversy really degenerated to the point where
people can talk about the fate of the planet as if they were on the

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stage of a televised jousting match, pretending that the two opposing
positions are of equal merit?
I wonder how the professor is going to respond. Will he put
the meddler in his place be reminding him that its not a matter of
belief but of fact? Will he once again summarize the indisputable
data that leave scarcely any room for doubt? But no, to my great
surprise, he responds, after a long drawn out sigh: If people dont
trust the institution of science, were in serious trouble. And he
begins to lay out before the audience the large number of researchers
involved in climate analysis, the complex system for verifying data,
the articles and repots, the principle of peer evaluation, the vast
network of weather stations, floating weather buoys, satellites, and
computers that ensure the flow of informationand then, standing at
the blackboard, he starts to explain the pitfalls of the models that are
needed to correct the data as well as the series of doubts that have
had to be addressed on each of these points. And in the other
camp, he adds, What do we find? No competent researcher in the
field who has the appropriate equipment.
Latour goes on to say that the scientist was precisely right to argue in this
fashion.469 Why are institutions so important to science and politics? What guarantee do
they provide? Institutions are first and foremost, collections of people. Institutions are
meant to render the specific individuals who comprise them less relevant than the
organization itself. As such, an organization is a set of concretized habits composing
human beings. The institution has a goal, usually, and the concretized habits are
conceived of as working toward that goal, involving processes of value commitments to
procedures extending beyond instrumental utilities deriving, for example, either from
the character of a specific organization or from the characteristics of bureaucratic
(rational-legal) organizations generally.470 Debates as to how institutions function center
on whether or not they are primarily rational or affective (a false dichotomy) and either
work by having members internalize norms,471 using externalized programs much like
rituals472 or utilize processes somewhere in the middle which are cognitive but external,
such as frames, schemas and situational definition.473 A complete definition from neo469

Latour, in Hacket et al, The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, 4.

Scott, W. Richard. Institutions and Organizations. Thousand Oaks: SAGE, 1995, 19.
471
Ibid, 20.
472
Ibid, 21.
473
Ibid, 23.
470

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institutional theory is usually something like this institutions consist of cognitive,
normative and regulative structures and activities that provide stability and meaning to
social behavior. Institutions are transported by various carrierscultures, structures and
routinesand they operate at multiple levels of jurisdiction.474 There is also a more post
human definition, wherein systems are fundamentally systems of communication and
communications whose main role is to generate more communication, defining itself as
separate from the environment through a process of self-reference and internal
differentiation.475 In this frame, an institution is a system, which is defined by its
fundamental oppositions: law deals with legal/nonlegal, science with true/false, and
religion with sacred/profane. Furthermore, systems main role is to reduce uncertainty.
Systems do not affect one another, instead they send out communications that are then
manipulated and dealt with internal to the rules of the other system. Therefore systems
are not affected, but irritated, both by other systems and the environment.476 I address
these definitions because both science and politics qualify as an institutions or a set of
institutions and as social systems. I bring up these definitions to understand the
following facts about institutions:
1.

Institutions are fundamentally about rules and practices, which

make sense only through the institution or systems selfunderstanding

2.

An institution or system defines its environment and deals with

information on its own turn

3.

Institutions and systems are fundamentally self-replicating and

deal in discourse and communication

4.

As organizers of behavior, institutions and system are

fundamentally pragmatic, ethical and, arguably, political. They
are fundamentally goal oriented

5.

Institutions and systems are fundamentally epistemic, for they

must decide which communications are valid, they must gather

474

Ibid, 33.
Luhmann, 1 Social Systems, 13.
476
Luhmann, Theory of Society, Vol. I.; and Luhmann et al., Law as a Social System.
475

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fundamental information about the environment and other
systems
My interest in institutions is as follows. Science is clearly an institution and
system and works because it is one. Politics and law additionally consists in institutions
and systems. Institutions highlight the fundamentally related nature of epistemology,
ethics and politics, of discourse, rules and practice, as can be seen through the institutions
and systems of religion and law, for example, where the fundamentally epistemic and
ethical nature of their work is obvious. Finally, institutions provide a practical means to
discuss linking up science and politics, for reducing uncertainty and for solving problems.
As Robert K. Merton writes, The interdependence of science and other social
institutions has been present all along.477 What is key here is that the innovation of
science fundamentally was that it was the institutionalization of epistemology. As much
as we would like to credit Galileo and Copernicus with inventing science, this simply is
not true. They did not publish their methodologies, have them independently verified by
other scholars and so on. Furthermore, religion, though an institution, was not
fundamentally concern with the production of knowledge, but with the production of
people, of aesthetics, of values and of communities. Of course, these projects are
fundamentally linked and that is a thesis of this essay, but self-understanding is
important. Though theological treatises were written and evaluated, the fundamental
mode of conflict within the church was force and take-over. Though discourse occurred
within disciplinary communities, between them only brought conflict. Furthermore, the
settling of controversy was done with respect to text and argument not with reference to
the world out there. The emphasis was on reason, not revelation. There may be some
truth, however, to the fact that science emerged from the concerns of those like Galileo
and Copernicus but with the structures of the church.
Suffice it to say, science as we know it today, or, at least as much as we can
coherently trace a history of processes, began in 16th century England.478 The formation of
science was the process by which the method of experiment as epistemic practice was
accepted as legitimate within a relevant community of scientific practitioners, who
477
478

Merton, The Sociology of Science, 177.

Shapin, Never Pure, 59.

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furthermore in practice and in theory realized that science could only work if practiced
between gentlemen that is to say, with enough publicity that it could be verified and
discussed among scientists.479 Seventeenth century England witnesses the rise and
institutionalization of a program devoted to systematic experimentation, accompanied by
a literature explicitly describing and defending practical aspects of that program.480 The
institutionalization of science was the creation of science as such because three sorts of
problems were recognized to attend to the privacy of solitary individual observation,
the transformation of mere belief into proper knowledge was considered to consist of the
transit from the perceptions of cognitions of the individual to the culture of the
collective, the view that the perceptions of postlapsarian people were corrupt and
subject to biases deriving from interest, and there were often contingent practical
problems attending the circumstance of observation, which meant that social relations of
some sort had to be established for the phenomena in question to be dealt with.481 The
institution of science was the flip side of the coin of experimentation. Experiments were
only valid in an institutional context as the very transition from private to public space
that marked the passage from opinion to knowledge was a remedy for the endemic
tendencies to over-hasty casual conjecturing, to finishing the roof, before the
foundation as been well laid, and that though the experiment is the private task of but
one or twothe conjecturing and debating on its consequences, was still the employment
ofassemblies. An item of experimental knowledge was not finished until it had,
literally, come into society.482 Summing up the showing of experimental phenomena in
public spaces to a relevant public of gentlemen-witnesses was an obligatory move in that
setting for the construction of scientific knowledge. What underwrote assent to
knowledge-claims was the word of a gentlemen, the conventions regulating access to a
gentlemens house and the social relations within it.483 The innovation of science then
was the mixture of experiment, discussion and institutionalization.

479

The political and epistemic history of rationalism vs. empiricism is detailed in Shapin and Shafer,
Leviathan and the Air pump.
480
Shapin, Never Pure, 59.
481
Ibid, 61.
482
Ibid, 82-83.
483
Ibid, 87.

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Even if science was not fundamentally political and politics not fundamentally
scientific, that politics needs to use scientific knowledge to deal with the problems of the
modern world and basic science needs to be funded and supported, there will always be
pragmatic instantiations of the politicization of science and the scientization of politics.
Whatever the pleas for an increase in public participation in scientific and technological
debates, a crucial site for interaction between science and policy remains the scientific
advisory committee.484 Scientific advice has unprecedented authority in modern political
institutions.485 The important issue here is that these stages allow scientists to engage
with politicians and in the process must perform the work of the differentiation of science
from politics. Science reestablishes itself through politically established institutions.
Furthermore, science engages the democratic polity through the institutionalization of
hybrid forums in things such as consensus conferences,486 where citizens acts as
scientists by virtue of their institutional place in a political forum. Institutions guarantee
the truthfulness of science, its successful organization, its self-definition and the
establishment of credit.487
Science, in the main, is a system of institutions of experiment, funding, education,
fieldwork, credit, skepticism,488 trust and award. Democracy is the institutionalization of
public discourse, the submission of bureaucracies and groups of decision makers to a
regulative framework in which people may participate. As Latours quotation indicates,
the reason climate skepticism and creationism are not legitimate is that they do not go
through the established institutions of science. Today there are really two main ones,
industry, comprising pharmaceuticals, biotech, engineering, military groups and so on489
and the academy. The settling of scientific controversies begins within these groups and
must be settled within them. I do not challenge that non-scientists can start scientific
controversies, but I will address this later. The beautiful advantage of science as an
institution is that if it is ideally functioning it has already institutionalized skepticism and
484

Bjiker, The Paradox of Scientific Authority, 4.

Hilgartner, Stephen, Science on Stage: Expert Advice as Public Drama, Stanford, CA: Stanford UP,
2000, 4.
486
Callon, Acting in an Uncertain World, 168.
487
Merton, The Sociology of Science, 482.
488
Owen-Smith, Jason, "Managing Laboratory Work through Skepticism: Processes of Evaluation and
Control," American Sociological Review 66.3, (2001): 427.
489
Shapin, The Scientific Life.
485

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a means by which the concerned public, the state, the people and non-scientists can
participate in the production of scientific knowledge, by raising questions, criticisms and
concerns and actually doing scientific work of collecting data and argumentation.
An objection to Mertons theory is the unrealistic conception of science as
universalist, rational and skeptically organized in practice.490 Rightly, rationality is
usually understood to be tantamount to correctness and if not is a minimal condition of
intelligibility common to most cultures. Universalism is also either agreed upon by
anyone not attached to a particular nationalism or forms of dialectical materialism, or
generally meanings consonance with experience, itself a universal norm among most
people. Finally, organized skepticism is considered mythical because of the vehemence
with which people tend to defend theories and paradigms. The social production of
rationality and universalism, and their being believed by scientists, I think, should
motivate them to be understood as socially epistemic guiding norms and thus the critique
is mostly irrelevant. On the issue of organized skepticism,491 it is just flat out wrong.
Organized skepticism precisely consists in the fact that science proceeds in an adversarial
institutional setting. Scientists vehemently defend their theories, but in best practices,
will allow for the publication of disconfirmatory papers even in journals they edit, though
this may not always be the case in practice. Scientific work typically takes place in the
university and increasingly in private firms. Though the privacy is considered
detrimental to science, it actually requires a higher degree of open-mindedness and
organized skepticism.492 Ideas, which are wrong, are not profitable. Steven Shapin traces
the privatization of science and emphasizes, as he does about early science and trust, a
subject I will discuss later, the moral and ethical claims inherent in such endeavors. In
private science, the over-interpretation of scientific results is a cardinal sin.493 In fact,
among academic science today, organized skepticism has weakened, as commitment to
positions has as well. The attempts at institutionalizing open-minded judgment of a free

490

Barnes and Dolby, "The Scientific Ethos: A Deviant View.

There is, it has been pointed out to me, a certain theological flavor to this, as in, in a joust or duel, it was
thought that Gods favored would win. The key difference here is that the defeated opponent is not killed,
but can come back to challenge the winning dogma, which more effectively secures the outcome.
492
Shapin, The Scientific Life.
493
Ibid, 30-31.
491

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sort, mixed with the culture of publications has perverted the institutional arrangements
required for science.
The Economist, not usually one to cite STS scholars, writes that Scientists divide
errors into two classes. A type I error is the mistake of thinking something is true when it
is not (also known as a false positive). A type II error is thinking something is not true
when in fact it is (a false negative). When testing a specific hypothesis, scientists run
statistical checks to work out how likely it would be for data which seem to support the
idea to have come about simply by chance. If the likelihood of such a false-positive
conclusion is less than 5%, they deem the evidence that the hypothesis is true
statistically significant. They are thus accepting that one result in 20 will be falsely
positivebut one in 20 seems a satisfactorily low rate.494 But, he idea that only one
such paper in 20 gives a false-positive result is hugely optimistic and
Insteadmost published research findings are probably false.495 The problem is that
science needs to be replicated, the data accessible and both negative and positive results
published, but the negative are not. Disconfirmation is considered irrelevant.
Replication is hard and thankless because Journals, thirsty for novelty, show little
interest in it; though minimum-threshold journals could change this, they have yet to do
so in a big way. Most academic researchers would rather spend time on work that is more
likely to enhance their careers. Additionally, replication is difficult mostly because
scientists do not wish to share data, or lose it, especially among unpublished research.
Fundamentally though, The Economist writes citing Harry Collins, even when the part
of the paper devoted to describing the methods used is up to snuff (and often it is not),
performing an experiment always entails what sociologists call tacit knowledgecraft
skills and extemporizations that their possessors take for granted but can pass on only
through example. Thus if a replication fails, it could be because the repeaters didnt quite
get these je-ne-sais-quoi bits of the protocol right.496

494

"Trouble at the Lab," The Economist, 19 Oct. 2013. Web. 04 Apr. 2014.
<http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21588057-scientists-think-science-self-correcting-alarmingdegree-it-not-trouble>.
495
Ibid.
496
Ibid.

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Yet the problem here is also its own solution as some organizations are trying to
encourage more replication. PLoS ONE and Science Exchange, a matchmaking service
for researchers and labs, have launched a program called the Reproducibility Initiative
through which life scientists can pay to have their work validated by an independent
lab.497 Interestingly, this is due to the public nature of much of scientific work.
Politically, the necessity of science for active policy work requires novel research, as to
mollify the right interests. The lack of attention to the relationship between politics and
science, through institutions, leaves them both in the dust, denying the fundamental
ability of science to prove its result through institutional organized skepticism. This is an
exception, which proves the rule. Insofar as the state [is] concerned it always needs a
wide range of technical expertise.498 Leading some to conclude that the institutions of
science are necessarily technocratic, as if to deny that the relationship between politics
and epistemology is one of systemic conditions and openness to debate.499
Ignoring the institutional production of knowledge leads to or presupposes the
distinction between pure and applied science.500 Applied science was then conceived to
be problematic for scientists as, scientists having internalized the pure science
sentiment are being put under pressure by other institutional agencies committed to the
application of knowledge.501 Fundamentally problematic here is the elision of the fact
that knowledge for its own sake is a value of application, just a self-referential one.
Furthermore, the notion that science must be value-free is so endemic to the larger culture
that private science firms actually vigorously endorsed the commercial prudence of a
quite free publishing policy and argued for the barest minimum of secrecy.502
Additionally, though committed to practical problems, the idea that such needs corrupted
the objectivity and thus purpose of science companies attempted to show their
scientists the continuing importance of disinterred inquiry.503 In addition, it was regular
corporate practice to set apart 20-30% and sometimes the majority of time and money for

497

Ibid.
Shapin, The Scientific Life, 39.
499
Ibid, 81.
500
Ibid, 97.
501
Ibid, 113.
502
Ibid, 147.
503
Ibid, 151.
498

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their chief scientists to explore whatever they wanted, allowing them to pursue science
for its own sake and publish the results accordingly.504 Thus, while it is the case that
scientific norms may not accurately represent scientific practice, they, as political and
ethical claims, were so powerful as to overpower the profit motive within the corporate
culture, all the while that the Ivory tower let its standards of certainty slip.
What these facts demonstrate is the extremely important role of institutions in
science, whether the state, industry or academia. While universities becomes more and
more seduced by for profit schemes, corporations believed in fostering disinterestedness
precisely so they could be productive. Science for its own sake for the sake of something
else. What this raises is that values are so fundamentally important to science, both to
scientists and those who foster it, that their elision or denial leads to slack in the capacity
of institutions to police their constituent members. The decline of Ivory Tower science is
wholly connected to the fact that the humanities and social sciences are declining as well.
The state, furthermore, has taken such a strong stance against basic research that does not
have, at least, some concrete benefit predicted, that it now sees science as a means to an
end rather than an end in itself. The most productive science, however, see sciences as an
end in itself, because that is a powerful regulative and constitutive ideal.
Successful epistemic endeavors can only ever occur in the context of institutions
and normative ideals.505 All in all, the problem is exactly as Latour stated, uncertainty.
Science exists as a way to engage uncertainty, quantify it (thus turning it into risk) and
combating it. But uncertainty itself is always already constrained if and when one
publically commits oneself to habits and norms, which is what institutions are. The
solution to uncertainty is the normative structure of institutions, which reflect those
guiding ideas, which render epistemology legible. I lament the fact that some of the most
important scientific research occurs in the context of business or the military.506 While

504

Ibid, 153.
Vaughan, D, "The Role of the Organization in the Production of Techno-Scientific Knowledge," Social
Studies of Science 29.6, (1999): 913-43.
506
The position of the relationship of science to corporations and militaries is that of science to
governments more generally. If the military or corporations are to let scientific be successful, they
ostensibly have to let it be democratic. The ideals of organized skepticism, criticism, epistemic equality
and so forth are inimical to the military and corporations, but they need science to survive. They are thus in
a paradoxical situation. What bakes their bread can also burn their bridges.
505

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the empirical evidence shows that private science is not, a priori, impossible or
necessarily detrimental to scientific knowledge production, it does represent a
contradiction in ideals. The very reason military and private science seem to be so
effective is their forceful commitment to preventing the scientists within them from
letting the pragmatic goals at hand contaminate their dedication to the ideals of the
scientific enterprise. Ironically, academia and the state, so tethered to satisfying the
symbolic demands of a perceived public,507 have lost sight of this goal. Without getting
ahead of myself, the facts of institutions demonstrates that even within non-democratic
systems of governance, a space for the democratic polity of science is required for
knowledge production and that, within typically democratic systems, such as the state and
academia, an over commitment to authoritarian goals is stifling.
Scientists in academia and government must justify their work as utilitarian in
order to proceed and this cuts to center of a perhaps false but important regulative ideal in
science. The world The Scientific Life has disappeared as well as companies no longer
invests in R&D the way they used too, though ironically, the most productive and
successful ones still recognize the need for basic science.508 A recent study in PLOS one
showed that investment in basic science, science for its own sake, as well the humanities,
arts and social sciences, is one of the most predictive factors in GDP growth.509
Empirically, it is simply the case that institutions and the norms they embody predict
successfully the form of scientific knowledge growth and of epistemic endeavors in
general. 510 One can debate the epistemology of institutions, but he or she cannot

507

Toumey, Conjuring Science.

