Liberalism and Truth

|Peter Boettke|

Political discourse is often shrill rather than dispassionate; and political adversaries often feel more comfortable neatly dividing the world into those who are evil, those who are stupid, and the enlightened who agree with them, rather than reasoned discourse where well-intentioned and smart individuals simply cannot come to an agreement on policies for a variety of reasons.  As Frank Knight liked to point out, "man is a disagreeing animal" -- we are opinionated, conceited, prejudiced, dogmatic, and addicted to believing our opinions are sacred and absolute.

Rational discourse is all we have, but it is also most elusive even in a free society.  But we can, and must, do better if we hope to live better together.  One of Knight's main claims is that a consequence of the liberal revolution "is that all truth is provisional, all knowledge and all valuations are relative. The concept of truth is progressive, dynamic."  Disagreement doesn't cause a problem unless men "confuse truth with goodness, to moralize and then to take a religious view of both truth and right, to hold that they are absolutely sacred dogma -- not open to question."  Such attitudes are the product of a pre-liberal era, and survive in the liberal era in the form of dogmatism and intolerance, which have no place in liberalism.

But Knight concludes that while "There can be no truth which is not open to question" under liberalism, liberalism also must exercise great discretion over "what questions are raised and discussed; for human individual attention is very limited and the possible scope for discussion is enormously more limited still."  What questions are worthy of discussion?  Knight argues that we can only tackle one at a time, and thus we will only address a tiny fraction of the questions that could be raised. And furthermore, Knight discusses the circular problem we must confront -- "laws have to be made by discussion, but discussion has to be regulated by law, and these laws, too, have to be administered by an authority with a good deal of discretionary power."*

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*See Knight, Intelligence and Democratic Action (Harvard, 1960), especially the chapter "The Ethics of Liberalism" and pp. 130-34.

Comments

[Richard Ebeling]

One has to be very careful with reading Frank Knight.

He was an extremely well-read and insightful economist/social philosopher.

But he was often contradictory (on both theory and policy issues), idiosyncratic, dogmatic, and assertive -- and condemnatory and sometimes rude.

Often he seems to be argumentative for argument's sake, as if he has to constantly look for something to criticize and "put down."

And not just towards Austrians, though he did this very often in his reviews or articles in which they were discussed by him.

My undergraduate professor for history of economic thought had gone to the University of Chicago, and told me that he had taken Frank Knight for the history of economic thought.

When I asked him what the class was like, he replied, "Well, it was basically the history of Frank Knight's thought."

His finest essays, in my opinion, are still his pieces from the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s on the methodology of economics and the social sciences in general. He was a brilliant critic of positivism and behaviorism.

He clearly was heavily influenced by thinkers such as Max Weber (he even translated a work of Weber's on "General Economic History"), especially on the idea of subjective meaning and "understanding." His 1920s essay on "The Limits of the Scientific Method in Economics," which originally appeared in a volume on "The Trends of Economics" edited by R. Tugwell, is a delight to read -- especially from an Austrian perspective.

If one is a classical liberal/libertarian, one will be surprised by the extent to which Knight not merely "concedes" much to the modern interventionist-welfare state, but considers it essential to a free society.

He, in particular, was a critic of income inequality in society, and certainly in the 1930s and 1940s, defended income redistribution in a variety of articles. He also supported regulation over a large number of business practices and what he considered to be monopolistic tendencies in the market, when the market was left to itself.

He, in many ways, typifies the strengths and weaknesses in American liberal economic thought in the middle decades of the 20th century.

Richard Ebeling

[Paul Poenicke]

Peter, I really appreciate this post. I agree that liberals need to appreciate the fallibility of knowledge (the idea that knowledge is dynamic, changing); far too many liberals want to be infalliblists or focus upon forms of foundationalism inspired by infalliblism—both of which are out of favor in post-Gettier epistemology. (Why liberals keep pounding away at their colleagues who embrace fallibilism—which I believe has promise to provide liberalism with a better foundation and superior place within epistemology—is beyond me. Professor Ebeling’s reply to your post is especially appropriate given Rothbard’s nasty “The Hermeneutical Invasion of Philosophy and Economics,” where Rothbard savaged Don Lavoie and Ebeling for even suggesting the possibility of fallibilism (in the form of hermeneutics) for Austrian thought.) I recently wrote a midterm analyzing Popper’s understanding of Tarski’s theory of truth. What is important is that Popper, a thinker with liberal sympathies and tendencies, realized the interconnection between fallibilism and social dialogue, the other important part of your post. Popper’s idea of intersubjective criticism can be understood by liberalism as a key element of the social dialogue necessary to achieve the social aspects of epistemology—to achieve a balance between expertise, tacit knowledge, and trust, along with ethical goods necessary for knowledge, including patience, love of knowledge, and tolerance. I think liberalism has significant resources from Hayek, Polyani, and McCloskey (along with inspirations ranging from the virtue tradition, classical Taoism and Confucianism, and other sources such as Sellars’s "Some Reflections on Language Games") to dispute whether “…discussion has to be regulated by law, and these laws, too, have to be administered by an authority with a good deal of discretionary power.”

[Greg Ransom]

Liberalism has a special problem -- it has to debate folks who don't come to the public square in good faith, as a matter of their very approach to the public square and the life of the mind, e.g. the tradition of Marx, Saul Alinsky, many "post modernists" and leftist intellectuals and academics. It's a stance that rejects principled behavior, institutions, and argument -- and stands instead for expediency to achieve it's ends and for "unmasking" the liberal
and his arguments as the epiphenomena of his explotational ideology machine.

In all sorts of ways veriations of this leftist frame are mainstream in the culture and in academia (see the list of the most cited authors in the humanities for a wakeup call -- or Barack Obama's reading list in college and as an organizer and at law school).

This is part of the background for wha Harry Frankfurt calls The Age of Bullshit (see his important and helpful book).

Liberals need to go out in the world not being naive about the set of double rules that exist when engaging folks who are on board the leftist / Marxist / post modern / anti-liberal train, and who lack any sense that non-leftist arguments or principled discussion from non-leftists have any standing as anything other than masked ideology which stand in the way of achieving their morally justified ends.

These people really do embrace expediency over principle in all domains, extending to the domain of intellectual inquiry, and they really do see argument and ideas as masked class interest, ideology and unjustified barriers to morally justified expediencies -- and it doesn't help in any way to pretend otherwise.

People differ in how self aware they are as enlisted in this tradition, but it is inescapable to see it at work in academic English departments, in the leftist elite publications, and even in the approach to discussion in the public square taken by Barack Obama.

If folks haven't read Frankfurt, I recommend it again, or some of the discussions by Roger Kimball or Victor David Hanson and others on the modern leftist epistemic turn, with roots in thenworst of Marx, the political left and post modernism.

You can't simply engage the hard leftist in the English department or philosophy department -- or Obama or Krugman -- like a naive deer in the headlights.

These people don't view truth or debate the way liberals do -- nor do they believe in the claims of principle against expediency they way liberals do.

They've got to be engage in other multiply divergent ways -- including engagement via an unmasking of their epistemic stance toward principle and truth ...