Mazzucato.
509
Jaffe, K., M. Caicedo, M. Manzanarea, M. Gil, et al., Productivity in Physical and Chemical Science
Predicts the Future Economic Growth of Developing Countries Better Than Other Popular Indices, 2013.
Web. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0066239#pone-0066239g001>.
510
Crespi, Gustavo and Geuna, Aldo, The Productivity of Science: A Cross Country Analysis, Report
prepared for the Office of Science and Technology, Department of Trade and Industry, 2004. Shows
variations in scientific productivity across countries. Furthermore, a study I performed for a class revealed
that indices of democracy, namely civil liberties, spiritual and post-material values and lack of corruption
explain, with investment, around 70-80% of the variance in scientific productivity. I used as my dependent
variable citations per scientific document across different countries, varying the number used, with for
example an N = 164, I found that Civil Liberties as measured by freedom house accounted for 23% of the
variance with p < .01. With an N = 44, ad variables measuring spending on science as percent of GDP (p <
.05), Civil Liberties (p <.05), Human Development (n.s.), Freedom from Corruption (p < .05), Patents in
Force (n.s.), Post Materialism (p < .1, unfortunately. P < 01 in other models, in this one drowned out by
508

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dispute the pragmatics at hand. Of import, however, is the fact that, due to the lack of the
analytic-synthetic divide, empirical facts have perhaps the same status as theory, just as
applied versus ideal science is itself an untenable distinction. Epistemic variation is
fostered and, as I argued, only possible within institutions which embody and foster
regulative and constitutive norms, even if these regulative and constitutive norms seem
performatively contradictory to the very enterprise at hand.
Facts are uncertain, as skepticism shows, but values, ironically, are more certain,
for they asserted, not proven. Furthermore, institutions, in order to be possible
presuppose sufficient epistemic claims in order to act at all. Institutions furthermore,
embody practices values and so on. Hume may show us that playing pool is impossible
in theory, for we cannot assume the causal effects of the billiards outside of the moves we
make, but the organized contests of pool, with clear winners and losers, existing as the
result of compact and consensus, attest to the fact that guided by norms and practices,
pragmatics and habits, we can be at least functionally certain, or must assume certainty
enough, that, rather than a Kantian transcendental a priori, constitutes an immanent and
pragmatic a priori, that, in practice, these evaluations and assumptions of certainty
performatively create its reality. Hume showed we cannot assume causality from
empirical objects because we can only discuss those empirical objects with reference to a
language, which presupposes causality, and Kant attempted to resolve this with
transcendentally proven a priori capacities, which establish the possibility of reality. To
this Platonism I argue for an Aristotelian reversal, we assume, in lived practical,
historical and institutional life theories of epistemology, intimately tied to ethical theories
and political communities that act as guarantors for the discussions of reality we wish to
have. Like radical Marxian praxis,511 we create the world we intend to describe, but this
youth), Youth (p < .05) explains R-Squared = 83 % for Citations per Document. In sum, democratic
countries (with high civil liberties, post-materialistic culture, less corruption and young population) that
spend money on science are highly productive.
511
As Bourdieu indicates, structures exist which structure behavior (structuring structures) but these
structures have no reality apart from the actions that constitute them in the first place. They bear a
relationship to each other of weak emergence, or even strong emergence, meaning structures supervene on
practices, but practices constitute structures and structures constitute practices. There is no pre-existing
field of the social capable of constructing anything, as Latour argues in Reassembling the Social (2005)and
on the Modern Cult of Factish Gods (2007), as the social is itself what is constructed. But inasmuch as the
social is constructed at any moment, it can as a network effect downwardly causal change on the elements
that constitute it. Marxs theory of praxis and Bourdieus of practice are some of the most sophisticated

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is only because, as with William James, John Dewey, Charles Sanders Peirce and Richard
Rorty,512 the ethical precedes the metaphysical, the political, and the democratic to the
philosophical. This was Heideggers point on the theory of the ready to hand513 and
Gadamer for the role of tradition.514 We cannot step outside of the practical meaningful
actions we take within the institutions constituted through those very practices, in order to
gain a vantage point to critique the foundations of knowledge. The critique of
epistemology and causality presupposes and requites a world in which we are quite
constrained, but in being constrained, so the Republican theory goes, we are made free.
Because human life occurs within institutions, we can believe that truth is relative to the
institutional frame at hand, such as legal/illegal in law and so on.515 But one cannot
simply start new institutions and, if one does, they will not be taken seriously.
Institutions guarantee a way of pragmatically instantiating Otto Neuraths boat.
Presaging my arguments later on science and democracy, institutions
epistemically have to establish insiders and outsiders.516 This is the practical solution to
Wittgensteins rule following argument. One gains insider access to an institution if one

theories of reality yet. We engage with the world through action and action is our fundamental epistemic
capacity, and, as such, we can create the world anew, but only in the wake of the world already created,
thus it is a constructivist but non-subjectivist theory, and primarily subjects the epistemic and metaphysical
to the ethical and political. Of course, we can later from the grounds of metaphysics and epistemology
critique the ethical and political, but only if through the latter kinds of action we have constructed a world
sturdy enough to stand on to change our way of understanding that world. We are, as such, collectively
free through our capacity to fashion reality and our understanding of it (through that understandings affect
on action and performativity), but at any given moment constrained by the social and technological
relationships, which constitute our collective existence and reality as such. Understanding Kierkegaard
retroactively this way indicates that the teleological suspension of the ethical is the product of praxis to
refashion our capacity to understand the world radically anew, an understanding then, which opens the
ground for the new ethics, actions and pragmatics that are possible within that metaphysical frame. As
such, Kierkegaard is an empiricist. We have a metaphysical world constituted through ethical practice,
which then suggests a field of practice in which to experiment with new ethical idioms, which, if
incompatible will fail relative to our metaphysics, but, if successful, have re-restablished the metaphysicoethical paradigm in which we are able to act in the future. God is metaphysics proper, but as Durkheim
shows, metaphysics is a communitys displacement and projection onto a nature that allows that collectivity
to constitute and re-constitute itself as necessary. As such, functionalism is a valid social and cultural
theory, but only in the context of interpretive theories mobilized to critique it. There is no function separate
from semantics, but, of course, semantics operates functionally.
512
James, Essays in Radical Empiricism; Peirce, Writings of Charles S. Peirce; and Rorty, Richard, Essays
on Heidegger and Others, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1991a.
513
Dreyfus, Being-in-the-world; and Heidegger, Time and Being.
514
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, and Joel Weinsheimer, Truth and Method, London: Continuum, 2006.
515
Gilson, The Law-Science Chasm.
516
Merton, The Sociology of Science, 101; or what, Luhmann et al., Law as a Social System, 76, calls
operative closure.

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has the right system of accreditation and can perform a rule correctly in front of the
relevant public. As a society, we delegate to different institutions different functions,
and, as such, once we have done so, we would have to appeal to a global substantive
reason for why that institution has failed us. In sum, we have given science the
institutional role of knowledge production and we let it make iPods and vaccines for us,
but do not let it decide questions of origin or climate? The problem here is that the
skepticism about climate change and evolution would either have to be global or it would
be incoherent and furthermore is taking place within the realm of the political sphere and
not the epistemic sphere, which is trying to legislate that it be forced upon the educational
and epistemic spheres, changing fundamentally the systems of accreditation which
guarantee continuity and success within scientific institutions. To doubt the importance
of institutions is to ostensibly believe in the possibility of a private language and to deny
the linguistic division of labor. Furthermore, institutions are the guarantor of consistency
in a world of relativism. They can be changed, but from within, or, from without, with a
sufficiently motivated and consistent irritation.
What I mean to say is, climate skeptics either have to do one of two things. They
can doubt science, as such, which may be valid but must consist in global skepticism
which completely undercuts the possibility of any pragmatic action whatsoever and thus
would be unacceptable, contradictory and incoherent in the public sphere, or they must
provide reasons why science is false and give a better replacement institution, which they
will have a hard time doing if they benefit from the vast majority of its results as they do.
On the other hand, they can challenge the specific results of science, but this then
premises they accept the institution of science (or else we are back at problem one), in
which case they must do it within the internal coding of science, not within the realm of
the political.
Institutions, like the facts that scientific ones create, consist in procedures of
memory and forgetting. By codifying something into a practice, one does not need to
regularly call it into consciousness. If a truly total system existed, no memory would be
needed at all.517 Because in science, the knowledge produced, the system of reference and
the organization of skepticism, experiment, theory and method are all institutionalized,
517

Bowker, Geoffrey C., Memory Practices in the Sciences, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005, 8.

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much of the work in scientific fact production can occur under erasure. That is to say,
because of the institutional norms governing all aspects of scientific production and at
times the latter being reducible to them, science can largely proceed in its minimal form.
An entire tradition, language and history of practices govern every result produced in a
scientific field and that production then adds to it. The institution of science attests to the
reliability of the facts it comprises. All academia is like this, it is the formal rational
reconstruction of tradition, or the tradition of skepticism and rational reconstruction
consisting in disciplines which perform the essential function of systematizing and
regulating the flow of social and technical practices at the heart of knowledge
productionwe are enjoined to focus upon the practices, techniques, instrumentalities,
work patterning, and organization and the coherent assembly of these different features
their packagingin local sites of knowledge production: laboratories, institutes and
departments. The generation and accumulation of innovative practices and their coherent
assembly occurs in local research sites organized in the service of a specific research
project or program. For local work to effect changes within the disciplinary landscape
resulting in the formation of new disciplines, institutional niches must be generated in
which departures from the routine of normal disciplinary activity can be sustained long
enough for a distinctive style of work to emerge.518
The fundamental accomplishment of institutionalization is that it carries the whole
tradition with each of its sub-parts but also creates an internal system of revision, which
makes sure the parts govern the whole. Furthermore, it allows the creation of different
sub-disciplines and modes of existence within its very frame, which inherit the legitimacy
of those surrounding it. That is why so much of science is boundary-work.519 Place
remains ever important because the very circulation of scientific claims and objects is
dependent on the materialization of equivalent standardized places where science settle
down[and] standardized work spaces in laboratories could foster a routinization of
bodily activities even as scientists migrate from one university to another.520 The
requisite standardization and materiality of science, while enabling a universal, though
518

Lenoir, Timothy, Instituting Science: The Cultural Production of Scientific Disciplines, Stanford, CA:
Stanford UP, 1997, 58.
519
Geiryn, "Boundary-work and the demarcation of science from non-science: strains and interests in
professional ideologies of scientists;" and Jasonoff and Martello, Earthly Politics.
520
Henke and Gieryn in Hackett et al., The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, 364.

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arbitrary language, which carries with it tradition, additionally creates at the same time a
certain vulnerability to challenge and contestation.521 The very materiality of scientific
sites makes them good targets, a kind of contested terrain where actors with divergent
interest have something to dig in to and hold on to, in both literal and figurative sense.
The capacity of physical sites to authorize knowledge is never automatic or permanent;
credibility merges from a negotiated order.522 That contestation and skepticism is built
into the literal place of science casts doubt on the capacity and sincerity of challenges
which purposefully occur on other terrain where the boundaries between scientific and
other ways of knowing placesas well as the boundary between laboratory and field
itselfare blurred and contested.523
Rather than scientists living in and acting in, and [being] protected by, what is
called an ivory tower524 it is precisely this area where they are most susceptible to
assault and this should strengthen our trust in the knowledge, which gets produced here.
One thing, which follows from my argument, is that all ideas must be considered, but that
consideration is itself not the grounds for action or acceptance. The empirical existence
of institutions is central to my argument, though from a conceptual perspective.
Institutions can be thought of as ideas, as well as practices, as with the idea of the state
the notion of what a state should and must be. In other words, there are constitutive and
regulative rules and with institutions, we surpass the fact/value divide by the fact that
starting notions of institutions contain normative claims because they are both
constitutive and regulative. Thus, while any healthy democracy or science will have
safeguarding mechanisms by which to investigate those ideas marginalized, either by
having been deemed false, unscientific or undemocratic. We cannot, however, for reasons
pragmatic and principled then open the floor to all of those ideas, which were
marginalized and, by and large, when doing serious democracy and science, even
mention them at allexcept to say they are false, let alone act on them. On a pragmatic
level, the political and less so the scientific system cannot afford to be bogged down in
ideas that are not useful. Thus politics may punt to science and say that, as of now, the
521

Ibid, 365.
Ibid, 366.
523
Ibid, 366.
524
Sonnert, Gerhard, and Gerald James Holton, Ivory Bridges: Connecting Science and Society,
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002, 1.
522

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relevant ideas are scientifically false, as opposed to still scientifically open, subject to
contradictory evidence, not yet investigable, or doubtfully not the purview of science at
all. These may be countenanced politically, as long as their status is addressed. Thus, for
example, while evolutionary psychology is controversial and challenged by philosophy,
sociology, and anthropology and from within psychology itself, it may be brought to the
congressional floor, for example, as long as its tentative and controversial nature is
addressed. There may be a question; it is certainly possible, of political policy, which
revolves either a type or program of research or a question about human nature and
preferences, which requires diverse disciplinary insights. There is ostensibly no limit to
what science can be reasonably be brought into an issue, even granting diverse
viewpoints, because not every representative of an idea must be included as long as the
main points and their evidence are. Thus, I differ from many in thinking that scientific
controversies can be settled politically or, at least, addressed and used for political
arguments but that we can also safely bar many tried ideas from the political sphere.
If proponents of settled as false claims want them addressed, they can, without
(and, even, I would say, sometimes with) government money research them and hope to
find new evidence for them. If they succeed and the scientific community endorses them,
then they can be addressed. There is one main flaw here and that is if the scientific
community is biased against an idea or already in cahoots with politics. For example,
acupuncture and physical therapy both began in scientific disrepute and now are either
fully (in the latter) or somewhat (in the former) accepted. This is a tough issue. I think
that there should be scientific and political institutions dedicated to investigating claims
which science claims are settled but are actually still controversies. In sum, there should
be safeguards, which allow matters of concern to not be misrepresented as matters of fact.
With those, then, politics can safely admit both matters of fact and matters of concern, as
long as in the latter case they include the different positions, into the discourse as well as
can and must for expedient reasons foreclose those anti-matters of fact, or rather,
positions which, as a matter of fact, are not regarded as scientific or accurate.
The social sciences have the same ground as the sciences in my view.
Furthermore, the humanities aim at doing something which is on the same ground as
science, though for different reasons, namely that, a close reading, a history, an

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interpretation or a philosophical investigation can be useful to politics when it is
formulating values, addressing the culture at hand, reading and analyzing texts,
investigating the past and is in need of critical reformulation. Philosophy, literature,
history and interpretive studies and theory are relevant and in some cases integral to
democracy, but their status is different than that of science. These disciplinesbesides
perhaps history525do not settle disputes of fact, but of value and interpretation. That
there are no facts without values and vice versa thus shows the connection between the
sciences and humanities, but does not give either priority or dominion. Even religion can
play a role here, if it admits it is answering a question of interpretation (textual or
hermeneutic of scripture for example) or of values (we are a Christian nation). In fact,
there is nothing mutually inconsistent on having values that are rooted in creationism,
while believing creationism to be false, as long as creationism is not considered
actionable in those areas in which science already has claimed turf. If, for example, as a
Christian nation we decide that the values of Christian virtue are rooted in the story of
creation and that education must teach these values, then, let us teach evolution in our
science class and creation in our religion. Indeed, most scientists accept this conclusion,
but its compromising nature its precisely the source of its discontenting feature.
Creationists want it taught as science and fact not just as religion.
Furthermore, the humanities and social sciences in dealing with
fundamental questions of value and interpretation serve as a starting point for the
clarification of those problems raised by the fact that science is a privileged epistemic
viewpoint. To the extent that science has reified the hegemonic structures of domination
in society, as it must to some extent, if my claims of the unity of ethics and epistemology
are true, its fundamental status as the arbiter of matters of fact is compromised, but, the
endeavor of the critical humanities then is not to raise questions about the truth of science
as such, but to make matters of concern out what were matters of fact, to engage, as I said
above, in an internal debate with their colleagues. Indeed, a sub-group of the literature in
STS, drawing on feminism, postcolonial thought, Marx and Foucault attempts to see
science as a manifestation of a specific gender, sexual, imperial, class or other form of
525

All I am saying with this claim is that some people conceive of history as dealing with facts rather than
interpretation. I take no stance on this whatsoever, especially given my views on the necessary
interpenetration of facts and values anyway.

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power interest. Instead of arguing that specific scientific results are imbued with
normative claims about these things, this literature attempts to claim that science
generally is biased and often then makes the relativistic argument that science is just one
way of knowing. This literature gets one thing right: science, in an abstract sense, is just
one way of knowing, but I want to argue, it is one way of knowing admitted and
suggested by democracy and only one of a few that do so and vice versa. In effect,
scientists should not be worried that relativists are taking pot shots at their theories, for if
the relativists are truly committed to the politics that they claim they are, they are the
allies of the scientists.
Famously, Sandra Harding526 argued that because of its metaphors, Newtons
Principia could be viewed as a rape manual, a claim she later, Wikipedia says, she
regretted. This one of the myriad claims, which led to the Science Wars.527 Where a
physicist forged an article claiming to show that gravity is a social construct. Not
understanding physics, the journal accepted the article and he could then claim that,
having accepted a farce, the field was illegitimate. Suffice it to say, the scholars of
literature, history and so on, which, up until then, had only commented on science as it
relates to their field, took on good faith this claim and thus were highly distressed by the
incident. Scientists charged that STS was mindless relativism. Some scholars of STS
are, in fact, relativists and would argue that science is just one perspective among many,
usually in contrast to indigenous and non-Western ways of thinking. Luckily, thinkers
like Latour do not say this. Some thinkers, like Donna Haraway, argue that science is
just one way of knowing, but that it is a good way of knowing and the best one we have,
arguing for situated and entangled objectivity instead of traditional objectivity. This is
ostensibly the claim I am making. There is a sense, in which, an apolitical person (what
type of person is that then) could argue that science is equivalent to any other form of
knowledge. Indeed though, a democrat has to believe in science, just as a theocrat has to
believe in religion. Otherwise, their system does not make sense. Thus, without
foundations, and in some abstract sense, all claims of knowledge are equal, but thats
irrelevant because we live in a political world. Similarly, all politics are equal, but we
526
527

Harding, Sandra G, The Science Question in Feminism, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986.
Ross, Andrew, Science Wars, Durham: Duke UP, 1996.

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live in a world with claims about what is true. This leaves the problem of how societies
change epistemologies and politics. Again, epistemologies and politics suggest and
admit a range of corresponding possibilities in practice and theory. Thus, while I think
that science is the best of the possibilities offered by democracy, it is not the only one and
vice versa. Luckily, science and democracy are both committed to investigating all
claims to truth and goodness. As such, they are uniquely suited to epistemology and
politics in general, for, in them, one can address the embryo of any other epistemic or
political system and, in applying it selectively and testing it, decide before adopting said
system, an advantage totalitarian governments and absolutist epistemologies do not have,
for they must cast off their opponents without discussion, sometimes on pain of death.
What this comes down to is the distinction between internal and external criticism
mapping on to my earlier discussion of insiders and outsiders, insiders being the one who
have received, through the right certified institutions (and their own teaching in the model
of citizen scientist), the correct explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge required to
engage the epistemic canon.528 Humanist, social scientists and scientists should see
themselves as one group, as that of academics, truth seekers and/or democrats. As such,
they should feel free to criticize one another but defend each other to the outside. In
academia today, the traditional distinctions of hard and soft, science and human have
fallen away; instead, it is not even practical vs. theory but for profit and not for profit.
Those that are not for profit, physics, biology, anthropology, literature, history, political
science, economics, art, theater, music and so on (even some forms of engineering or
design) should band together, I would say, against onslaughts, usually political and
cultural, but ultimately aimed at their bottom line, by conservatives, capitalists and those
that charge that schools are for preparing people to make money, through disciplines like
finance, business, mechanical engineering and so on.
The job then of the humanities and social science with respect to questions of
science is to precisely use their interpretive or empirical skills to make science more
scientific. Am I so nave to think of academe as a unified enterprise and does it make me
an elitist to think that, for example, feminist critiques of Darwinism applied should carry
528

See Cyrus Mody and David Kaiser, Scientific Training and the Creation of Scientific Knowledge in
Science and Democracy Network, Selected Bibliography.

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more weight than that of a politically motivated pastor attempting to deconstruct
evolution entirely. Suffice it to say, they are both political debates, but they are also
debates about facts and their facticity. I, to this date, know of no feminist who says that
the scars of evolutionary psychology bear the burden of us having to eliminate Darwin
altogether, or anyone who points to the Malthusian and thus capitalist foundations of
natural selection as evidence for its entire exclusion. It is precisely, then, the status of
this debate between experts and as an internal debate that grants it legitimacy, that it aims
to clarify, correct and problematize, not eliminate in one fell swoop. Indeed, as soon as
critiques of science devolve to exhortations against the enterprise as such that I stop
listening. Furthermore, the point of expertise is less important than that of internality, for
many famous examples of science occurred in the public laboratories of laymen. It is
precisely, for example, because of the forces of politics as an external intruder that forced
science to accept those habitual claims of domination that prevented it from addressing
things such as the AIDs crisis, GMOs and nuclear power and it was precisely then
citizens, acting as scientists internal to its mores, that citizen scientists advanced our
knowledge of AIDs, clarified the questions of GMOs and made us think more carefully
about nuclear power.529

529

Callon et al., Acting in an Uncertain World; and Epstein, Steven, Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and
the Politics of Knowledge, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Suffice it to say, on the question
of GMOs, though I think lay men concerns about clarifying the dangers of GMOs have been well
intentioned and well founded and policies such as GMO labeling to be perfectly sound, I do not want to
oversell citizen science. The evidence is conclusive: GMOs pose no known threat and withholding them is
to condemn millions to starve which otherwise would not have to. Though it is capitalisms fault that these
people starve, this does not mean a solution within capitalism to this starvation should be off the table and
though I think citizens are in every way entitled to force science to clarify the issue of GMOs, scientists,
upon much prodding and investigation, have deemed it settled, which, then, even by the strict restrictions of
the precautionary principle render them actionable.

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Section IV: Epistemology and Politics Imply Each

Other
The Mutuality of Politics and Epistemology Established Perspectives
The centerpiece claim of this thesis stems around the relationship between truth
and politics as one con-constitutivity, either causally or theoretically. My claim, as such,
is graded but amounts to one of two variations.
My weak thesis, which I will mostly defend here, is one stated in the introduction.
Epistemological systems comprise a set of political claims, habits and suggestions of a
fundamental nature and that political systems comprise a set of epistemic claims, habits
and suggestions of a fundamental nature. That is to say epistemic systems, in the main,
range over a series of possible corresponding political theories and vice versa. In its
weak form, this amounts to saying that no epistemology can be without political
implications and pragmatically lends itself to a subset of those epistemic claims and the
reverse holds for politics as well. I will attempt to use this claim to show how science
and democracy are exactly those theories ranging over each other. In my strongest form,
of which the seeds will be planted here, is that this not just a relationship of constraint of
intellectual range but one of co-equivalence. What is at stake here is that absent
foundationalism, one can refer to ones pre-existing ethical and political commitments to
argue for an epistemic system, with reference to perhaps intuitively non-reducible
political claims and commitments. While this is germane for many, the reverse, that
acting in epistemic good faith requires a commitment to a subset, or perhaps a specific
politics, is a claim germane to many Marxist and post-structuralists, but not the average
epistemologist.
Given the suggestions in preceding chapters on the nature of truth, epistemology,
science, public knowledge and so forth, it actually almost trivially follows that politics
and epistemology bear this fundamental relationship to one another. Nonetheless, I will
pursue the reasons why that is below.

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One problem I encounter is the fact that, just as my project is to connect science
and democracy normative, the project of showing that epistemology and politics are
linked is, in the literature, almost exclusively concerned descriptively, with that project of
establishment. This risks the error of assuming by consequent in my cause, something I
will hope to avoid by reference to other facts relating to this relationship.
Centrally, I am motivated by something Bruno Latour wrote as a blurb to a book
Cosmopolitics, whose reflections on physics are cited earlier. Cosmopolitanism, that
is, the possibility of a thriving polis and city, consists in its two constituents, the cosmos
and its politicsa politics that is attached to a cosmos is moot and that a cosmos
detached from a politics is irrelevant.530
I am certainly not the first to proffer these conclusions and, as such, I want to
discuss several others who have made similar claims. For example, Richard Rorty, both
a political and analytic philosopher sought to make the connection between epistemology
and politics explicit through his pragmatism. Assuming what I have described before as
a mixture of consensus theories of truthwe must always evaluate claims relative to our
epistemic and political system, and pragmatic ones, wherein truth is judged by what it can
do, or as he writes to reduce objectivity to solidarity and to view truth aswhat is
good for us to believe.531 That the notion of objectivity has a history and, at that, a
social a history, in which it came to be concluded, by means of consensus, that objectivity
existed and should be pursued, reveals objectivitys reducibility, in some sense, to
sociological convention (of a very non-trivial sort) and that objectivity, as a regulative
ideal, is itself a normative claim, one not explicable by reference to the scientific facts it
tries to describe. I cannot review the extensive historical literature on this subject here,
though the philosophical point is the same.532

530

Stengers, Cosmopolitics II.

Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, 22.
532
Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison, Objectivity, New York: Zone, 2007. A wonderful text on the
history of objectivity, tracing how the idea came about and how it came to be accepted among scientific
practitioners, through the medium of scientific atlases. The text argues that objectivity emerged in three
forms mechanical, structural, and trained judgment all of which have a social history, a consensus
base for establishment and are endowed with meaning through discursive social processes occurring within
the relevant disciplinary groups. The status of objectivity as precisely a regulative ideal, a value, is also
addressed.
531

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Rorty agues that that there is nothing to be said about either truth or rationality
apart from descriptions of the familiar procedures of justification within a given society
ours- uses in one or another area of inquiry,533 which, strictly speakingeven if one
believes in the use of truth or rationality as notionsmust be true, almost trivially and as
a result of the empirical history of those notions, as well as the fact that as discussed,
private language is impossible, language bears a causal not referential relationship to
reality and we are all trapped within a linguistic correlational circle. Because thought it
always evaluated related to our goals, it entails both claims to the extent to which claims
accord with ours, with no substantive a priori reason to distinguish between claims,
though there may be a criteria of relevance, which itself will be internal to that vary
conception, as well at the status of those who utter those claims at subjects capable of
being listened to, which means they must accord on some fundamental level.534 Rorty
argues that epistemology and politics both entail theories of communication, which,
bounded by time, forestall infinite regress, though this cannot be escaped. The contexts
of discovery and justification collapse, or rather become defined internal to that selfreferential theory of communication, which, as such, collapses the distinction between
epistemology and ethics, or, even more so, makes epistemology impossible without
politics, as politics was already impossible without epistemology.
As discussed, realism requires a contradictory Gods eye view of the world and,
as such, language, rather than forestalling access to reality, through its possibility of
causal reference and semantic meaning making, renders through its circular and
regressive nature, access to reality at all.535 Semantic meanings, in turn, cannot be debated
apart from the language game, to which they are causally and wholly related, that gives
them meaning.536 Notions of a communicative community supersede private certainty.
Facts and truth appeal to what is and to truth and these are justified and disputed only by
other beliefs and sentences. One cannot step outside language and because of this truth
and rightness, as coherently distinguishable notions, collapse.537

533

Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, 23.

Ibid, 175-196.
535
Habermas, Jrgen, and Barbara Fultner, Truth and Justification, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003, 216.
536
Ibid, 219.
537
Ibid, 249.
534

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Both politics and epistemology consist in giving reasons and giving reasons for
reasons and so on. There is no context apart from those reasons that exists independently,
but there is the idea that those reasons to be meaningful must be commonly translatable,
which means they both require perspective taking and furthermore may even presuppose
a common world.538 Worldviews are causally and coherently related, as such, the reasons
for interests, claims of knowledge and clams of the good, have to be related.539
Elaborating on these claims, Habermas argues, Without ethics, epistemology is
incomplete because reason as such is practical. Naturally the practice of inquiry is
directed toward truth and objectivity and in that sense value free. But the collaborative
search for truth is itself a normatively structured enterprise. Independent of the fact that
problem selection trivially depends on what is taken to be relevant, that is, on extrinsic
value orientations, inquiry manifests an intrinsic normative structure. Among other
things, this is manifested in the standards according to which theories are assessed and
accepted.540 What this means is that practical reason, ethics, concerns action and action,
itself, necessarily must presuppose epistemology by its vary structure, lest meaningful
action is impossible.
But epistemology, being necessarily public and consisting in giving reasons is
itself political. Inasmuch as politics is the realm of disputes of interests and thus of
actions, it necessarily entails claims about action, about the world and about the
establishment of mutually consistent worldviews, which necessarily entail both epistemic
and ethical claims. As such, inasmuch as politics consists in public discourse, it is at its
very nature an ethical and epistemic enterprise and, in fact, one could conceive of the
disputation, publically, of concerns over facts and values, epistemology and ethics to be
the political field proper.541
These claims are less disputable when conceived of practically, though this
distinction itself may be problematic. Sheila Jasanoff, in the field of policy, states the
problem as the fact that society cannot function without knowledge anymore than
538

Ibid, 221.
Ibid, 227.
540
Ibid, 223.
541
Habermas, Jrgen, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and
Democracy, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 199617, Habermas, 1996.
539

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knowledge can exist without appropriate social supports.542 Furthermore, science and
technology are indispensible to the expression and exercise of power and therefore
Science and technology, in short, act as political agents.543 This is true regardless if
power is conceived of as discipline or governance.
Though this point is philosophical, Jasanoffs argument is, in nature, empirical.
She argues for the notion of the co-production of science, technology, history sociality
and politics. In part, she asks us to try to think them apart, which practically and
theoretically, necessarily fails.544 But, the use of thinking them together, which is not
only conceptually and empirically simple, also produces useful and successful claims in
sociology, history, philosophy, linguistics and political science dealing with science and
technology, and thus, as an empirical theory of the social and human science is validated
by its results.545
Much like I argued that rebuttals to relativism necessarily fail because they
attempt to step out of the very traditions which render them meaningful, in most
exercises of world making, neither science nor society begins with a clean slate but
operates always against the backdrop of an extant order, in which people already know
in pragmatic terms what counts as nature or science and what as society or culture.546
Following from this is the theoretically important, but empirically true claim that
nothing significant happens in science without coherent adjustments in society, politics
or culture; similarly, intransigent social problems seldom yield to resolution without
changes in existing structures of knowledge.547 This is most obvious in discussions of
technology because material productions necessarily affect both what we know and
how we behave.548 Technological and scientific problems of standardization, almost

542

2-3 Jasanoff and Martello, Earthly Politics 2-3. See comments and citations to Merton above as well as
the subsection on institutions.
543
Ibid, 14.
544
Ibid, 16-17.
545
Ibid, 17. These are far too numerous to list, as the STS literature is extensive. Note this is the main
argument for Latours Science in Action and Reassembling the Social, both of which have had the same
explanatory success.
546
Ibid, 19.
547
Ibid, 21.
548
Ibid, 21.

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always political, but necessarily social, call this into high relief.549 Jasanoff closes by
stating, Human beings seeking to ascertain facts about the natural world are confronted,
necessarily and perpetually, by problems of social authority and credibility. Whose
testimony can be trusted, and on what basis, become central issues for people seeking
reliable information about the state of a world in which all the relevant facts can never be
at any single persons fingertips. At times of significant changeit may not be possible
to address questions of the facticity and credibility of knowledge claims without, in
effect, redrafting the rules of the social order pertaining to the trustworthiness and
authority of individuals and institutions. Only by solving social problems in this way can
satisfactory warrants be produced for radically new orderings of nature.550
In a similar vein, Steven Shapin, a historian of science, in Jasanoffs department
(and a Reed graduate I may add) famously argued that solutions to the problem of order
are solutions to the problem of knowledge. There are three main ways in which this
true, first that scientific practitioners have created, selected, and maintained a polity
within which they operate and make their intellectual products, second that the
intellectual products made within that polity has become an element in political activity
of the state and finally there is a conditional relationship between the nature of the
polity occupied by scientific intellectuals and the nature of the wider polity.551
Importantly, epistemic sanctions are enforced socially.552 Science took place in a
socially constructed public space insisted upon by experimental philosophers [as] a
space for collective witnessing, of which the main point was that the witnessing
experience had to be made accessible and witnesses had to be reliable and their
testimony had to be credible.553
Shapin emphasizes the fact that a condition for the production of science was free
men, honest men, publicity, trust, a point I mention early on, and will defend later and the
banal fact that social institutions must support the production of valid knowledge.554 The

549

Ibid, 27.
Ibid, 27-28.
551
Shapin and Shaffer, Leviathan and the Air-pump, 332.
552
Ibid, 333.
553
Ibid, 336.
554
Ibid, 339.
550

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role of freedom and institutions emphasizes the fact that knowledge is political as it
entails laying down rules and conventions of relations between men. Scientific
knowledge is used politically and political knowledge needs whatever it considers the
valid epistemic knowledge. As Habermas and Rorty argued above, this is in part because
tied to (or fundamental to) conflicts of interest are conflicts of epistemologies.555
Knowledge, being a collective good, cannot dispense with others for its validity
and exchange.556 Referencing Wittgensteinian arguments I discuss above, Shapin argues
that knowledge is the result of the communitys evaluations and actions and is
entrenched through the integrations of claims about the world into the communitys
institutionalized behavior drawing on the fact that Wittgensteins later philosophical
writings insisted that all justifications for our judgments of the proper and the improper,
the true and the false, must come to an end. All such judgments are ultimately terminated
not in a way of seeing but in a collective way of acting.557
At the front and center of Shapins arguments is the notion of trust. Trust, a
specifically epistemic claim, is the basis for promises and thus for politics and those
whose actions eroded trust did not properly belong to civil society and since man was (as
Aristotle said) a political animal, the liar lost the title of man.558 Restating my
argument against skepticism, Shapin argues that at any given moment skepticism is
always a possible move, but its possibility derives from a system in which take other
relevant knowledge on trust.559 Global skepticism would mean expulsion from a
political community if taken to its end and specific skepticism requires counterlaboratories which are very specifically social and institutional functions.560 Re-iterating
his argument above, Shapin claims solutions to the problem of trust are necessary for
building both the social and cognitive order; indeed there must be practical solutions as a
conditions for actors or analysts being able to recognize the social or cognitive order.561
555

Ibid, 342.
Shapin, A Social History of Truth, xxv.
557
Ibid, 6.
558
Ibid, 11.
559
Ibid, 18.
560
Ibid, 19.
561
Ibid, 27. As such, he proposes breaching experiments, wherein one tries to deal with the everyday life
with a form of global skepticism. Sociologically, these always end in failure and disaster and that is
because doubting of trust and skepticism is a violation of the social and cognitive order both at once!
556

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Trust, already both the foundation of epistemology and politics is itself only
possible, really, in the right political conditions. Compelled actions or actions burdened
by duties or secrets or dishonesty cannot be truthfully, politically or epistemically useful,
a condition only guaranteed by free men in a non-totalitarian society.562
Additionally, it cannot be disputed that the source of knowledge and politics are
authorities, which are both epistemic and political actors. These actors derive their power
from notions of competence and trustworthiness, both of which are socially constructed
attributes.563 Furthermore, they are attributes deriving from aspects of a person imbued
fundamentally with power and politics, as education, expertise, access to different
experiences and so on evidence. As such, one perhaps, runs the risk of institutionalizing
neglect of a whole class of experiences of people due to their political and social status
which, then, is both clearly a problem of epistemology and justice.564 Veristic
assessment must be sensitive to the anti-verific effects which relations of power can
have which introduces a political standard via the possibility of a distinctively
epistemic variety of injustice, whereby some people are effectively denied and/or others
given credibility due to their socio-political power status.565 Central to this whether or
not testimony is epistemically and fundamentally prior and nonreducible and thus
constitutes genuine knowledge566 or whether, testimony is pragmatically useful, but must
be judged according to epistemic standards of motivational evidence and rationality all
the same, thus globally or locally reduced to classic epistemology generally.567 While it
is the case that, perhaps, after a point, testimony must and can be evaluated only relative
to its own inherent intrinsic epistemic motives, the very capacity to do so, the notion of
reasons, of justifications, of rationality and the very ontological categories and entities
admitted to a person for judgment in the world, must necessarily be testimonially
inculcated at some point and furthermore only possess semantic meaning and usefulness
with reference to publically instantiated rules, discourses and practices anyway. This is
562

Ibid, 38.
Fricker in Goldman, Alvin I., and Dennis Whitcomb, Social Epistemology: Essential Readings, Oxford:
Oxford UP, 2011, 61.
564
Ibid, 64, Fricker in Goldman
565
Ibid, 65, Fricker in Goldman
566
Lackey in Goldman, Social Epistemology, 73.
567
Ibid, 74-75.
563

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indisputable. Without social upbringing and being taught the validity and usefulness of
ones senses, the notion of manipulating and handling objects, and the meaningfulness of
what one encounters in the world, rationality, rule following and the judgment of
evidence is impossible. How can one have a meaningful notion of evidence without a
collective history to suggest it! One can both believe in some sort of intrinsic natural
kind veridicality of rationality all they want (though, it will be hard for them to prove
this) but they must admit, that, at some point, that notion began with semantic instruction
and conceptual organization which was taken on faith, socially and through instruction
and testimony.

The Mutuality of Politics and Epistemology Extending My Earlier

Arguments
This brief historical survey touches on some of the main points I would have
gleaned from my discussions above. Starting with the obvious relationships, politics
necessarily requires epistemology, because politics concerns disputes, interests, debates
and actions. Each of these fundamentally requires a working theory of what is and how
to know it and usually entail with them epistemic claims and habits. These theories can
change, but that itself then is just a political debate over epistemology. This brings me
back to a point I made about truth and politics as classically conceived. Even if one is
skeptical and thinks truth is fundamentally inaccessible, for pragmatic reasons, one must
admit some class of truths, somehow, somewhere, even temporarily for the purposes of
action. Thus, while providing no criteria by which political discussants and actors should
and can judge skeptical claims and so forth, it is the case they must be established at any
given political moment, no matter how provisionally.
Furthermore, freedom of speech and perhaps other freedoms, are, in many senses,
a condition for genuine knowledge. If one lives in which free discussion is impossible,
then so is free thought, for thought requires external variation and validation. The
possibility of meaning of thought requires a common and established world and in order
to change and modulate those claims internal to the tradition, free and open speech,
parrhesia even, must occur. Furthermore, the conditions under which one is not free

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preclude the kind of trust that makes epistemology possible. Science, for example, can
occur under totalitarian regimes, but only, really, if those scientists exist in a nontotalitarian space within said regime. The disasters of scientifically incorrect information
produced in Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany demonstrate this fact, and are also the
exceptions which proved the rule, for the privileged few scientists who operated within
the right constraints such that they we able to speak freely were in fact able to produce
meaningful, if not at times atrocious, scientific results.568 Relatedly, suggestions above
about epistemic injustice suggest that perhaps equality, openness and pluralism are
required for maximizing epistemic possibilities, confirmation and disconfirmation and
furthermore links up precluding this access a sort of imposed injustice against ones
claims to equality. The former claim is one entailed by our notions of epistemology,
while the latter is a normative claim stemming from external concerns about equality, but
most fundamentally connect epistemology and politics in a fundamentally meaningful
way.
There is an exception to what I just said and that is the problem of revelation.
Revelation is the only alternative to an epistemology grounded in publicity, skepticism
and trust. Furthermore, reason and revelation cannot defeat each other in intellectual
battle.569 They each fundamentally enclose each other. Revelation, however, is
necessarily an epistemology and also pertains to claims about ethics and politics.570 At
least in the case where revelation is a counter argument, namely to the idea that without
public confirmation, one can make political and ethical decisions due to revelation, this
must necessarily be the case. Thus, inasmuch as revelation serves as a rebuttal to
arguments about politics and epistemology, it is doing so as a set of epistemic, ethical and
political claims and thus therefore, while maybe discrediting science, hermeneutics or
some other such knowledge gathering formation cannot dislodge the fact that politics and
epistemology entail each other in fundamental ways.
As I mentioned above, significant portions of the literature concern science and
democracy, which is surprising to me as theocracy seems like the most obvious example.
568

Agar, Science in the Twentieth Century and Beyond.

Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theological-Political Problem.
570
It also, some argue, fundamentally changes ones relationship to time.
569

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A theocratic system explicitly is founded upon the premise that epistemology, ethics and
politics are co-equivalent and co-extensive. Similarly, authoritarian governments, either
of the fascist sort, proclaiming truth to be equivalent to the dictator and his mens claims
or degenerate communist states which entail necessarily a Marxist, Leninist, Maoist etc.
epistemology or one such derived from it, reveal that though the case that is meant to
prove the relationship of politics and epistemology through democracy and science, it is
far easier to do so in reference to exactly every other system but those too.
Consider, furthermore, a monarchy. In addition to politics enjoining it to
epistemic decisions, however liminally, the question of the legitimacy of the monarch,
vis--vis divine sanction or heredity, is itself a fundamentally epistemic question. If one
endeavors to displace questions of legitimacy onto the populace via the platitude consent
of the governed, one has already crossed into an explicitly epistemic territory of given
reasons and common understandings.
As hinted at by my discussion of institutions, one must have a institutions to have
publically certifiable and reproducible knowledge production. As such, the very
propping up of knowledge claim through science, advisory boards, think tanks, research
groups, bureaucraciesrequires political or, at least, public assent, which itself is not a far
cry from the social and thus political priorities of a people. Furthermore, science, as
occurring in an institution, thus requisitely must make claims of ethics, behavior and
public presentation, which means that science in practice, in institutions, its only real
form, necessarily enjoins ethical and political claims. This does not have to rest with
science. Ecclesiastical bodies are of exactly the same sort. Whether it is Catholics
discussing proper interpretations, the distribution and analysis of Fiqh and Islamic law,
either in a decentralized fashion as in the Sunni world, or in the more Pope-like fashion
of the Shia world, indicates exactly this same relationship. The propping up of epistemic
and ecclesiastical bodies, which if political or legal are necessarily epistemic and if
epistemic are necessarily committed to ethics and politics, again cuts to the very
fundamental nature in which politics and epistemology are related.
I have tried to illustrate the point with my discussion of Quine that translation, in
order to work, requires a form of public assent, discussion and faith and testimony.

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Furthermore, the discussion of the properness of an epistemic theory, itself, requires nonscientific, value and social based reasons. It is not hard to see how aesthetics, simplicity
and other such values, are either political in nature, or must be decided in public, in
precisely kind of realm in which claimants are making in purpose or in effect political or
politically consequent claims. But most important to the discussion here is the
collapsing, or at least necessarily interpenetrating of facts and values. Claims about what
is then, necessarily entail claims about values and what should be. Claims about what
should be and our values necessarily entail claims about how the world is and how we
can claim it to be so. Decidedly then, epistemology and ethics collapse or necessarily
interpenetrate. The involvement of ethics and epistemology in politics and the political
sphere being the field in which much if not all of discussions of epistemology and ethics
takes place, concords with this fact and thus demonstrates that if politics and
epistemology are not collapse into one another, they at least interpenetrate in almost
every fundamental way. Extricating them from each other in kind or in effect is
impossible. My discussions of Wittgenstein, Kripke and Putnam are, in a sense, a mere
bolstering of my Quinean claims. They reduce epistemology and semantics to discourse,
publicity, causality and its mutual establishment as to its validity or lack thereof. That
there is no private language and that meaning derives from a causal linguistic division of
labor, itself presupposing epistemic, ethical and political questions of legitimacy, head on
collapse the spheres in which political, ethical and epistemic disputes and thus their
establishment take place. If meaning and rules are to work at all, it is because we
humans, as political animals, are lucky to be able to kvetch and act in concert, uniting our
worldviews, actions, discourses and practices in a distinctively political and epistemic
fashion.
The inseparability of interest, context and know how from epistemic claims
further bolsters this point. Inasmuch as claims can be evaluated epistemically as relevant
to interests, and the fact that interests are either quite clearly normative and publically
discussable and established demonstrates the relevance of politics to both the justification
and establishment of the validity of claims and the evidence used to provide for them.
Additionally, know-how, practical reason, always as action entail localized
epistemologies and occurring relative to interests, norms and values and made

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meaningful in a community, shows how practical activity and the discussions around it,
fundamentally, necessarily and ontologically to epistemology, ethics and politics, reveals
their mutual interpenetrability. The relativism that I related to this and in part derived
from this was more to show the problematic nature of claims to truth and justification,
though, I am personally committed to a mild form of relativism. The fact that relativism
demonstrates that one cannot extricate oneself from a tradition or a conceptual apparatus
made meaningful by a tradition, serves to show, as traditions constitute ethical, epistemic
and political claims, in turn reveals that attempts to make view-from-nowhere epistemic
claims, which is impossible, is also an attempt to extricate oneself from the political
milieu in which one makes his or her cognitive home. But, the view from nowhere fails,
even if one is committed to a form of absolutism or objectivism, and with this failure in
seeps politics. Importantly though, rather than boding poorly for truth, this shows that
politics and its attendant philosophical nature is rather a stabilizer for epistemic claims, a
plank on the boat I have discussed so frequently, from which to adjust other planks. One
can, of course, revise ones politics from other political positions and ones epistemology
while standing on the planks of other epistemic positions, but importantly, one cannot
step outside of both or either at the same time, and, even more importantly, wholesale
revisions to politics require standing, for the most part, on ones epistemology571 in toto,
and furthermore, revisions to ones theory of knowledge must take for granted the
possibility of politics proper, of discussion of publicity and therefore entail one standing
on ones planks of political positions, additionally, nearly in toto.
Kuhnian paradigms are the apotheosis of the preceding claims. A paradigmatic
community, incommensurable or not, is a practice based community which necessarily
entails epistemic standards, ethical mores and political conceptions of publicity. If
Kuhns theory of science is true, even in its weakest form, the fact that politics and
epistemology form a necessarily indissociable patchwork, involving mutual suggestivity
or co-equivalence has been established a priori. Every paradigm would necessarily, as a
collectively, a group of actors committed to ways of acting in public, to ways of acting

571

Inasmuch as it is not politicalmy claim of co-equivalence is systemic, as in, ones epistemic system
entails a political one, but sub-claims within each do not necessarily have to have a one to one
correspondence.

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ethically, commit its followers to a politics, at least within themselves. If they are to
deny their political nature, all they have done is commit themselves to their own internal
polis. Furthermore, the rupture and movement between paradigms is both necessarily
internally political, for reasons above, but additionally, takes place in an external political
context. Revolutionary science takes place against the backdrop of non-revolutionary
politics. Though perhaps one can revolutions in both at the same time, this is only if one
unproblematically does not revolutionize all of their epistemology or politics at once.
This is a priori the case. An attempt to completely revolutionize, totally and at once,
ones politics and epistemology would not end in revolution, but in incoherence, or most
likely, a hodgepodge fragmented re-assembly of what existed before, but with some parts
changed or interpreted differently.
Paradigms, as a theory of scientific knowledge and practice, are fundamentally, at
base, a social epistemology. Discussions of paradigms, when practiced with the vigor
and vitriol many feel about such relativistic ideas, neglects the fundamental points that
are the social aspects of epistemology at hand. Objectivity, for example, is itself a
normative judgment which is fundamentally social, premised on four principles equality
of intellectual authority, some shared values such as the valuing of empirical success,
public forums for criticism and responsiveness to criticism.572 These norms already
have a political edge, but the result of satisfying these normsis pluralism.573 In
addition, sociality scaffolds normative concerns such as trust about testimony,574
authority,575 criticism,576 collaboration,577 competition,578 dissent and
consensus,579 and diversity580 of opinion, all of which are either causally or actually
related to the production of objectivity.581

572

Solomon in Hackett et al., The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, 249.
Ibid, 249.
574
Ibid, 250.
575
Ibid, 251.
576
Ibid, 251.
577
Ibid, 252.
578
Ibid, 253.
579
Ibid, 253.
580
2 Ibid, 54.
581
Much of this is based in Longino, Helen. Science as Social Knowledge.
573

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Latour and Political Epistemology

Society is the cause that allowed controversies to be settled, says one half of the
Janus face, as it did with nature. No, a stable society is the result of settled
controversies,582 says the other. Instead, it is the relative stability of nature and society
that allows controversies to be settled and the settling of those controversies settle nature
and society.
Bruno Latours work questions the viability of a project, like mine, in a sense, that
seeks to show how, after the fact, once science and politics are analyzed, that they are
mutually determinative. All good work in science and technology studies, he argues, is a
work in political epistemology,583 that takes paradigmatically the fact that epistemology
and politics are co-constitutive. They both consist in the same things, alliance making,
friend recruiting, establishing counterpoints to power relations, mobilizing resources,
giving resources, cycling credit, creating and operating in viable institutions, making sure
socio-technical systems are running well, attempting to black box those matters of fact
which are relevant to ones case, while, at the same time, demonstrating that either ones
un-addressed assumptions or the matters of fact of an enemy, are actually matters of
concern, or, furthermore, creating these enemies and friends through matters of fact and
concern.
I have attempted to show how through the relationships of science and
epistemology to values, sociality, paradigms, rules, language, thought and so forth, that
epistemology and politics bear a fundamental relationship that is both causal and
constitutive in nature. The Latourian bargain is to begin with that assumption and see
where it leads, arguing that the notion that nature and culture, subject and object, fact and
value are separable, instead requires the more burdening starting assumptions, while the
relationship between the eternal and the constructed is perhaps the more obvious position,
his factishes, wherein, Europeans upon meeting tribesman were aghast that these
people could believe that idols they have constructed had real effects, while the

582
583

Latour, 1987, 43.

Latour, Politics of Nature.

209
Europeans had cleanly separated their factsscience and religion, from their values
liberal democracy and their constructions.584
There is a striking idea, in our world, that if something is shown to be socially or
culturally constructed, or, indeed, constructed at all, that it is not real.585 The only
things, which can be real, we assume, inheriting a theological prejudice from Christianity
and Platonism, are those things, which are immaterial and eternal. It is not then that all
political concepts are reified theological concepts,586 but all scientific concepts are as
well. Indeed, it would be impossible for this to have not been the case. Similarly, Arendt,
for example, conceived of politics as taking place in the public realm between interested
actors, showing who they are through discourse and action. Action and politics are
marked not by their intent but how they are taken up, the history they create through
myriad interactions, which take on meaning through a mixture of objective effects and
historical interpretations, indissociable really at all. Politics is where things happen and
things happen because actors act and describe their actions to interested parties,
constructing their interests in the process and using them to later align themselves and
form collectivities, in a forever perpetuating cycle, limited only by the impossible end of
history. The words change, but it does not take much to see that Arendts theory of
politics and Latours theory of science587 are almost the same.588 So, wherein my style of
argument has been, to extend this metaphor, to show that the fact that politics and
epistemology both inherit reified theological concepts, thus showing their relationship,
Latour goes in reverse and asks why we have to put so much conceptual and intellectual
work into not assuming this in the first place.
Religion is not composed of religious things, but of churches, frocks, texts,
gatherings, psalms, praises, deities, art, communities, wars, holy water, spots of land
designated holy.589 Politics does not comprise anything especially political, but instead
584

Latour, 2007 in Hackett et al. The Science Technology Studies Handbook.

In DeLanda, Manuel, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, London: Continuum, 2002, he
interestingly argues that that which we consider the real, as the abstractions eternally the case is actually
better termed the virtual, for it is abstracted and virtualized from actual concrete reality.
586
Schmitt and Hoelzl, Political Theology.
587
As well as Latours theory of politics and Arendts of science.
588
My first idea was to focus on this. Arendt on politics, Latour on science, and their equivalence and to
take it from here.
589
Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence.
585

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inherits wood paneled halls with Greco-Roman embellishments, politburos,
revolutionaries, papers with administrative rules on them we call constitutions, sociotechnical systems comprising nuclear power stations, coal plants, carbon credits, space
organizations,590 something loosely captured, perhaps, in our notion of a militaryindustrial complex. Science, similarly, involves a host of beakers, lab coats, government
grants, hypodermic needles, large scale construction projects, nuclear waste, giant
calculators called computers themselves inheriting a large scale socio-technical system
involving coltanitself a centerpiece in a genocide in the Congo, silicon, the assuredness
of supplies of electricity, itself requiring the functioning of Oil resources. The platitude
of everything being connected is a glib way of presenting this. It is still possible, at any
level of analysis, quarks, atoms, molecules, cells, organisms, brains, minds, colonies,
species, communities, neighborhoods, biomes, biospheres, planets, galaxies and so forth,
to recognize objects, but the fundamental thing is that the domain in which they exist is
always temporary, always in the process of construction, only ever relatively settled and
in a configuration with a composite of allies, networks, connections and enemies,
subjects and objects, technologies and institutions and so forth, whose solidity and
repetition indicates the possibility of black boxing and taking as a matter of fact, but
whose existence is to some extent fragile, though in highly graded scalable ways. This
itself is not glibly reducible, either, to nominalism, to the idea that there exists a united
mass of things on which we imposed our categories. True, we construct science, politics,
religion and so forth out of objects, which are not those things naturally, but only
inasmuch as they are not naturally anything and require relations to be meaningful, or
specified, while, at any given moment, are identifiable, in a realist fashion, as an object.
As a philosophical position, the complexity of Latours ideas and their relative
eccentricity is less my concern. He posits his notions as workable ideas for use in
productive social sciences, one in which the mutually existent fields of the sciences and
the humanities can co-exist. As a research program it has been highly successful,
generating many new articles and empirical analyses and responses, rebuttals and
criticisms. To the extent that he concerns me philosophically, it is his notion that nature
and culture cannot be cleanly separated, that all epistemology and all politics are political
590

Themselves comprising spaceships, scientists, meters, astronauts, and competition with the Soviets.

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epistemology, that realism versus nominalism or anti-realism, absolutism versus
relativism, objectivism versus subjectivism and truth versus skepticism are not useful
ways to start and to frame the debate and discuss the complexities of the natural, sociocultural and intellectual world, to not so hubristically assume that humans are the center
of the universe and that our place is fundamentally unique, nor to deny the impossibility
of conceiving ourselves apart from reality.
If subject and object, reality and name, certainty and knowledge and so forth are
to exist at all, they emerge through the relative ties, relationships, collectivities and
associations that emerge in and between the things of the world, the actants therein. If
humans did not have practical engagement with the world, the need to manipulate things,
collective representations that emerge therein, political associations, a world in which to
exist and so forth, there would be no question of the subject and object at all. Not the
platitude of sterile intellectual thought being on the backburner to more authentic
practical engagement nor the trite fact that thinking brings into being new objects, he
argues that rather than the subject coordinating a representation to an object forever
foreclosed, first comes the acts of science and politics, each with their own relative
association and combination of the natural, cultural, linguistic, practical and intellectual
and through that emerge the relative poles of subject and object, their mediation and
meaningful interaction giving rise to the possibility of differentiating them, temporarily,
at all.
A word of caution is necessary. Latours latest position is somewhat different.
He argues that, yes, he is still involved in a sort of investigation of political epistemology,
but what this entails now is understanding knowledge as a mode of existence and each
mode of existence, each knowledge has a form of veridiction specific to it. This mode of
veridiction must take place within that field as it assembles itself. While similar to the
ideas of Luhmann mentioned here, Latour emphasizes mediation, hiatuses, gaps and
connections rather than closure and self-reference. The typical problem of discussion
politics and science together is the tendency to reify discourse with the notion of straight
talk591 which is to say talk which, rather than thinking itself scientific, wants to imitate

591

Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, 125-126.

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its results, without having imitating the burdensome process as well.592 Straight talk
contrasts itself with falsity, propaganda, stupidity and so forth,593 all examples of crooked
talkwhatever is required at the time to close the conversation at hand.
Politics consists in movement.594 Political speech, argues Latourand much like
Arendttakes place in the heart of the agora, with urgency, in the middle of a crowd
where it always a matter of responding, on the fly, without full knowledge of the ins and
the outs of the issue, to a whole series of questions in which life and death of the
collective are at stake.595 Latour seems to be reformulating the ideas of pluralism, but in
actor network theorys new clothes, but he argues, rather than this being a matter of
opinion versus truth, as that requires the very notion of objectivity and straight talk he is
contesting, pluralism requites its only mode of veridiction because the continual renewal
or reprise of a movementthat cannot definitively rely on anything is probably the most
characteristic feature of political speech; the obligation to start everything over again
gives political speech perhaps the mode demanding of all felicity conditions.596 There is
then lying in politics, a malicious form of not telling the truthas opposed to stupidity or
ignorance, which consists in interrupting the movementsuspending its reprise and
thus no longer being able to obtain continuity.597
Like in pluralism, Latour considers opinion and action and contingency to be
important in politics, but does not contrast this with truth, nor is afraid of the role of
science in politics, or any form of truth for that matter. Politics has its own mode of
truth, which consists in precisely those statements, which reproduce the conditions of
possibility of politics itself. Latour is on to something here, that the conditions in which
we can successfully dispute ideas inimical to pluralism while committing ourselves to it,
must inhere in that political epistemology which makes possible both our epistemology
and our politics, which, happen, not perhaps by chance, to be science and democracy.

592

Ibid, 127.
Ibid, 131.
594
Ibid, 133.
595
Ibid, 133.
596
Ibid, 134.
597
Ibid, 134.
593

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Politics, as science, requires institutions, machines, time and colleagues.
Discussing the problems of exporting science he argues, The universalization of
knowledge remains a hypocritical pretense as long as we fail to extend the networks of
laboratories and colleagues that make it possible to bring knowledge into existence. As
such, the democratic ideal cannot be extended more rapidly, with fewer instruments,
fewer costly mediations than the scientific ideal because the universalization of
freedom is only a gratuitous injunction as long as we dont take pains to build up the
artificial enclosuresthe air conditioned equipment that would finally make the
atmosphere of politics breathable.598
Constructivist epistemologies impose burdens on people. Rather than sojourning
into subjectivism, this type of relativism requires quite literal establishment, which
requires significant work. Latour, then, argues that politics as such consists in speech,
which is fundamentally plural, and the condition of veridiction then is one, which
reproduces plurality. He has, like many others, in this same discussion, confused
democracy for politics and science for epistemology, at least it has appears as though he
has done so. For though, I will later argue that all the fundamental features of politics
and epistemology are captured by democracy and science, this cannot be assumed.
Lingering among the specter of democracy is totalitarianism, its awful other and
Latour does not make for the possibility of its existence. With Latour the state,
theocracies and the pasts of oppression seem to disappear. Either fascism is not politics,
or politics cannot be fundamentally pluralistic, in a descriptive sense. Normatively,
perhaps, we would like this to be a feature. Latour shows that within the confines of our
political world we must create conversation which can create more conversation and that,
science plays a role in this, inasmuch as it generates more conversation and solidity to the
collective, but this is as if one can retort to those who wish to critique science or
democracy from religion or totalitarianism that they are not being scientific or
democratic, as if they would even care. More fundamentally, the conditions under which
one can tell if someone is posturing as scientific or democratic within such systems are
not specified. In fact, those who proffer doubt about climate change, just as they did with

598

Ibid, 332.

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the dangers of smoking, as they did with the uses of strategic defense, and of the nonexistence of climate change, do so under the visage of being both scientific and
continuing the conversation and one is hard-pressed to show that they are, in fact,
silencing the conversation except by reference to the conditions of science and
democracy which we are in fact trying to prove.599

Latours Error and the Beginning of Science and Democracy

I commend the notion that democratic pluralism consists in conditions of further
discussion just as science does in knowledge, which can create more knowledge. What I
dont like is that this falls somewhat into the trap of begging the question, of still then
leaving us without the criteria internal to different realms of existence by which to judge,
which Latour so skillfully dealt with on the question of science. He has a hard time
dealing with those who do construct counter-laboratories and thus use the reasonable
suspicion of science against the very scientific enterprise itself.600
Latour stepping back from unifying epistemology and politics in an attempt to
separate them while still maintaining a political epistemology, while interesting, goes a
bit too far. We cannot start under the assumption that politics is democracy or science is
epistemology, even if later we are going to make the normative judgment that the former
should be reducible to the latter. The specter of totalitarianism is too great, as is the
specter of manufactured skepticism. The truth is, we cannot tell that something is, in
fact, posing a continuation of the conversation except by reference to those solid things,
which are, for the moment, closed. The continual openness of matters of fact to
becoming matters of concern, but the impossibility of globally doing so is what is of
importance and this is the last way, I think, that politics and epistemology are related and
is, in a way, a defense of Latours approach; one cannot simply raise the specter of
totalitarianism as if we are concocting a new political or epistemic system from scratch
the way Rawls proposes for we are already embedded in a tradition, a social world,
institutions, collectivities, understandings rules and practices that make doing so less
599

Oreskes, Naomi, and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the
Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, New York: Bloomsbury, 2010.
600
Ibid, 34.