[benny buchthal]

I'm not sure that I understand this correctly but to me it seems that liberalism is not faced with a special challenge to public debate. it rather makes public debate quite superflous for the most part.

on the one hand we have debates about economic systems and basically facts. what are the consequences of redistribution, taxation, price setting, minimum wage, etc... those are all hard questions and liberalism just takes a particular stance which is backed by theory.

on the other hand we have so and so many soft points that come down to value questions. do we value family life, are we comfortable with abortion, should our kids be learned in religious matters, etc... those are all the questions that liberalism takes out (!) of the realm of relevant public debate. whatever people feel, believe or value they are good to go to arrange their lives according to their own liking. we dont need public debate here (at least not necessarily).

so i basically disagree on this point:
"One of Knight's main claims is that a consequence of the liberal revolution "is that all truth is provisional, all knowledge and all valuations are relative."

we must clearly distinguish between questions of fact/knowledge and particular individual valuations. if we do so, liberalism does not face a special challenge. it simply reduces the area for which we need or should allow for systemically meaningful public debate - as long as we dont live in a settled liberal world.

once we do, public debate just becomes a toying field for those who wish to convince others to live like they themselves do. but as long as that isnt bound to legislative powers, we might not care too much.

[Mario Rizzo]

Knight understood liberalism broadly. So it was not just a political doctrine; it was also a mind-set. And we cannot ignore the role of the Roman Catholic Church here. At first it was a reminder to kings and emperors that they were not the last word. But as time went on Knight saw, or rather claimed, that it had a corrosive influence on freedom of thought and discussion. It claimed absolute truth where there was none. One has simply to look at the "notoroius" Pius IX's encyclical, "The Syllabus of Errors."

[Troy Camplin]

I think Knight might be on to something with the point on focus. For my money, the most important thing to focus on is economic liberty -- much follows thereafter. Here, then is the question:

How do we argue economic liberty/free market/Austrian economics in such a way that it addresses the concerns of 1) Left/liberals, 2) pro-business people, 3) religious people, 4) those who believe power is the answer to everything, and 5) tribalists?

[Greg Ransom]

I note that Mises cast his whole explanatory frame in a machinery designed to execute a Full Nelson on anti-liberal intellectuals and their anti-liberal epistemology / sociology.

This is how seriously Mises took the problem.

[Paul Poenicke]

Greg,
Sorry for the late reply...

Yes, there are some Marxists/postmodernists who believe that discussion of any sort will never solve intellectual or social questions—so these individuals reach for the gun or for the noble lie to achieve desired ends. However, unlike what Hanson will tell you, a good number of these individuals are reacting to, and attempting to intellectually come to grips with, a series of important philosophical issues; their answers cannot be so easily swatted away with talk of rejecting common institutions or sets of double rules. The problems stem from thinkers as varied as Wittgenstein, Sellars, Kuhn, Kant, and Hegel; the questions are related to the possibility of objectivity, the definition of truth, the historicity of values, and more. Where liberals and these individuals part is not just in the answers—it is in our inability to engage the other side at their ideological core. Liberals need to see that Hanson’s picture of postmodernism is a myth: for the most part these are serious thinkers who have taken a different view on problems that all agree are difficult and tricky to answer. Further, Hanson, like Limbaugh, lumps all thinkers who endorse the same policies as accepting the same justifications for those policies—Rawls, Singer, and Sen might agree on many policies with Foucault, Derrida, and Lyotard, but the former (set of thinkers) would be aghast at how the later defended socialism!

My solution included patience, tolerance, love, and other intellectual virtues to return to these fundamental questions and engage the other side in debate. I see your turn away from this engagement as a rejection of intellectual dialogue—such dialogue might be difficult, but it is necessary to correct others and to help us better understand and defend our own theories. I am currently a philosophy MA student at Virginia Tech, and I know (I have justified true belief) that the analytic philosophical world is not populated by postmodern nihilists—our Marxists are thinkheaded, as most ideological individuals tend to be (including Mises and Rothbard), but open to argument. Liberals need to re-engage and keep arguing; we need to understand the contemporary concerns Marxists and postmoderns have and respond to those issues. Liberals are not losing in philosophy because the Marxists are thinkheaded dolts; we are losing because we are not adding to Nozick’s critiques of Rawls. It will be impossible to convince a Marxist or postmodern that they are wrong if we simply assume, on the basis of a Hillsdale prof. who has not adequately appreciated the complex philosophical milieu Marxists/postmoderns attempt to respond to, that dialogue is impossible because every Marxist/postmodernist is secretly Saul Alinsky. (After attending Hillsdale for over three years, I heard this kind of crap for far too long.)