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coherent. Latour is, in a sense, lucky that we are already democratic and scientific,
because then we can recourse to those facts to defend against totalitarianism and
pernicious skepticism, not by recourses to tradition, as Burke would, but to those
conditions of possibility for truth and politics central to those worlds in which we operate
and the solidity they provide.
That one can stand from the vantage point of politics to critique epistemic views
and results and from the viewpoint of epistemology to critique political ones, results from
the necessary imbrication of both sets whenever anyone makes any type of contestation.
That is to say, the reason nave skepticism is ruled off the table despite the foregoing
discussions of the relationship between politics and epistemology and of relativism and
constructivism is the nature of political epistemology. The political nature of
epistemology guarantees its solidity as much as the epistemic nature of politics
guarantees its effectiveness. That the process of building a way of life and a way of
knowledge is co-constitutive, or at least mutually suggestive, means that instability in
either refers back to both. If ones institutions are not producing solid knowledge and
behavior, if ones social organization cannot support collective action and public
knowledge, if one is halted in the forward progression of knowledge generation and
collective organizing, further and further expanding the circle of both as to include all the
possibilities that are reasonable within a horizon, testing and problem solving, scoping
and searching, alternating between breadth and depth, one can then work to modify,
tweak and sometimes, if afforded the right materials and vantage point, downright throw
out epistemic and political features of life. What I mean to say is the con-constitutivity of
politics and epistemology is a guarantee against skepticism and subjectivism even if it
suggests relativism and constructivism.
This is, however, not a prescription against change or even revolution. I am not,
in this respect, a traditionalist, though in the way I have been formalizing it, I have been
indicating the fundamentally traditional nature of knowledge and politics as with
traditionalism, as well as the necessity of difference, freedom and so forth as with
pluralism, both reformulated as defenses against skepticism in its global form.

216
Again, drawing on the metaphor of the boat, one can build a new boat from the
materials of the ship as well as from the refuse one finds while sailing and throw that
overboard, jump on it, and hope it floats (in fact, it would be unethical if it didnt, and
this is why one should either keep the old boat around temporarily or they have to deal
with the Kantian problem of revolutions, which is that they are only ethical if they
succeed) and then collect the best parts of the old ship while it sinks.
The problem, say, with the French and Bolshevik revolutions is not that they
wished to start anew, but that they did so by eliminating all possible supports upon which
they could stand to do so and threw out the baby with the bathwater where older
institutions were better. Furthermore, they viewed their ship as the final one.
It didnt help that other boats, fancying themselves warships, which also saw
themselves as final, as the circle closed, like England and the USA, which sought to see
them fail, surrounded them. This raise the facts that both science and democracy are both
epistemic and political projects because they will fail if they allow all these different
ships to exist in war, as the final say.
The project with both is to make them universal, to make sure that everyone is on
the same ship, or, at least in the same fleet, and, if not on the same wave length such that
they can communicative with everybody, at least there is the possibility of
communication through an intermediary. Either way, new forms of transponders, or
intermediate translators of the ones that exist are necessary, unmediated constructions of
the universal and the true are impossible and this is Latours correct diagnosis of previous
attempts at the universalization of science and democracy.
Intrinsically then, whatever the laboratories of ones epistemology and the
parliaments of ones politics have to be multiplied when either wishes to expand and
include and even more fundamentally, one must multiply both, or create the conditions of
transformation, mediate institutions, colleagues, traditions and so forth which can
translate successfully between, without foreclosing the possibility of change.
That the laboratories that we must multiple are the laboratories we have now and
the halls of parliament the ones we have now, are the ones which we should multiply
together and that they can be multiplied in such a way as to not marginalize or exclude

217
fundamentally, as they expand, or, multiply in such a way that they do not displace, but
instead create mediators and translators with the traditions in which they seek to replicate
themselves, is to what I now turn. Our political epistemology entails science and
democracy, but it is now necessary to analyze why.

Section V: Science and Democracy (Weakly) Suggest

Each Other
I have attempted, up until now, to posit, address and investigate different,
primarily iconoclasticthough some of them quite accepted at this point, notions of
epistemology and a diverse set of perspectives on politics, science and democracy. My
conclusions have been an attempt to disbar more chauvinistic conceptions of
epistemology and to a lesser extent metaphysics and to work through different ideas,
committing myself to some, merely thinking through others as possibilities while at the
same time keeping at bay, primarily, skeptical and subjectivist notions of reality. I
started off describing conceptions of truth, politics, science and democracy and the
problems inherent in each. The startling fact, however, I seemed to find over and over is
this every conception, though problematic, there lies significant and important insights,
such that, for example, though I find the pluralist and traditionalist conceptions of truth
and politics to be incoherent and collapsible, they are, when truth itself is realigned and
the bogey of skepticism is pushed back, fundamentally correct in some key ways.
My project has otherwise been to show how politics and epistemology bear a
causal, co-constitutive relationship of both shared form, content, practice, premise and
support. The main weakness, I found, rhetorically in the literature I have addressed
comes to something like this: every conception of politics I have encountered, to some
degree, is built in reference to an ideal conception of democracy, and every conception of
democracy, inherently, posits an ideal for politics. Furthermore, discussions of
epistemology in the literature are almost always inevitably tied to science thus producing
the same problem. Somewhat interestingly, when attempting to address a similar project

218
to my own, it is the relationship between science and democracy, which is used to
illustrate either the existence of or the usefulness of the assumption of a political
epistemology, rather than the other way around.
This is only troubling, because, I think it is important to posit a weak claim before
getting to a strong one. The weak claims substance inheres in the fact that the
fundamental relationship between politics and epistemology suggests something about
the relationship between science and democracy, and vice versa, and with reference to
other facts about reality and our values we can be motivated to accept both, together. The
stronger claim is that epistemologies and politics do not range over each other, but that
the reality of political epistemology is one of equivalence and that, as such, it is
impossible to be scientist without being a scientist and democrat at the same time.
Finally, the strongest claim is to argue that, in appealing to our understandings of
epistemology and politics at all, we have committed ourselves to science, democracy and
their combination. I believe all three of these claims, though, now I will address the
weak claim in the main and gesture at the stronger claims, because, I think, the logic of
accepting them will start to become apparent in the discussion of the weak claim and its
relationship to the preceding discussions.

Science in Democracy
I first want to address an argument that the relationship between science and
democracy is isomorphic to that of the one between representative democracy and direct
democracy. As it stands, the author of the text Science in Democracy, makes a very
powerful relationship for the descriptive and prescriptive relationship between science
and democracy. Many of the points he makes are fundamentally true, but where he is
wrong, I think, highlights substantive features that relate science and democracy.
The author starts investigating the fact that political conflicts are displaced onto
scientific ones601 but that this only occurs because of the functions they have in common.
In politics, Mark Brown argues, rulers represent people by standing for them or acting for

601

Brown, Science in Democracy, 5.

219
them and in science, machines, diagrams, etc. stand for or act for nature.602 He claims that
the juridical model of representation underlies elitist, minimalist and realist theories of
democracies. The authors conceive [of] political representation as the task of expert
rulers who deliberate in the public interest.603
Participatory democracy does not free one from this problem because the
juridical model is also assumed by those participatory and radical democrats who see
political representation as inherently suspecta second best alternative to direct
democracy. They rightly charge todays representative governments with using
representation to subvert rather than fulfill democratic ideals. But they implicitly agree
with democratic elitists that, ideally, political representation requires correspondence to
popular will. The Key difference is that where elitists seek to provide a hypothetical
form of correspondenceparticipatory democrats conceive lay participation in
opposition to this, as a matter of common sense.
One notices that the notion of representation before being problematized bears the
same dually problematic notion that truth does to politics, it is both too progressive and
too elite.604 What I mean to say is that those of the more technocratic ilk or pluralistic
persuasion both operated under the assumption of truth as unitary, absolute and free from
social and political conflict. Similarly, then, both liberal and radical democrats implicitly
take the idea that representation entails an elite who is more intelligent, experienced, fit to
rule, or with more access to truth. The bias against representation, at the risk of overly
relying on anaphoric argument, underlies both Western theories of truth and politics and
both over emphasize the difference between nature and culture and the people and the
elite.
That said, through the medium of representation, emptied of its loaded role in
positivism, laboratories and political institutions play a very similar transformative role,
from nature and man into thought and action.605 Skepticism about either science or
democracy requires a criteria of absolute certainty or truth or equality or liberty or

602

Ibid, 5.
Ibid, 7.
604
Ibid, 7.
605
Ibid, 44.
603

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whatever the standard is being used at the time and neglects the actualities of mediation,
representation and transformation, which occur.606
The problem, in part, is the notion that if representations exist they must be final.
If there is a similarity in Greece and Jerusalem, it is that, in the former, Plato wanted
access to unmediated forms and in the latter, craven images were sacrilegious. Latour
classifies several types of iconoclasm, those who are against images and
representations.607 There are those against all images, because they believe them to be
necessarily false or unethical. There are those who are against freeze-frames, images that
are reified or over-selected.608 There are those solely against the images of their
opponents.609 Finally, there are those, who, in their zealousness to protect images,
destroy them.610
Briefly, three of these four notions of representation are problematic. One cannot
be against all images, for then one is necessarily proffering an image against images, a
contradiction. There is no representation without mediation, argues Latour. One cannot
consistently be only against the images of their opponents. These include both
deconstructionists who wish to show all things are linguistic fictions, scientists who want
to reduce all things to their natural components and those who see power operating
behind everything like Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault or David Graeber. Finally, one
cannot hope to protect an image, because, in doing so, one attempts to hold back product
from process, to the detriment thereof. For example, attempts to fight cultural
appropriation or protect cultures, often ends up reifying or removing the agency of the
subjects of the culture involved, as if they cannot stand up for themselves.611 In these
image wars, one typically either does what Graham Harman calls underminingreducing
606

Ibid, 53.
Latour, Bruno, What is Iconoclash? Or is There a World Beyond the Image Wars?
In Iconoclash. Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art edited by Bruno Latour and Peter
Weibel. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 2002: 14-18.
608
Ibid, 27.
609
Ibid, 28.
610
Ibid, 29.
611
This is Sahlins famous point. On our fair college campus it comes to light when in discussing cultural
appropriation one cannot distinguish the fact that a white kid gleefully and dumbly using a Native
American headdress is clearly being stupid and offensive and the fact that cultures by their very necessity
and nature appropriate, surprising, because this is a dogma of introduction to anthropology, drawing
famously on Gupta and Ferguson.
607

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an object to another one, nature, atoms, culture etc., or over-miningclaiming objects
are falsely deep and instead are processes, fluxes and so forth.612
The only proper relationship to action and reflection, process and product, being
and becoming is to be the iconoclast who does not refuse images but only insists upon
them never being the final one. As such, representation is the acknowledgment of our
confinement to our political and epistemic boat, the fact that we must use images and
products at any given time, but never permanently and only provisionally. Thus,
democracy and science bear the same relationship in that the nature of representation cuts
across them in the same way. Absolutism of truth or global relativism destroys both
science and democracy in the same way and only in their problematization can science
and democracy be made coherent.
The author argues that while science helps democracy be more reflective, science
is itself political where there is conflict on interest, lying on a spectrum of truth to power.
Politics appears wherever there is a conflict of interest or power.613 Scienceseeks to
control empirical phenomena, and political representation aims to mediate relations of
conflict and power but the difference is not so vast because science and politics use
many of the same resources.614 As a social institution democracy allows for a diversity
of political influences on science and it helps ensure that science is open to new empirical
evidence and democracy is clearly better for science than totalitarianism but their
relationship is not one of ethos like Russell, Popper and Merton argue.615
Now, the idea that science can ever exist without conflicts of interest and power is
something to which I have already paid considerable attention. Furthermore, that science
plays a very important causal role in rendering democracy more reflective and the fact
that democracy is empirically better for science suggests, if we are going to be
empiricists, in the weak sense, that there is something about their nature, which suits
them to each other. While we can protest that this is ethos or fundamental principles

612

<http://doctorzamalek2.wordpress.com/2011/01/24/the-case-for-objects/>.
Brown, Science in Democracy, 12.
614
Ibid, 13.
615
Ibid, 15.
613

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though in that respect, as I will describe later, I find them very similar, we must still find
the causal facts impressive.
Ethos or ethics aside, there is something about the empirical nature of science and
democracy on the ground as voluminous literature in history and sociology shows, that
the two are causally related. Assuming that there is, if anything, only a weak difference
between analytic and synthetic facts as I argued before, this suggests a deep connection
between science and democracy and if we are not going to say it is ethos or principles, we
will be at somewhat of a loss to say what, in fact, it is. One has a high burden of proof to
show that it is only contingent rather than necessary features of science and democracy
that relate them, though I suppose it can be done and even in doing so, our ethical
commitments make this empirical finding irrelevant to the question of their normative
relationship. This is a unidirectional fact, however, as the empirical relationship does, I
think, in this case, reasonably suggest a normative relationship, in reference to our other
normative commitments, thus evading the naturalistic fallacy.
Furthermore, science causally helped created the bourgeoisie political sphere in
which marginalized groups could assert their voices. The public must always be
constructed.616 This unique relationship of both elite expertise and publicity grants
science and democracy a sort of paradoxical character wherein it is supposed to be a
distinct enterprise that is both uniquely public and reserved for an elite, both generally
valid and locally produced, as well as public, impartial and supremely open to
criticisms, and immune to objections from lay citizens.617 As such and because the
representative assembly is implicitly modeled on an idealized scientific community,
engaged in rational deliberation for public ends, while citizens play the role of lay
witnesses to professional demonstrations of expert prowess618 discussion, against
representation and in search of certainty in both science and democracy, within the
general will, rather than a general will for continued discussion, makes majoritarian
democratic egalitarianism and skeptical science its own opposite.619
616

Ibid, 59. He draws on Habermas here, but this is the entire argument in The Descent of Icarus by Ezrahi,
but in reverse.
617
Ibid, 55.
618
Ibid, 85.
619
Ibid, 77.

223
That said, Michael Callon argues that, consensus is often a mask hiding relations
of domination and exclusion. Furthermore, democracy will not be increased by seeking
agreement at any cost.620 Because of the power of frozen images to stultify truth and
freedom controversies enrich democracy because when scientific expertise and
political voluntarism adopt the form of authoritative discourse they fail to respond
tocitizens.621 Callon proposes the creation and proliferation of hybrid forums, which
similarly attempt to meld science and politics, expert and laymen.622 The fact is that all
forums are hybrid forums because to every specialist there is always someone more a
specialist and to every one always someone more a layman.623 Callon agrees with
Brown that representation is the cornerstone of democracy, since it is representation that
gets the people to speak at and the same time designate their spokespersons and to
suppress it would deny the very conditions of democracy.624
Unlike Brown, however, Callon does not think that science and politics are ever
separable anyway, and that, as such, while he shares the same concerns about
representation, Callons solution is mine, whenever there is a problem with pluralism, the
solution is more pluralism. The problems of science and democracy can only be solved
through more hybrid forums. There is not a gap between facts and values, but there is a
gap between research in the lab and research in the wild, though, the proliferation of labs
in the wild is a condition of successful translation.625
Hybrid forums are then this proliferation of research in the wild, the creating of
spaces of laboratory and political work, which inhere in the real world experience of
every day life. On the one hand, these organizations requiring the expertise of
technocrats at the same time that through practice they create new experts, experts in
bridging the gaps between laymen and technical thinkers. To the extent that these forums
already exist, they are manifest in government advisory boards that take into account

620

Callon et al., Acting in an Uncertain World, 4.

Ibid, 28 Callon
622
Ibid, 48, 51, and 59. Callon similarly explicates Latours idiom of translation. Translation 1 being from
macrocosm to microcosm (48), translation 2 is the collective at work (51) and translation 3 is lab to world
(59).
623
Brown, Science in Democracy, 75.
624
Callon et al., Acting in an Uncertain World, 116.
625
Ibid, 232.
621

224
representatives from all stakeholders, educated or not. They are present in sociotechnical systems that utilize democratic procedures and reaching out to the public. They
are present in consensus conferences, research in the field, and citizen-scientists who
have made great leaps in fields such as HIV research, nuclear power and so forth.
It is the duty of our society to equip the populace with the capacity, as much as
possible, to participate in and produce scientific claims, as well as competently act in
democracy. This is a truism, but this requires that elites, technocrats and experts be
similarly equipped to act as laymen, engage the public and be successful democrats. In
exchange, this establishes a compact in which citizens use scientific and technical advice
to mobilize and produce successful political outcomes, trusting the experts and
technocrats inasmuch as and only to the extent that the experts and technocrats trust the
people. In a sense, then, citizens are obligated, for example, to trust climate experts and
scientists, inasmuch as those climate experts can trust the public to mobilize that data
correctly and, if and when they are skeptical, they are motivated to instead of politically
challenging the data, to set up modes of populist access and expertise to the relevant
climate science and in establishing those counter laboratories, propped up in a public
manner, but following the procedures and methods of those whom they are trying to
contest, only then can they validly be skeptical to the extent that they are able to not
mobilize expertise in the creation of public policy.
Discussion, the medium of both science and democracy, may be arbitrary but
requires covenanting and public understanding in order to work.626 Science requires
language to work therefore making it unreliable tool for maintaining the linguistic
certainty required for truth, all speech, including and perhaps especially scientific
speech. As Arendt says of human actions and Latour says of scientific claims, the power
of words depends on how they are taken up by others.627 Consensus, as such, is the thus
precondition and result of successful science and democracy and hybrid forums which
maximize plural and efficient discussions properly address the problem at hand. The
recognition of the necessary role of science in civic narration and the necessary
626

Hobbes and Tnnies, The Elements of Law, Natural & Politic, 108 on this point, and James, Essays in
Radical Empiricism, 114. This is Kripkes point as well.
627
Brown, Science in Democracy, 116.

225
instability of the knowledge and discourse both required for and resulting from science
and politics opens up avenues to hybrid forums intrinsic to the structures at hand causing
the very problems we seek to solve.628
Despite all these strong fundamental similarities between science and democracy,
the author insists on their differentiation, as politics, he argues, is not involved where
there is neither conflict nor power, conflict but no power or power but no conflict.629 The
two have different institutional centers,630 different time-scapes631 and politics
fundamentally involves the state.632 But, focusing on the specific elides the fact that it is
institutionality and temporality, as such, which guarantee the success of science,
democracy and their associated socio-technical systems.
Furthermore, the idea that there are spaces free from conflict and power, except
provisionally and that peace itself the result of power struggles is itself a myth. The idea
that permanent peace is desirable is itself a free frame version of truth, stuck to the
absolutist and unproblematized conception of truth and the pluralist but incorrect theory
of the desirability of unity in the populace. The idea that there are scientific spaces
without power or conflict, or political ones that lack provisional peace is doubtful. The
insistence on different institutional centers and the differences in relation to the state is
also itself false. The state is one of the main supports of scientific knowledge and always
has been. The very existence of notated time and statistics are both state constructions
and underlie that the state does not merely causally support science, it plays a constitutive
role as well. Non-state publics can substitute the state, but it cannot be eliminated, qua
publicity and institutionality, in either science or politics. The notion of the different
time-scapes of science and politics, slow versus fast is itself also false. There are
extremely slow political movements, both within and between societies and regimes, and
the pace of scientific research is expanding at an ever-increasing rate.

628

In Brown, Richard Harvey, Toward a Democratic Science: Scientific Narration and Civic
Communication, New Haven: Yale UP, 1998, Brown argues for a conception of science and democracy
united by narrative and narration, rhetoric and practice, and proffers the notion of civic communication and
narration as the unity, in public, of these problematics and their proposed solutions.
629
Ibid, 189-190.
630
Ibid, 193.
631
Ibid, 194.
632
Ibid, 195.