Let me take Frankfurt’s work as a case where there can be something like truth without the traditional understanding of the term. (I think one can gain all the benefits, and none of the many pitfalls, of the traditional view defended by Frankfurt through a combination of a minimalist theory of truth and a nuanced historicism/foundherentism, but that is an issue for another day.) On pages 64-67 of On Bullshit, Frankfurt examines the problems of skepticism and nihilism that you point out. On page 65, Frankfurt discusses a person who does not believe in an objective external world; such a person only has his own individual, subjective, culturally-determined worldview to examine. Frankfurt then goes onto claim that such an individual would sink into a kind of solipsism: only being true to one’s own opinions or views would be important—all other views can be easily rejected. Instead, one could reject such a view for a more nuanced kind of constructivism promoted by Helen Longino in Science as Social Knowledge: there may be no unconstructed external world (what Frankfurt would call a kind of skepticism about the external world), but we have a sense that there are other points of view, some very different from our own, that seem to share the same kinds of data we recognize. What is necessary to justify our own views would be a common ground for discussion in which to pit our view against others—this would provide a sense of objectivity and justification that would be more than just the self-obsessed solipsism that Frankfurt wrongly assumes all anti-realist doctrines fall prey to. (And now we return to Popper and an interest in intersubjective testing…)

[Troy Camplin]

If you weren't a racist, sexist, homophobe engaging in fallacious logocentric, phallocentric reasoning, it would be clear to you that the Marxist critique demonstrates the inferiority of your bourgeoise neoliberal prejudices that only work to oppress the proletarian workers and postcolonial peoples.

Now, seriously, how do you have a rational discussion with this person?

[Steve Horwitz]

After over 20 years at a liberal arts college with a faculty that leans slightly more to the left than average, I've never had a colleague respond to my arguments in the way that Troy (or Greg) describes. Not even close. Maybe that's what they say "in the crapper," but in actual conversation with another human being, they DO engage in rational discussion most of the time. (And arguably, more of the time than many libertarians I know, as evidence by the irrational caricatures of lefty academics that have populated this thread and much libertarian and conservative discourse on higher ed.)

Paul P. has it exactly right here:

"My solution included patience, tolerance, love, and other intellectual virtues to return to these fundamental questions and engage the other side in debate. I see your turn away from this engagement as a rejection of intellectual dialogue—such dialogue might be difficult, but it is necessary to correct others and to help us better understand and defend our own theories. "

If we start by treating the left as either stupid or evil (or irrational), we are indeed giving up on intellectual dialogue and we are making the "culture war" no longer metaphorical. If we cannot talk, what's left but brute force?

[Greg Ransom]

Paul -- I'm guessing I know this literature better and at a more profound level than you do.

My experience is that most people attracted to this stuff are attracted for emotional and political reasons, and they aren't in it for getting at the truth, and many are attracted to the whole domain of producing bullshit. That is my experience. See Harry Frankfurt's _On Bullshit_ for more.

So there is a motivation and psychological and political problem right at the heart of this engagement -- which is part and parcel of the epistemology that comes out.

"Yes, there are some Marxists/postmodernists who believe that discussion of any sort will never solve intellectual or social questions—so these individuals reach for the gun or for the noble lie to achieve desired ends. However, unlike what Hanson will tell you, a good number of these individuals are reacting to, and attempting to intellectually come to grips with, a series of important philosophical issues; their answers cannot be so easily swatted away with talk of rejecting common institutions or sets of double rules. The problems stem from thinkers as varied as Wittgenstein, Sellars, Kuhn, Kant, and Hegel; the questions are related to the possibility of objectivity, the definition of truth, the historicity of values, and more."