226
Politics and especially democracy involves five features which he names as
authorization, accountability, participation, deliberation and resemblance,633 and those
in which both science and politics share, they differ. Furthermore, their authority differs
as between procedural and substantive sources.634 Deriving from this politics
fundamentally consists in coercion.635 That science and democracy differ in those
instantiations of substantive features is debatable but perhaps even irrelevant, for the
philosophical import of those notions suggests fundamental relationships nonetheless.
The contingent variations in science and democracy at any time show their fundamental
connections, not their differences. Finally, the idea that substantive and procedural
knowledge fundamentally differ falls away under scrutiny. Substantive authority, expert
authority, is produced through following proper procedures and following proper
procedures requires knowledge of a substantive kind!
Concluding, Brown argues that who counts in politics is at times a scientific
question.636 Despite their fundamental differences, one cannot be educated in
participation in either without actually participating, dishonest, stupid. Thus pernicious
discourse must be admitted so that, in both, and in their relations, they may be pointed
out by criteria internal to the system itself.637 Here, Brown agrees with Callon on the
notion of hybrid forums. As such, pernicious and manipulative speech cannot be
removed from either science or politics, but can, within those spheres, be include as such,
included to be excluded, in a way. Raise your challenges! says the scientific democrat,
but make sure you raise a laboratory and a parliament as well! I worry about the uses
of pernicious skepticism and stupidity being used to motivate and destroy fundamentally
important scientific and democratic results and institutions. Perhaps though, the fault is
with the defenders of these regimes. The solution to problems in science and democracy
is more science and democracy. Climate skepticism can only be defeated with a full on
assault of both, the details of which must be worked out. Politics is by its nature
coercive.

633

Ibid, 206.
Ibid, 207.
635
Ibid, 212.
636
Ibid, 221.
637
Ibid, 225.
634

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The pluralist worry is that truth is by its nature coercive, destructive of opinion.
But politics is itself coercive and destructive of opinion. The status of a scientific fact
within political discourse need be no more coercive than the political or legal facts at
hand; in fact, they must be equally as coercive. If one wishes to civilly disobey the law,
in protest, she can accept the consequences, so too for the laws of science. Indeed, one
may choose to ignore scientific fact, in hopes of disproving it, in the way that one may
choose to ignore political and legal fact, with the outcome the judge of the action in the
grand court of history. The problem, for example, with climate change is that we are
ignoring it now, civilly disobeying nature in hopes of proving it wrong. The stakes here,
however, are far too high. As such, the coercive facts of politics must be coordinated
with the coercive acts of nature. The global elite may choose to civilly disobey nature if
they wish to civilly disobey the law as well, but it is getting to the point, which is
problematic, but only if one thinks that science and democracy are fundamentally weak.
What I am arguing is that within the public sphere, once the skeptics have been given
their chance to speak, without establishing counter-labs and counter-publics,638 we may
exclude them or their discourse until they have raised the world. Skeptics should be
allowed to pursue civil disobedience of the facts of nature all they want, but here the
costs of ignorance are simply too high for them to interpolate their counter-public with
the public as a whole. There is no reason the masses of the world must suffer for the
manufactured skepticism of a few. It is by reference to the internally coherent and
externally productive aspects of both science and democracy that we may substantively
raise the burden of proof against skeptics in both realms.
Thus where Brown wants to highlight the very strong relationship between
science and democracy at the same time that he wants to back down and separate them
such that he can legislate an external reason for their relationship, Michael Lynch takes
the approach that science can be justified with democratic reasoning. Lynch does not
accept a nave realist view, but nonetheless is not a full constructivist about science nor
even as much of one as Brown.

638

I believe this is Michael Walzers term, but I have thought of it in reference to counterlaboratories and I
do not know the sense in which he uses it.

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Science because of Democracy

Lynch differentiates commitments from belief, though, true belief requires both
and the fact that all beliefs are oriented toward action makes the distinction slippery.639
One cannot justify ones commitments in epistemology by reference to epistemic
principles, nor to ones political principles by reference to political principles, but,
perhaps, he argues, one can use one to justify the other, an approach I like very much.
Epistemic views are fundamental to the operation of civil society640 and thus, those
epistemic views which generate a good civil society are, perhaps, those which we should
adopt.
Though, Lynch argues, one cannot justify these commitments by reference to
results641 because he says, skeptics dont dispute all scientific results. Nonetheless, one
could argue that commitment to scientific results in part is a commitment to their
methodology, a methodology, which, in order to maintain coherence must insist both on
the necessity of skepticism and revision, but of the universal application of the principles
therein. Thus, climate skeptics may believe in the physics of airplanes, but may not do
so coherently if they wish to contest climate science on scientific grounds lacking their
evidence.
Thus, I think, the structure of Lynchs argument suggest that both practical and
ethical reasons can be used to argue for epistemic commitments642 but that, these both
consist fundamentally in the operation of practical and political reason. Not letting
epistemology and politics stray too far from the outsets means that the worry of partial
skepticism and justification by results is null. One can assume that the success of a civil
society and the generation of useful scientific evidence stem from the same principles if
indeed those principles are the same, which fundamentally are a mixture of epistemic and
social equality.643

639

Lynch, Michael P. In Praise of Reason: Why Rationality Matters for Democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2012, 83.
640
Ibid, 84.
641
Ibid, 86.
642
Ibid, 95.
643
Ibid, 6, and 9.

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Lynch proposes a thought experiment, which is similar to Rawls one of the veil
of ignorance, wherein, instead of creating a new political science, we are creating a new
epistemic one, on a new earth.644 He argues that unlike Rawls, the selves he proposes are
actual, not minimal, just with the veil of ignorance645 escaping the fact that values are
constitutively important to the operation of reason itself. Lynch assumes that those
operating are capable of accepting a principle of there being generally agreed upon
epistemic principles to which they can instrumentally accede the utility.646 The success or
failure of this thought experiment thus hinges on the problem of paradigms and
incommensurability.
Thus, while I do not necessarily think that imagining creating a new epistemic or
political society anew, even if from among our current and actual embodied selves, is the
best exercise for the establishment of the relevant principles. Lynch makes a
fundamentally important point: those principles epistemically inherent in science and the
habits it establishes and to some degree the actual claims it makes are fundamental,
causally, practically as well as historically and contingently to the operation of successful
civil society qua democracy qua politics, and vice versa. Science, and democracy, are
objective,647 inasmuch as Lynch defines objectivity as a process, not a product, and more
akin to inter-subjectivity and generative of and receptive to plural conditions of epistemic
possibility, transparent,648 repeatable649inasmuch as like gives like, to which the skeptical
regress applies, inasmuch as we can imagine a skeptical critic disembodied and free from
the covenants that have made the relevant evidence possibleself correcting650 and
produced through epistemically basic faculties, the baseline necessities of practical
reason, like observation, discussion, agreement, sensation, reflection, belief, induction
and so forth.651

644

Ibid, 98.
Ibid, 110.
646
Ibid, 112.
647
Ibid, 90.
648
Ibid, 91.
649
Ibid, 92.
650
Ibid, 93.
651
Ibid, 95.
645

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The problem of the relationship of truth to politics, by way of science and
democracy is the intrinsic problem central to the operation of democracy itself, the
inherent and necessary conceptual and practical tensions that inhere in any sort of
formulation of the nature of the conceptual and practical world. Inasmuch as they are
different, were Browns assumptions right, science and democracy should bear a
privileged relationship with each other and Brown outlines that through historical, causal,
theoretical and other reasons, but denies the fundamental relationship of ethos, ethics,
epistemology, institutions and so forth.
Where Brown acutely and perceptively gives us an account as to why the internal
structure of science and democracy as separate entities suggest each other, Brown gives
reasons as to why their internal structure, inasmuch as they practically produce one
another suggests a mutual co-constitutivity in the process of giving reasons, such that the
infinite regress and unjustifiability of science and democracy with reference to the
assume necessity of foundations itself lies in the fact that both, actually lacking
foundations,652 can rely on one another.
The facts of political epistemology are clear: it is by reference to the internal
conditions and habits of both science and democracy that we can make the conditions of
inclusion of both, the necessity of continuing the conversation, of pluralism, the condition
of its opposite, of exclusion, of ending aspects of the conversation, if only, as in both
political and scientific representation, to prevent its even worse cousin, the specter of
totalitarianism or a pernicious global skepticism which is really nihilism. Thus, inclusion
must provisionally exclude in order to prevent global exclusion. Pluralists must contest
those who wish to include in the discourse those conditions inimical to pluralism, but
those conditions cannot be decided as inimical to pluralism except within the discourse
itself.

652

In my opinion, Lynch is less sanguine on this. He believes fundamentally in science and democracy to
be true and right and thus thinks that the unjustifiability of fundamental premises is not such a problem and
does not pose questions of incommensurability. I am arguing that even if they do, Lynch is right anyway.

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The Common Features of Science and Democracy

To summarize and explicate all of the preceding, it will be useful to state those
respects in which science and democracy contain mutually suggestive claims, require and
propose similar ethical and epistemic practices and contain some of the same claims,
ethical, metaphysical, epistemic, political, aesthetic and practical. Again, science and
democracy bear a similar relationship to truth and to representation. Both of them require
one understanding truth both relatively and absolutely. Relativism is a description of the
scientific and democratic process, while absolutism is a description of scientific and
democratic product. The product is never final and attempts to finalize it are both
unscientific and undemocratic. The fact is though, that in the course of never finalizing,
these conceptual supports themselves may come under attack, but must be defending in
reference to the fact that whereas continuing the conversation is self-coherent, its
opposite is not. That is to say, both pluralism and its opposite create infinite regresses,
but the ones of pluralism occur in time and self-referentially, this utilizing rather than
suffering from that fact. If one insists on a unified metaphysics then its one of the form
all claims, except this one, are relative to a frame. This is the most aggravating and
infuriating compromise to most metaphysicians, but then again, science and democracy
will not be satisfactory to either absolutists or global relativists, to either Parmenides or
Heraclitus and this is their advantage not their weakness.
As such democracy and science response to subjectivism and skepticism in the
same way. They point out that skepticism begs the question and action must and will
occur. Both science and democracy contest every stepping outside of the traditions in
which one exists to have a view from nowhere, but both make as their goal a view, which
can be seen from everywhere, or as many different places as is practically possible. In an
empirically satisfying and coherent world, that is what we mean by objectivity,
practically maximal inter-subjectivity. Objectivity is a process, something that must be
made anew, always and forever. The irreconcilable facts of action and reflection cut
across and through every human conceptualization of the universe and, as such, rather
than protesting the problems they create, we can propose a system which pragmatically
responds to their dictates.

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Nextly, science and democracy share an institutional structure, using institutions
similarly as a bulwark against uncertainty, skepticism and subjectivism. Both of them
consist in a series of socio-technical systems that use institutional powers to constrain,
construct and motivate behavior to create an environment in which things can be
questioned, where localized skepticism is the norm, but always against the background of
trust, where ideas can flow freely and conflicts can emerge and be settled, provisionally,
only to be opened again without tearing the community apart. In ancient times it was
thought that the philosopher should rule precisely because he is the one who leaves the
city and thus can see it with fresh eyes. As such, philosophy and politics were always in
threat: philosophy is the best way to run politics, but the philosopher does not want to be
political and the city cannot be asked to create a space that undercuts its own authority.
Democracy and science pose the same problem as they both consist in creating
institutions of dissent. They both require that those in power and the social world
construct and maintain social institutions fundamentally threatening by nature to the
socio-political order, or even sociality and politics as such. Democracy plays this role
with the elite, who cannot be asked, except perhaps prudentially, to cede power to the
common man. The scientist, like the philosopher, needs the city, the state to support him,
but his job consists in overturning those very mores required to secure this.653 As
institutions, science and democracy must coordinate complex sociotechnical systems
involving bureaucrats, citizens, politicians, laboratories, advisory committees,
corporations, universities, the military and so forth. Each of them has to address
problems and find the right expertise, funding and complex association of individuals

653

Again, this was Leo Strauss idea in The City and Man, where he opposed philosopher and city. Arendt
traces this history too and the idea of the philosopher as an interest group who only wants a political system
to be stable so that he can leave and contemplate, a la Hobbes. Strauss emphasizes something similar
though his stems from his notion of revolution versus reason. That conflict he says is central to politics and
philosophy. I agree, only inasmuch as reason versus revelation maps on to truth and politics, science and
democracy and philosophy and the city. Similarly scientists today as experts have interests as experts and
thus need to make themselves seem like the universal voice of reason so as to protect their interests as a
minority. Science for the sake of science is justified by virtue of the benefits it brings. There is the idea
that if science were practiced for non scientific reasons it could not function, but science we only allow for
its utilitarian function. Thus we have a sort of contradiction, science derives its utility from being able to
function, which requires it act as though it is only acting for itself. Thus we have science for itself for
others. Or rather, we science for the sake of science for the sake of utilitarian gain. Arendt, Persecution and
the Art of Writing; Kant, Immanuel, and J. H. Bernard, Critique of Judgment, New York: Hafner, 1951;
Strauss, The City and Man; and Strauss, The Theologico-Political Problem.

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who can deal with the problem, but both by their very nature need to impede action, such
that power is not abused and the truth is safely found.
Science and democracy, then, derive their efficacy from their own internal selflimits, the organization of skepticism, doubt, dissent and argument. Furthermore, science
and democracy cannot function without institutions and often the same ones. They
connect the problems of practical reason to the problems of epistemology and politics, or
show, rather, that epistemology and politics are impossible outside a system of habits,
rules, discourses and practices, operating within a tradition that secure the success of
future moves. Therefore, science and democracy bear the same relationship to practical
reason. Both consist in the practice of giving reasons, which must bear some relationship
to what has been decided to be reality, except this reality has to be decided within the
framework of giving reasons. The role of rules and paradigms in science and democracy
then reveal that they have the same internal structure of practical reason, of problem
solving, relative to a goal, within a specific community of rules that divides the epistemic
and linguistic labor at hand. Practical reason cannot operate without publics, institutions
and so forth, though it may operate with impoverished versions of those. No one would
argue that say, nomadic tribesmen lack practical reason, but what they do lack is an
epistemic and political system that models itself on the internal structure of practical
reason itself and the demands it makes on human socio-cognitive systems.
The success or failure of a socio-cognitive system requires that there be proper
coordination between different ideas in a public sphere. Knowledge must be made
public. Furthermore, people must be trusting of the knowledge of their colleagues, which
means they cannot believe them to be lying, perniciously motivated or not free in their
decisions. This is why freedom of speech is necessary to both science and democracy
and, in a sense, is the most fundamental right. Closely coupled to freedom of speech is
freedom of association. Without freedom of association the publics and laboratories
required cannot be formed, but more fundamentally, without freedom of speech, science
and democracy cannot function. Even in the most brutal autocracy, freedom of speech

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provides a guarantee, a check on power, for it allows the coordination of free collective
action, the kind that Arendt says is the opposite of violence.654
For Arendt, when a community of free people comes together and asserts
themselves, collectively self-determining their actions toward a common goal, they assert
power. In this sense, power and knowledge truly are linked, for scientists too come
together, exactly the way Arendt imagines free people do when they are utilizing their
powers as a collective. For this reason, freedom of speech, as a political right is causally
and constitutively necessary for both science and democracy and maybe for epistemology
and politics more generally. Autocratic regimes wishing to use science generally must
allow freedom of speech among them. The Nazis attempts to de-Judaize science set
them back in their pursuit of physics and even technology.655
The unity power of knowledge in free collective action coordinated through
speech is the link between legitimacy of procedure and legitimacy of substance. Science
and democracy both link procedural and substantive legitimacy together, using
procedures to determine who is substantively legitimate and requiring substantive
knowledge in order to carry through with complex procedures. The assurance that
substantive authority cannot be overstepped is buffeted by the fact that procedures can
allows the populace to depose technocrats and re-establish values of their state, as well as
actually challenge the substantive content of those technocrats claims. Procedures when
properly followed still have to address themselves before those deemed to have legitimate
substantive knowledge thus creating a check and balance on the sort of populism of
which, say, Federalists were afraid, without the necessity of creating an aristocratic class.
After all, with the right institutional mechanisms for education, skill training and so forth
in place, the technocrats can be drawn from the lower rungs of the populace anyway.
Similar ethico-political values that are both causally and constitutively related to
science and democracy abound. Both science and democracy require tolerance, which is
to say allowing those with separate interests, opinions, lifestyles and views of the good to
peacefully co-exist and to create mechanisms by which, if both parties accept
provisionally the common contexts of discovery and justification, these two groups can
654
655

Arendt, On Violence.
Agar, Science in the Twentieth Century and Beyond.

235
come together. Science and democracy presume that people with fundamentally different
metaphysical, epistemic, ethical and political views can co-exist and even co-operate. Of
course, there is a bare minimum that must be accepted such that incommensurable
paradigms can be at least brought into the same field of judgment, a sort of minimal bare
translation, but true scientists and democrats, I believe, would even accept the fact should
this minimal agreement not be possible, that the persons involved have not lost their
legitimacy as epistemic and political agents with rights and capabilities, though they may
have their role in scientific and political discourse limited.656
Individual liberty and equality are fundamental to science. Liberty is both the
freedom from constraint and the freedom to do things, to enact ideas and equality is both
before and by the law. What matters is the context. Negative freedom in science and
democracy is obvious around issues such as freedom of speech. Positive freedom
concerns the necessary institutions to provide for the creation of citizens and scientists,
such as schools, libraries, museums, universities, research labs, aquariums, industries,
parliaments, town halls and so forth. Negative freedom is often positive freedom, which
operates so effectively it, hides from view, as in privilege. This is not a problem though,
for science and democracy should both try to maximize privileges among those it
concerns itself with. Though to some, a privilege is always relative, in my view, it is
more like an asset, cultural and social capital that are not zero sum. Equality comes into
play inasmuch as before entering the demos, the public, all are equal. Before the stakes
and stakeholders have been established one may not assume anything. As such, with
respect to every new political meeting, we are perhaps in the Rawlsian spot of the veil of
ignorance, except ourselves are encumbered and we have some idea as to who the
stakeholders will be. As such, it is the institutions of science and democracies job to
make sure that there are no unfair advantages accruing. That is to say, no one should be
excluded from either the credentialing organization or the scientific enterprise once
credentialed for an aspect of his or her identity or social position, as is the case with
democracy as well. Science and democracy can both make sure that, in a sense, all
claims are judged equally, inasmuch as this means prejudice stems from the claim itself
rather than the claimant as much as this is possible. Liberty and equality are thorny
656

Locke and Laslett, Two Treatises of Government.

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issues with an extensive literature around them and I cannot hope to settle the debate
now. But, it is not hard how to see, even with varying definitions, they place similar or
the same causal and constitutive role in science and democracy.
Science and democracy both require transparency and openness. Transparency is
openness of methods, results, members, procedures and so forth to the public eye, while
openness itself is the permeability of these groups to new members. Tolerance is about
the substantive need to create a provisional patchwork, family resemblance common
world, to accept that one may live with one, who, in another political theory may be
designated an enemy.657 This does not reduce to the platitudes of liberalism, however,
which coordinate friend and enemy through economic relationships. Though, for
example, Richard Rorty thinks the metaphor of the bazaar as the public sphere and the
economic market is a good metaphor. The difference though, between liberalism and
substantive but minimal science and democracy is that both must maintain visibility.
Both must be transparent to themselves, to all the relevant outsiders to the specific lab or
public, but insiders to the general community in which they are embedded and even
transparency to the outside world entirely.
Democracies, when transparent, make fewer enemies, as they have fewer secrets
and can show the world the benefits of their practices without the imposition of force.
Furthermore, scientists, if transparent, can beat skepticism ahead of time. That said, this
rule is violated somewhat in practice, by things such as state secrets, which are kept even
from the populace and, at that, are compartmentalized within even the state itself. Not
wanting ones research to be stolen scientists in both industry and academia constantly
and fundamentally negotiate and renegotiate the proper bounds of transparency. In its
ideal form, scientists would be fully transparent and a giant database of methods, data,
results and so forth would be common to all scientists. The facts of specialization
suggest that some lack of transparency is the result of disciplinary boundaries, but the
point is more than if an interested party wished, they could seek out the data and have it
explained to them.

657

Schmitt.

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A democracy not wanting to establish an internal aristocracy must be open to new
members and the institutions of politics must be open to the members of the relevant
society. Furthermore, the only barriers to entry of science should be credentials. In both
science and democracy, the ideal scenario is where resources, schools, skills and so forth
are apportioned such that anyone, given the right length of time, could join a scientific or
political community. Though this perhaps seems utopian, a human being can learn pretty
much anything with enough time and practice and often the main barrier is resources.
Intelligence, wisdom and skill may not be evenly distributed, but each can be practiced,
each has environmental aspects and each concern more speed than content. Thus, the
more intelligent may be at an advantage in science and the more wise and prudential in
politics, but, ideally, in a democracy, no further impediments are made and, in fact,
support systems are put into place. Science and democracy both benefit from the
maximization of different perspectives, peoples and skills. Too many cooks cannot spoil
the broth in either science or democracy, given the right institutions of training and
accreditation.
The plethora and myriad peoples that come through the scientific and democratic
world enjoins another commonality, that of intersubjectivity and perspective taking. The
agora is the place where one takes the perspectives of others, sees through their eyes. In
science, one wishes to maximize the number of perspectives through which a set of data
is seen. Democracy and science both have as regulative ideals, maximal intersubjective
validity and perspective taking possibility. In an ideal democracy, the public would come
together and would see each issue from every other member of the publics viewpoint. In
an ideal scientific community, rather than being objective, a viewpoint would be
maximally intersubjective, meaning that the truth still holds from as many viewpoints as
possible, or, at least can be viewed as coherent and understood from those viewpoints.
Intersubjectivity and perspective taking require training as well.658
Intersubjectivity and perspective taking can be institutionalized. People can be
made to take other perspectives and perspectives can be made to go through the rungs of
658

Indeed, if anything, one thing I am realizing is that pedagogy, as praxis and political epistemology, is the
fundamental connection between politics and epistemology, science and democracy. This was the thesis of
Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

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others views. In fact, this is exactly what peer review, dissertation defense and general
science journals do. They force a view institutionally through as many perspectives as
possible. Furthermore, taking ones viewpoint can be a condition of entry into politics,
though it seems that the best mechanism through which to do this is the education system.
That said, I see no reason why, for example, in the Senate, a precondition of a proposal is
to state publically ones understanding of all the other views on the proposal and why they
have merits. Perspective taking is not institutionalized because it threatens power
structures, but it guarantees good science and democracy.659
When perspective taking and intersubjectivity are institutionalized, along with
transparency, openness and freedom of speech, association and thought, one can properly
create an adversarial system, in which different competing interests and views duke it out
in the public sphere. Again, that people can adversarially show down is only possible if
there is a bare minimum of trust, and that they are adversaries, combined with perspective
taking, guarantees institutionalized skepticism. The PI, for example, in a lab, often
purposefully pits lab members against each other, or suggests an alternate explanation, or
guides and molds a group during a presentation, enjoining them to take the idea seriously
but also to discuss it. Similarly, things work best in politics when they are challenged.
When one thinks of the legislation which passed with no challenge: the Iraq War, the
PATRIOT Act, the NDAA which authorized indefinite detention, much drug war
legislation and the bail-out to financial firms rather than citizens, its easy to see how
commonly agreed upon and unchallenged ideas can be problematic. Partly, this is
because those ideas, which are unchallenged, are often bathed in manipulative or
coercively unifying language that deceptively creates notions of imagined
communities660 like nations, to mobilize against enemies.
But conflict on its own is no good either and conflicts must always reach
provisional consensuses. This unites science and democracy yet again. A scientific fact
is a theory, which, due to its status in an institution, having had made it through
659

This is Graebers point in Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire Possibilities and
Direct Action: An Ethnography. He discusses how in high school, students are often asked to write an
essay from the perspective of the opposite sex. Girls write in depth essays and boys tend to refuse to do the
assignment. Why? Because the oppressor cannot take the viewpoint of the oppressed without admitting he
or she was wrong.
660
Anderson, Imagined Communities.

239
mechanisms of skepticism, having had correlated and associated the right machines,
having had made it through time and journal, having had bestowed practical reason upon
the technologists and theorists who wished to take it up, has been provisionally accepted.
Once accepted, a scientific fact is used to generate new ones until those facts create
enough adversaries to challenge the preliminary fact. In politics, this is the same way, as
that is how legislation and juridical practice occur. It would seem the time-scapes again
are slower, as scientific facts once accepted are dislodged later whereas political ones
change quickly, though this is not always true. Some aspects of the Constitution and
perhaps even their interpretation have been unchanged and in some scientific fields, such
as neuroscience, the provisional consensus changes all the time. What is important to
both is that provisional consensus has been produced adversarially and skeptically and is
understood to be subject to debate for later, but that, until that point, admittance to the
community at hand requires either accepting that provisional consensus or offering
reasons as to why the discussion should be opened up again, either with counterpublics or
counterlabs.
Science and democracy both establish and solve problems. A provisional
consensus is always an answer to a question, to a specific problem at hand. In both
normal science and normal democracy, problems are solved. They are solved through
equations, data gathering, discussion, bureaucracies, notaries, databases, information
exchange, collaboration, innovation and so forth. A democracy's job is, in part, to
discover, to grant ontological import to public problems, problems that either concerns
the public as a whole or democracy as such, or specific groups within the public, which
are airing their grievances before the public in hopes of them being addressed. Science,
furthermore, is a practical endeavor as much as theoretical, and the fact that science is
almost always technoscience, embedded in a socio-technical system, makes obvious its
problem solving nature. Engineering, medicine and mathematics are all obvious problem
solving examples, but any paradigm produces problems, which must be solved. The
point is that for science and democracy, any problem is acceptable for solving if
presented in the correct manner before the correct public or laboratory.
Problem solving fundamentally requires on the input end critical inquiry and on
the output end testing. Critical inquiry is the fact that both science and democracy must

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have institutions which do more than wait for the public to bring problems forth, they
must productively ask questions, they must speculate, perhaps idly, in hopes of providing
new thoughts, new metaphors, new answers.661 Critical inquiry involves skepticism about
old results, but also generating hypotheses, which take those results for granted. As such,
critical inquiry almost always involved conceptual analysis or rational reconstruction.
Critical inquiry is the self-reflexive practice of subjecting ones current understandings
and body of knowledge about that body of knowledge and about what that body of
knowledge designates as the world and conceiving of ways to expand or contract that
knowledge, to break down certain ideas, or build upon them. Of course, in doing either,
one does both. All knowledge increases the meta-knowledge of ignorance, knowing
demonstrates how much more there is to know.
Though science and democracy are fundamentally practical in nature and theory
always needs practice, practice being institutionalized ahead of time, so must be theory.
Idle speculation is good for both science and democracy. How many good political ideas
have been thought of while walking662 or in late night, starry eyed conversations among
friends where everything seems possible. How much philosophy and science emerged
from taking a bath or a nap, or a seemingly irrelevant conversation among friends.
Though then, science and democracy are justified to the populace by the fact that they
work, in order to do so, they must have segments, which exist for their own sake.
Democracy and science benefit from the proliferation of utopian moments,663 that is
indulgence in the ideas of art for arts sake, science for sciences sake, discussion for
discussions sake and so forth. The reasons to indulge utopian moments is, on the one
hand, the ironic fact that for some reason, owing to a mixture of contingent fact and
inherent theory, idle speculation or practice for its own sake is one of the most productive
ways of generating knowledge. On the other hand, to accept the importance of
knowledge and democracy is to commit ahead of time to the fact that they have merits,
which exist for themselves, for their own sake.664

661

See Hannah Arendt on The Life of the Mind and Heidegger on What is Called Thinking.
Nietzsche.
663
David Graeber attributes this to Bourdieu in a private email.
664
In graph theory this is the difference between a depth first and breadth first search. In evolution it is the
choice between using a current adaptation or modifying it on the one hand, or mutating or trying a new
662

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Not all critical inquiry is idle speculation, however, as much of it exists in the
exercising of practical reason, of rational reconstruction. This is the process by which
one makes ones tacit assumptions explicit, both as an individual and a culture, the process
by which intuitions are collective and individually interrogated for the purposes of
elucidating something fundamental about them.665 All systems, as Luhmann showed,
must self reflectively rationally reconstruct, for the conditions of veridiction, the
difference between system and environment, can only be decided from within the system
itself. Through the concept of rational reconstruction then, we see the unity of the ideas
of Hegels Geist, Marxs material history, analytic conceptual analysis, Arendts public
sphere, and Habermas democratic theory, the giving of reasons more generally. Because
the giving of reasons and the imputation to know-how of substantive conceptual
proposition content does not differentiate between the ethical and the epistemic, through
this notion we see how a society and an individual is constantly in the process of
remaking both its ways of knowing and its ways of living. This web of reasons in
metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and politics is all connected, a coherent whole, that
needs patching, that within it, determines that which is its other, the world itself, which
must be interrogated and addressed such that the process of reconceptualization can occur
productively. Science and democracy are the two systems, epistemic and political to
realize this fundamentally reconstructive nature of human reason and make them central
to the institution, practices, habits, beliefs and systems of their operation. So though it is
true then that all social systems must do this, it is science and democracy, which
recognize themselves as such and exploit their own type and internal structure to
maximal benefit.
To be a scientist or a democrat is to realize ones place on the boat and the sailing
ever forward into the horizon. The scientist and the democrat knows one will never be on
land and knows one must constantly remake the ship, both its hull and living quarters, its
compass and deck. Perhaps in the worst scenario the lifeboats can be deployed, or a new
ship thrown into the sea from the hull, built from collected planks in the ocean. Perhaps
solution all together, the meta-evolutionary problem of searching versus staying (see Bedau and
Humphreys on meta-evolution in "Evolution of Evolvability via Adaptation of Mutation
Rates," Biosystems).
665
All credit to my professor Peter Steinberger for this idea.

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the ocean contains many ships and these ships either establish means of communication
or build a larger ship together. This is the practical of transformation, mediation and
rational reconstruction, the structure of society and thought to which science and
democracy both pay heed for the purposes of creating, to our knowledge, maximally
productive epistemic and political systems, that is to say, systems which respond
maximally to our intuitions about epistemology and politics and often would across many
cultures for the very reason that mechanisms of translation and persuasion re built in.
The fact is though, that in problem solving and rational reconstruction, in both
science and democracy, testing must be undertaken. A test is when a lab or a public takes
in a piece of the world through its institutional mechanisms and reading it with
technologies coordinates with the system of thoughts which renders the process possible
and the plural thoughts of the colleagues involved. A test must be public. A test must be
able to prove a theory wrong and must represent a theory. A test must be repeatable and
one hopes that like creates like. Where, for science, the key virtue is repeatability, for
democracy it is reversibility and these two bear isomorphic relationship. The tests of a
democracy must be able to be undone and those of science to be repeated. The structure
here is the same. Something internal to the test must guarantee that it functions in reality
without too much friction. This is the condition of pluralism where it must allow for
more pluralism. The problem with totalitarianism is that it is hard or impossible to undo.
One may always re-integrate an excluded member of a polity, for example, but not if they
are dead and that is why tolerance really represents something about reversibility in
politics as it does repeatability in science. One tolerates anothers ideas in science, for
the repeat of the experiment might prove them right and the experimenters regress
suggests that one should keep around those naysayers at the risk of allowing ones own
confirmation to delude. In politics, one tolerates so that they may reverse. Science and
democracy both involve, as such, deferral. They are putting off into the future the final
decision and that is the fundamental structure they share which unites the concerns of
pluralism, tolerance, openness, transparency and so forth, through the problematics of
critical inquiry, idle speculation, rational reconstruction, testing and experimentation and
the presuppositions therein of repeatability and reversibility.

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Thus, while all things are open to debate, even the very foundations of both
systems, that they are always open to debate is afforded by the structure of pluralism and
repeatability and reversibility. As such, the perpetual openness to debate suggests, its
own dialectical, contradictory, other, the exclusion of those things which may prevent
repetition or reversing, which close the plural circle. That said, the system can only
decided that something threatens to close the circle once it has already admitted it in and
this science and democracy can lord over their others, for the scientist and democrat can
say to the creationist and totalitarian we have a mechanism for including you, for taking
your perspective, for seeing what would happen if we listened, for testing your ideas, for
being tolerant to them and you, for being open to you and for being transparent to you
and you do not return us the same favor and thus, in the absence of evidence, and even in
its presence, we may deny you much of what you request for your request undercuts the
very structure that makes such a request possible. Again, it is this structure of
repeatability and reversibility and provisional consensus that unites the notion of truth
and power as no more compulsive than each other, for civil disobedience consists in
similar operations in both. By resisting the civil or natural law, one is trying to register
within the public sphere, ones dissent and the success or failure of that dissent in the
court of nature or law, in the lab and among the people, confers on that claim a status that
makes it applicable within the public sphere and, thus inheriting the conditions of
repeatability and reversibility, has credentialed itself as a valid scientific and political
discourse.
Thus in science and democracy we see many ironies, the not least of which is a
bias against bias itself and a tradition of changing traditions. This apparent contradiction
is not one when it operates in time, sequentially, historically, socially, publically and so
forth and, as such, is a strength of both systems, not its weakness.

Both Scientist and Democrat All Along

Perhaps, in a sense, this exercise is ultimately disingenuous in a way, because
politics and epistemology cannot be separated that easily in the first place. All politics
involves a set of epistemic claims and habits and all epistemologies entail political claims

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and habit. This is bore out in both theory and practice, both as a useful assumption and
something which emerges when analyzing the both of them. As such, it is useful to
conceive of political epistemology as the exercise here. One should always be trying to
understand how claims about what should be and how humans should organize
themselves entail about how they may know the world and what humans claim about how
they know the world suggests about how they should organize themselves.
For example, if one commits oneself to a way of knowing which entails
experimentation, problem solving, critical inquiry, organized skepticism, credentialed
disputation, publicity, transparency, openness, pluralism and so forth and additionally
thinks this is the only way one can validly know something and furthermore that one
believes that when a community acts, it should be based on what it knows, it would be
hard to see how these do not take on an ethical, practical and political valence. If one
commits oneself to one way of knowing the world then one, almost implicitly, commits
oneself to believing that it is only just to collectively act on knowledge produced in that
way, or to organize oneself based on that sort of knowledge. To claim otherwise would
require more intellectual work than otherwise.
Furthermore, knowledge produced in this way will eventually have political
implications because of the simple fact that politics is a field in which nearly anything
may be contested. To believe knowledge to be validly produced would mean that one
believes it should take precedence over opinion, but this does not make it compulsive,
because in integrating facts about the world into the sphere of politics, one must do by
reference to both the form and the content of that knowledge. In effect, when ones
epistemic framework generates knowledge in a way that a political system would find
habitable, then in explicating that knowledge and in referencing that mode of production
one is ostensibly making a juridical argument along the lines of the fact that were a
political fact to have been generated by the political equivalent of that methodology, one
would say it is valid and should have compulsive and binding force in a political sense, as
anything else would be to make politics the realm of complete contingency, absent rule of
law or precedent. An emergency situation is itself something, which can only be
determined within the confines of the political sphere anyway. Similarly, if claims of
knowledge based on revelation are introduced into the political sphere they must

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integrated with respect to their form as well as content. Thus, one would have to justify
why in a political system based on openness, transparency, pluralism and contingency, a
form of knowledge produced through one mans purported interaction with a completely
private source of knowledge, which cannot be shown to be credentialed and which would
by its nature suppress pluralism, one should entertain the idea at all. A scientific fact is
no more compulsive than a law produced through the politically equivalent mode of
action, with regard, at least, to the judgment of legitimacy or inclusion. Thus, worries
that truth forecloses conversation, suppresses opinion and so forth are only valid if those
claims were produced in a manner, which is inconsistent with the continuation of the
conversation. Because the truths of science are considered to be provisional, working
theories and so forth, they have the form of doxa even if they have the compulsive nature
of a natural law, which makes them no more oppressive than collectively agreed upon
things. The weakness of the pluralist argument is that it generalizes this to all truth, not
realizing that not all claims to truth and all opinion are made equally, as some can accord
with our intuitions, in a formal way, of how the world should be. Thus, within a
theocracy, for example, revelation is a valid mode of policy making, though, one would
have a hard time determining a criteria for whose revelations to trust.
Similarly, if one commits oneself to a method of producing knowledge, one
would be hard pressed to accept political claims made otherwise. If knowledge truly has
to be produced in an open, public and transparent manner, it would require a lot of
intellectual work to argue that ones political system should not be made this way. The
fact is if one thinks knowledge can only be made in one valid way, one would think that
political decisions should be made in this way and furthermore, would not think political
decisions valid that were not, at least, made in a similar formal manner. Thus, if one
believes in science, one should believe in politics that makes politics in a way that would
be consist with the way that one makes truth in science and furthermore would resist
political decisions that did not fit this mold. Thus, that epistemology suggests politics,
through the means of practical reason, has implications for politics and epistemology,
namely adjudicating claims within the former and judging legitimacy in the latter.
Ultimately, it is all a matter of judging legitimacy.

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Going from the other direction, if one commits oneself to the way a political
system validly produces political action, one would have a hard time arguing that
knowledge made in a manner inconsistent with that form of organization would not have
a privileged status. Though one, of course, can retort that what is true is true, those
within the political sphere have to choose how they are going to judge which things are
true or not.
This is the basis of my weak claim. I cannot, as of yet, speak to epistemologies
and politics compatible with science and democracy other than each other. What I am
claiming is that democracy commits one to all of the features I listed above, so whatever
epistemology it uses, must share those features. Thus, if one wants to claim that science
is not the valid form of knowledge for democracy, one has to point to another
epistemology, which shares the features of publicity, organized skepticism, transparency,
openness, pluralism, and so forth. The burden of proof is high. Thus, I can totally
imagine the possibility of their being an epistemology which shares those features of
democracy other than science, but I believe one would, upon discovering that
epistemology, be hard pressed to find scientists who did not then accept it as well.
Scientists, remember, must be open to challenges to their very epistemic structure and
though one may think that the fact that they have to judge the new epistemology from the
vantage point of their old is a weakness, I do not. One would have to show scientists a
more scientific epistemology, just as one would have to show democrats a more
democratic politics.
The burden of proof for those who would want to claim that democracy is not
what suits scientific knowledge usually resort to the content of scientific knowledge
rather than its form. They refer to the contingent facts of their being scientists, somewhat
an elite, with access to knowledge many do not have and then argue for technocracy. But
technocracy as a form of politics would be unacceptable as a form of science. If one told
scientists they would have to accept as fact, in a non-challengeable way, with no method
of dissent and so forth the claims of people outside of their specialty, they would revolt.
For the most part, they trust said facts, but only because they were subjected to a method
which enjoins them against accepting those facts otherwise. Thus the contingent facts of
the distribution of scientific knowledge is not the issue at hand, but the formal properties

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of how scientific knowledge is produced and its relevance for the production of political
action and organization of people.
Throughout history both scientific and epistemic systems changed over time.
Their change always occurs, though, with reference to some aspect of life that is lived
before. Though it is easy to see the differences between say science and life as lived by
the Jews of the bible, or democracy and the political systems of the Holy Roman Empire,
along every intermediate step, each shift in the ways of knowing and ways of organizing
were justified with reference to the ones which existed currently, a claim that part of the
epistemic or political boat needed to be rebuilt, while people stood on other parts.
Science came about because it was ultimately considered to be more epistemologically
powerful than that which came before, as was the case with democracy. Changes in the
ways of knowing and the ways of living ultimately affect each other as well, as each has
to justify their content with the respect to the other. For, if an epistemological system
changed, those in political power would need reasons as to why they are not adopting it
and vice versa. Hegel made the mistake of imputing a telos to the world spirit, but absent
that, his analysis seems to be right. History consists, at least, in part, in exercises of
reflection and revision, in making ones politics and epistemology more suited to ones
intuitions about those things, as well as changing those intuitions, through both
discussion and practice, through theory and result. Kuhn made the mistake of believing
in the necessity of there being no intermediate steps between paradigms without
realizing, as Latour did, that a successful shift in paradigms consists, in part, in making
those intermediate steps fall away, in maximizing the supposed distance and
incommensurability of the new idea with the old, but only inasmuch as that exercise
entails that the previous paradigm accords less with the correct intuitions of how the
world should be. When it is a single fact, which is being established, and not a paradigm
shift the exercise is somewhat different, to emphasize the continuities and to make sure
that its the jumps that go under erasure. What Kuhn neglected was the active and
practical side of basic and normal science that consist in a series of transformations, of
which hiding either the continuities or discontinuities is a part.
I believe I have suitably shown that epistemology and politics bear an important
relationship to each other and that, that relationship suggests, in its weakest forms that