[Greg Ransom]

Let's not push to hard on the word "constucted" -- it will break and crash under the weight. Read Hacking or Hayek or Kuhn for some sense of why.

It's been some time since I've read Longino -- how wacky does her feminist "social construction" stuff get? I can't remember.

If memory serves she is among the more sane and reality based in that community. Some of what is written in this literature is just silly. Some it goes off into Kennedy assassination territory.

You write:

"one could reject such a view for a more nuanced kind of constructivism promoted by Helen Longino in Science as Social Knowledge: there may be no unconstructed external world (what Frankfurt would call a kind of skepticism about the external world),

[Greg Ransom]

Paul, I know this stuff well, and know how it interacts with Hayek's landmark contributions to the same literature.

This is old hat for me. And you forgot to include Popper, Polanyi, Bartley, and others.

"The problems stem from thinkers as varied as Wittgenstein, Sellars, Kuhn"

[Greg Ransom]

Paul -- I studied with a leading Kuhn scholar, a leading Post Modernist, and a Rawls scholar, and a number of professors steeped in Wittgenstein -- including one of the leading non-positivist writers on explanation and argument of the last 50 years.

There is nothing knew under the sun here in what you write, for me.

"It will be impossible to convince a Marxist or postmodern that they are wrong if we simply assume, on the basis of a Hillsdale prof. who has not adequately appreciated the complex philosophical milieu Marxists/postmoderns attempt to respond to, that dialogue is impossible because every Marxist/postmodernist is secretly Saul Alinsky. (After attending Hillsdale for over three years, I heard this kind of crap for far too long.)"

[Greg Ransom]

Paul -- I doubt there is little we disagree about here. There are varieties of "post modernists" who have actual brought Hayek into the conversation -- where he belongs.

[Greg Ransom]

Steve, is it possible for me to agree with what you say below, and still make the arguments I make above?

Because I don't see these as in conflict.

Cross-paradigm conversations are difficult -- and costly to conduct. Most people have an interest in being friendly but no interest in bearing the costs of thinking hard about an alien ideology -- and even less interest in bearing the costs of taking up that alien ideology.

And I want to hold on to the argument that there is a fundamental divide between the world view of liberal tradition, principle and rules and the world view of those who see no authority in tradition or rules in the face of the expediencies of the demands of social justice. (See Ed Feser's article on Hayek and tradition for some sense of the DEEP rejection of liberal tradition in favor of "reason" and expediency, or Hayek's own essay on this topic.)

And the minority of people who really never seriously engage non-leftist ideas -- like Barack Obama -- do exist in academia. Obama would not engage in substantive conversation with Richard Epstein, even when invited to do so. He was friendly to him, but refused to engage even on a conversation level. Doing so was too costly ...

But I've gotten off topic.

I agree with what you say, and continue to believe what I wrote above.

Steve writes.

"After over 20 years at a liberal arts college with a faculty that leans slightly more to the left than average, I've never had a colleague respond to my arguments in the way that Troy (or Greg) describes. Not even close. Maybe that's what they say "in the crapper," but in actual conversation with another human being, they DO engage in rational discussion most of the time. (And arguably, more of the time than many libertarians I know, as evidence by the irrational caricatures of lefty academics that have populated this thread and much libertarian and conservative discourse on higher ed.)

Paul P. has it exactly right here:

"My solution included patience, tolerance, love, and other intellectual virtues to return to these fundamental questions and engage the other side in debate. I see your turn away from this engagement as a rejection of intellectual dialogue—such dialogue might be difficult, but it is necessary to correct others and to help us better understand and defend our own theories. "

If we start by treating the left as either stupid or evil (or irrational), we are indeed giving up on intellectual dialogue and we are making the "culture war" no longer metaphorical. If we cannot talk, what's left but brute force?"

[Troy Camplin]

My only point of exaggeration was to put all those things into one sentence.