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science is one of the acceptable epistemologies for democracy and democracy one of the
acceptable forms for science. I believe I have further shown that more than being one of
the acceptable forms, the two bear a long-standing causal, historical, practical and
theoretical relationship to each other. Furthermore, from within the horizons of our
current political and epistemological system, from which we cannot step out, one cannot
argue about politics or epistemology except by reference to those commonly constituted
ideals, norms and practices which inevitable will make reference to both of them. Thus,
in its weakest form, of the many politics to which a scientist can give creed, democracy is
one of the main ones and has been one of the main ones. Additionally, of all the
epistemologies that can be used internally to justify facts in a democracy, science is one
of the lead ones. Presumably, the claims of politics and epistemology limit the possible
range of their corresponding others, but they at least raise the burden of justification as to
why formally each system should be accepted within the framework of the other. The
strong connections between science and democracy in both a theoretical, but also
practical, historical, causal, institutional and ethical ways suggests that they are made for
one another, and truly, in history, they did arise together.
I know of no other political system which corresponds to science as much as
democracy and no epistemic system which corresponds to democracy, though this may
be a limit of my imagination, though, it would seem to me that any such epistemology or
politics would be justified precisely because it is more scientific or more democratic that
that which preceded it. Furthermore, the practical benefits of both science and
democracy commit us to them. So, in its weakest form, my argument is thus. If one is
committed to democracy, then one of the myriad epistemic systems, though the only one
of which I can think, to which one can be committed is science. If one is committed to
science, then one of the political systems, though the only one of which I can think, that
one can adopt is science. Furthermore, if we are committed to those principles and
intuitions which form the common base of both or either science and democracy, it is
hard to see how we can be in a position not to accept either or both of them. The track
record of science in producing knowledge which has been reliable, useful and so forth
and the fact that it accords so well with out common fundamental understandings of
epistemology suggest that we should suggest it for merits entirely its own. Similarly, the

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record shows for democracy. If for no other reason, the advantage of science and
democracy is their openness to change and the contradiction one brings upon oneself in
practical terms if one is committing oneself to systems, which can be flexible, and
change, which is not science and are not democracy. Finally, that we are already
scientists and democrats and our web of institutions in which we currently sit justifies
both of these systems, it is hard to see how one could make an argument for another
epistemology or politics with reference to the values we hold in common which seem to
entail both.
The stronger argument, which I will have to prove in the future, is that science
and democracy are not merely options among many, but that they are the only ones suited
to each other at this time. It does not take much imagination to see how I will make this
argument because it will depend on all of the preceding discussion. What matters is that I
must show that conceiving of those common features to both science and democracy
commits us to both and that we cannot conceive of those systems without those common
features. The hardest and strongest argument I must make, however, is that in appealing
to our notions of epistemology at all, or politics at all, we commit ourselves to either and
thus both science and democracy. Again, the path of this argument is clear, for,
discussions of democracy and politics have always already been intertwined since the
beginning, as have discussions of epistemology and science in the last century. The
thrust of this argument is that all of our key insights and intuitions about politics and
epistemology are fully captured by science and democracy. The fact of the matter is,
that, science seems, in many ways, to be the most catchall epistemology we have yet, as
democracy is the most catchall politics, that is to say, that by their very structure they can
accommodate any other epistemic or political system and remain coherent and consistent
within a certain bounds, which, means, as such, there is something fundamentally relating
science to epistemology as such and democracy to politics as such and that because of
their relationship together we must accede to both. That is to say, the next task is to show
that science and democracy are not merely mutually suggestive both entirely co-extensive
and finally that when it comes to epistemology and politics, all roads lead to Rome,
namely science and democracy.

Conclusion
My Strong and Stronger Theses:
If I could write more I would have. As one of my interlocuters suggested, this
thesis would have been best written if it could have been either 300 pages longer or 250
pages shorter, but due to space and time (as well as institutions, academia, colleagues and
machines) I had to fashion a flimsier rhetoric ark, whose bow did not so strongly break
the waters of thought. My stronger formulation of the claim would have been that, not
only do epistemic and political systems range over each other, but that they are
equivalent. Furthermore, science and democracy are fully equivalent to each other. My
strongest argument is that science captures all our key intuitions about epistemology and
democracy about politics and thus, as such, anyone who wishes to be epistemic or
political at all, in this specific historical moment (of course, better forms may come
along), must be either and thus both a scientist and democrat. How successfully I
hammered in these claims would speak to whether or not I deal with perhaps a critique
some have had of my thesis, that my version of science resembles liberalism more than it
does democracy. This, to me, would destroy my thesis, but I am not necessarily worried
about it. At base, the difference lies in the fact that for me, rights as I discuss them, are
constitutive not regulative, as in freedom of speech is necessary for democracy to work,
not because we fundamentally deserve it as human beings.666
I would like to, if I may, outline what would have been these arguments and leave
them at that. The first argument is that science must be democratic and democracy must
be scientific. Consider the contrary set up: what does science look like in a nondemocratic country, or when it itself is not democratic? Without free speech, there
cannot be free thought. Science is tethered to agendas completely out of its control,
while science must be decided with regard to values. Sciences main values consist

666

Which we do, but this is a separate argument entirely.

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partially in objectivity and disinteredness, which are compromised by any alternative
configuration, whether theocratic, corporate, militaristic or totalitarian.
For science to advance, free speech must at least be granted to scientists, but then
couldnt be made public, and thus while fellow scientists can decide, the issue is not truly
public as to allow for critical reevaluation. As such, the circle of thought is closed
prematurely and one cannot be satisfied with true epistemic certainty.
Furthermore, if scientists should be granted free speech, why not anybody else, as
the cognitive and practical conditions for science are inherent in all people and are made
through training and communities, though this is a more liberal than pluralist argument
and one not absolute necessary, though sufficient, to the success of these large claims.
Thus, the non-democratic society can give no reason why it shouldnt educate everyone
to make the most scientists possible and grant them all free speech. Thus while science
can be practiced in totalitarian countries, it is philosophically and practically constrained,
and, absent the possibility of falsehood and counterfactuals, then things cant be
determined to be true.
Now, imagine a democracy that doesnt use science. How do we decide among
claims in this democracy? Furthermore, how do we test policies, evaluate them and
revise them? We must have a method to evaluate the success of a policy and notions of
how to do things, and if that method is not science, then there are truths the democracy
must accept, but these truths are not open to infinite revision as with science and thus are
undemocratic. Science is the only public, perspective taking, up for debate, revisable and
reversible epistemology.667 Thus for democracy for work, it must be scientific and if it
doesnt it must be compelled to accept truths that are made by an epistemic system which
presupposes undemocratic premises, or must recourse to skepticism, but then, as I stated
earlier, this just raises the problem again in a new form and we are back where we
started.
In sum, science must exist in a democracy and vice versa. Thus if we want either,
we must have the both. Furthermore, a democracy, which is only partly democratic, has

667

The burden of proof, I think, is on my challengers to show this is not the case.

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a difficult time justifying itself.668 A science, which is only partly scientific, cannot
determine truth, because of the need of counterfactuals for confirmation. Because the
universe is logically and causally connected, theres a sense in which all facts relate to the
truth of one another and thus if some things are verboeden, in the last instance, all are.
Thus democracies must be at least partly scientific and science partly democratic, but
partiality doesnt work because it renders the main mechanisms of the systems useless.
My strongest claim is that metaphysical commitments prove that science is
always the means to an end of most epistemologies and democracy of most politics, but
that these systems, though the most open to any other systems than other systems, are
themselves only possibly if accepted all the way. Thus even without foundations, most
commitments lead to science and thus democracy and democracy and thus science.
Let us consider a totalitarian state or a theocracy. It must formulate policies and
even if it has religious values, to enact them, it must know things about reality. Thus
revelation must either explain everything in such a way that it can be used, or it must be
supplemented. Alternatively, the totalitarian states leader must know everything or have
a way to know any given thing. The non-totalitarian and non-theocratic way of making
knowledge is science. One will have a very hard time giving me an alternative to science
as this epistemology. What I meant to say is, for prudential reasons, any political system
must make recourse to science, as it is the only reliable way of making knowledge, for it
can be proven wrong. Because revelation cannot be proven wrong, it is not an alternative
epistemology but an alternative to epistemology. The status of revelation as knowledge
is suspect even to the faithful, for that is the very point of faith, for example.
Let us consider a religious or mythical system or again a theocracy. A theocracy
rests of democracy in the sense that it needs citizens to not revolt. Furthermore, even if
revelation and God can be real, that doesnt obviate the public, collective, historical and
668

Unless the undemocratic aspects were decided democratically, but then there is a sense in which its
either no longer a democracy or is still up for democratic grabs. Remember, one not must close the
democratic circle. The pluralistic concerns of Arendt and Latour remain. In a sense, one may argue, this is
contradictory either way, because either the democracy must be undemocratic in that it forecloses some
claims or in that it can become undemocratic democratically. Remember, however, that the opposing
claims of, say, totalitarianism, are, in fact, integrated into the system itself and then debated and opposed by
the very conditions of possibility for that debate itself, namely the conditions of pluralism and freedom of
speech.

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practical and non- foundational nature of meaning and truth. Furthermore the religion
must compel everyone to be religious, in which case people arent actually religious and
thus it doesnt work. Alternatively, people choose to be religious, publically accept it and
so forth, which, in a sense, is my counterfactual of undemocratic democracy above.
Furthermore, the theologian whether as group or individualthe receiver of revelation
must be mutually intelligible to people, must be able to convince the public, and given
practical reasons for thought and action, putting him back into the circle of science and
democracy. Furthermore, if people are convinced of religious beliefs, they must put them
into practice and they run into the problems that totalitarian societies do with science.
Thus, a theocracy must be sometimes scientific and sometimes democratic. A
totalitarian state must be sometimes scientific. A democracy that can close its own circle
though, is no democracy at all, for a truly democratic system must maintain as its
condition of possibility the possibility of revision. The same is true of science. Only
going part way with democracy and science is to try to emulate their effects without
doing the work involved to do either or both.
Thus most, if not all, roads lead to science and democracy or a better form we
havent thought of yet, which maintains the same features.669

Summary and Conclusion:

I have tried to argued, in brief, that the fundamental features shared between
science and democracy make a case for their mutuality, that, if one, in good faith, accepts
one, she should accept the other as well. This is because they share many features
relating to their ethical, practical, epistemic and political status. The two of them rely on
669

The only problem is theology and revelation, like a paradigm, it cannot be externally proven wrong. As
Leo Strauss says reason v. revelation is the main conflict of politics, and, must be settled with a tie.
Revelation cannot disprove or be disproved by reason and vice versa. Thus, theology/theocracy are the
only forms of non-democratic and non-scientific form, which escapes my critique, but most people who
agree with these give some role to reason, empirical, etc., in fact, they must, given their religion. Thus in
the abstract r v r isnt solvable, but it is in practice. The only truly escaping idea is a fully religious
solipsism or skepticism, like Gnosticism. This must be strictly individual though and thus is neither
political nor epistemic.

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the structuring of institutions and organizations as to maximize the fruitfulness of
conflict, of provisional assessment, of never being done or certain. The specter of
subjectivism and skepticism haunts every possible epistemic position and, in some sense,
takes all reason with it. There is then very little, internal to the reasons of the systems
that subjectivism and skepticism attack, namely objectivism and absolutism, to guarantee
them. I, have argued, that ones inability to give fundamental reasons at the axiomatic
level is less of a problem than is typically conceived, in large part because we already
have an epistemic and political world before us from which to start operating.
Science and democracy share reasons that are fundamentally political and
epistemic, practical reasons, which have to do with the operation of action in every day
life. Recapping then, science and democracy share a fundamental ethos and value of
critical inquiry, openness, transparency, organized skepticism, sociality, publicity,
provisionally, reversibility, repeatability and so forth. Both seek to maximize critical
inquiry, problem solving and the like. Rather than fighting the problems posed by the
nature of human knowledge, by its necessarily provisional and social status as well the
specters of skepticism, subjectivism and the fact that human life cannot operate outside of
traditions and institutions, science and democracy cut to the very central structure of
those problematics and use them to their own advantage. This is the case even though
many of the main ideologues involved in defending science and democracy do not
recognize these features and see a feature of science, for example, that it produces truly
unbiased or objective information, or of democracy, that it comes to true consensus.
Rather than perpetually insisting on the asymptotic nature of those qualities, science and
democracy rather embrace the lack of foundations they encounter, in hopes of
maximizing our practical and theoretical reason in operation in the world.
What this came down to, was the unity in practical reason, of politics and
epistemology, resulting in what is called political epistemology, which interpenetrates all
of human thought and life. Two approaches to the ideas of political epistemology were
encountered. One was to address the fundamental nature of epistemology and politics
and to show how the two entailed claims, habits and structures fundamental to each other,
to demonstrate that the key to knowledge and the key to public collective life are one and
the same. The other perspective was to assume from the beginning that the two are

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inseparable. This is because, on the one hand, it requires fewer assumptions to do so, to
not posit abstractions, which are empirically unattainable and doing so solves many
conceptual problems. The other reason was that in assuming their fundamental
connection, one more successfully produces empirical results about reality, showing that
as a research program, they have more explanatory power than their opposite.
Rather than being stultified by skepticism and subjectivism and by the nature of
human life which forces a sort of relativism upon us, I had investigated the facts of
human life which generated certainty, features common to both science and democracy.
These, of course, were their institutional structure, their relationship to time and their
relationship to technology. The internal structure of academia allowed us to see how to
understand knowledge as a game of internal and external criticism, which, mandates the
acceptance of claims, as part of a large con-constitutive web of knowledge, facts,
practices and values. Relativism, as such, is a solution to skepticism and subjectivism.
Grounded in tradition, sociality, time, institutions, technology and the dictates of practical
reason, the fact that operate and must operate as in subjectivism and skepticism do not
apply, except locally, provisionally and internally to a schema, we find ourselves on
sturdy ground, if, perhaps, without foundation. The metaphor I beat to death is that of a
boat, one that we cannot escape, but to whose current form we are not bound as long as
we operate carefully.
These sources of certainty were suggested by Bruno Latour, a philosopher and
sociologist who has done more to shake our conception of truth, of reality, of science and
of politics than many other thinkers. At the root of his conception of the world is an
understanding of political epistemology, of the world as composed of associations, actors,
networks, and partial subjects and objects, always translating, transforming and
mediating each other. His ideas carry with them the notion that we must do away with
subjectivity and objectivity as traditionally, conceived, an argument, which if true,
presses upon us many of my conclusions, though, a weaker form of his argument is
available and it is one which addresses, in effect, the tradition of analytic philosophy.
Thomas Kuhn proposed a theory that science operates through basic and normal
science, through shifts of paradigms. The global, incommensurable nature of these

257
paradigms makes them unwieldy, but that is because Kuhn neglected that these
paradigms must be actively constructed, are a process and not only a product. The
features of paradigm shifts, normal science, problem solving, incommensurability, are
produced in action, due to the nature of the type of conflict and association involved. The
fact is, though, that Thomas Kuhns theory of paradigms, however reviled, is suggested
to us by the lineage of analytic philosophy. Briefly, I addressed the nature of know how,
of context and interest sensitive relativism, the problems inherent in theories of math and
logic, the nature of rules, meanings, words and the world and the problem of truth,
evidence and the under-determination of theories and meanings. These features of
thought, in many different assemblages, result in a description of human thought that
resembles the Kuhnian ideal, but the Kuhnian problematic does not make much sense
without the features of practical reason highlighted by Latour.
Ultimately, the problem of practical reason is the problem of truth and politics.
From the beginning, definitions of both science and democracy, truth and politics were
fraught with indecision and uncertainty. Furthermore, the very structure of our thought
and conceptual system seemed to afford no way out. I staked out the basic terrain of the
definitions of politics, science and democracy and what was at stake in each of them and
the fact that, from the beginning, the three definitions bore a relationship to one another.
Furthermore, the very nature of reason and our definitions and understandings of
relativism, absolutism, subjectivism, objectivism, realism, anti-realism and
correlationism, that is, the fundamental conceptions of truth and our relation to it suggest
no way out except one grounded in a sort of self-referential and dialectical reason. That
science and democracy was the modern formulation of the problem of truth and politics
was beset by the problems inherent in defining either, as well as those concepts, which
we use as frameworks to understand them.
From time immemorial, humans have asked questions about how to know the
world and how to act on it, how to live together and come to agreement. This is the
problem of truth and politics. Truth seems oppressive, destroying opinion, which is
fundamental to politics, or alternatively, too novel, destroying traditions in its wake. It
would seem that politics should either subordinate itself to truth or dispense with it all

258
together. The latter idea is impossible, but the former is undesirable and makes us
question our very conceptions of both truth and politics.
Science and democracy is the modern formulation of this, as today the question is
how to incorporate scientific knowledge into democracies and democracy into science.
Furthermore, science and democracy capture many of the key features of our
understanding of both truth and politics. The problem of truth and politics, only emerges,
it turns out, when our notion of truth and of politics is outdated. All the preceding
considerations were attempts to update our understanding of both separately and together.
The conclusion I wish to impress upon people is that problem of truth and politics is not
one at all if the two are conceived of as never separable and mutually suggestive, but to
not fall into the trap that this seems to force upon us, the trap of nave skepticism,
subjectivism or global relativism. Instead, there are features intrinsic to human life, the
structure of practical action and so forth, which can guide us away from the Scylla of
subjectivism versus objectivism and the Charybdis of relativism versus absolutism, and
these structures furthermore inhere in science, in democracy and in their relationship.
Science and democracy capture the key features of the instability and lack of
foundations of human life, but furthermore, the fundamental aspects of the world that
allow us to operate in spite of those facts. Maximizing these features, science and
democracy operate such that they maximize pluralism and possibility, contingency and
chance. Therefore the very structures internal to pluralism that render nave and
pernicious skepticism or stupidity as well as totalitarianism a threat to science and
democracy, grant us the grounds under which we can exclude those ideas from the
conversation, as long as that exclusion has been decided within the structures of science
and democracy, decided after the fact, after initial inclusion.
The greatest advantage science and democracy have over their opponents is that
they can afford to accommodate them, while the latter do not have the same ability.
Science and democracy afford a structure that is so effective and consistent that they
resist only being partially taken up, taking part of one of them, one must take all of it, as
well as the other, and their very structure suggests that they can be taken up from
maximally different starting positions, positions that are diverse but unified in their

259
concern for an epistemic and political structure which addresses the fundamental aspects
of human life.
So long as we understand truth to be political and politics to be concerned with
truth and that both are never settled, never done, always provisional, partial and without
telos, end or peace, we can see that the problem of truth and politics, by way of the
problem of science and democracy, is not a problem at all, but bespeaks its own solution,
there all along. The aphorism given us by Holderlin is that where the destructive power
lies, the saving power lies also, but this does not quite capture it, for those features of
truth, politics, science and democracy which are considered destructive, are only so
because of the temptations of the enemies, very real, very dangerous and very seductive
enemies they face. But the solution to the problems of democracy is more democracy, to
science more science, to truth more truth and to politics more politics and to all of them
each other. As long as these systems of thought and action stay true to the their mutually
constitutive self-justifying principles, than they can fend off any attack. It seems that,
then, since the time of Plato, we who have been so concerned with truth and politics have
been deluded, if only because we knew the answer all along.

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