Among the things I have been told, to shut down argument:

When explaining that a particular humanities author misunderstood evolution (something to which I can speak having actually been educated in biology, including 2 years of grad school), I was asked, "Well, how many papers have you had publisehd on evolution?" as though being able to get something published doesn't make it nonsense (I have noticed the Left is quite prone to deferring to authority)>

I have been told that I cannot understand the truth of Marx because my bourgeoise world view prevents me from seeing its truth (something I thought to be hillarious, considering that the person telling me this was from a wealthy family, while I was raised by a coal mineer with an 8th grade education).

I have been told that all perspectives are equally valid and ethical -- as part of an argument against grand narratives ("Including the Taliban's?" I asked. She responded, "Well, the one thing I don't tolerate is inolerance." To which I resopnded, "So you believe in the grand narrative of intolerance to intolerance -- that that should be the ruling ethic and world view?" No answer.)

In a class on postcolonialism, when I mentioned that my (white, southern) family acted just like an African family depicted in a novel, my teacher looked at me as though I was the most clueless racist who had ever set foot in her class.

I've been accused of being logocentric, of daring to use reason (to which I responded, "Well, you give reasons for what you believe, don't you?").

I have talked to and tried to reason with the postmodern Left for a long time. Until they get over their guilt and stop projecting all their prejudices on everyone else, there's no talking to them. That doesn't mean violence is necessary. It just means we have to reach people before they do, to give them rational arguments before they get the postmodern Left's irrational ones. They should be marginalized the same way other flat-earthers are, and treated with as much respect -- once they have demonstrated that they are imervious to rational discourse.

[Paul Poenicke]

I understand your frustration. At the extreme, the Left can get into positions so nihilistic and relativistic that it seems impossible to draw them out. I think you have done a good job at pointing out the flaws in their arguments. But my call for patience, love, and tolerance continues. We simply can't marginalize these individuals for a host of reasons, including

1. Because they hold a number of places of intellectual power in society;
2. Marginalization is to essentially tacit encouragement for them to keep thinking that way
3. We need to continually face our opponents to test our ideas, and consider new arguments and ways of thinking to show the superiority of our ideas
4. Most importantly, marginalization is a manner of weakening our epistemic community, whether Austrian, economic, or the scholarly community in general. Further, through debate, we encourage intellectual virtues necessary for successful epistemic practice (Patience, love of knowledge, tolerance, ect.) and ethical virtues to make ourselves better persons (grace, love of persons, honesty).
5. In debating and not marginalizing, we are upholding the greatest tradition of the liberal system—free and open discussion—against the complaints of postmoderns who contend that the liberal system is only for the moneyed, middle class interests. To display the errors of our opponents, and to further the system that we as liberals claim as an essential part of our ideology’s social epistemology (after all, in a liberal system there will more emphasis upon the social epistemology of society without government—no universities or government-backed experts to uphold the truth), I believe it is necessary to keep the debate open to all.

Is this a good response to your plight with postmodernism gone wild? Perhaps not—but this is what I believe is necessary.

[Paul Poenicke]

Whoops--that last comment was in response to Troy

Greg,

Thanks for the acknowledgement of near agreement, even as you focused on your own experience and knowledge—which probably is larger than mine—at the cost of making an argument.

I still think there is a significant difference between your position and my position (which Steve accepted). Yes, there is a fundamental gap between the liberal and leftist worldviews, but it is a gap that can and must be overcome. Acknowledging the emotional and political reasons to accept an ideology are necessary to change a mind, and overcoming such a divide will be difficult and require high costs. The Left may not want to acknowledge our position, but there are ways of encouraging them to—including solid critiques, using assumptions of the Left to provide evidence for liberal principles, gaining positions of influence to make such critiques, and—most importantly—treating the principles of the Left with the seriousness and grace that requires a response (according to academic system that they supposedly adhere to). Yes, this does not necessitate a response, but, in accord with my response to Troy, I believe these are the necessary and best ways of encouraging liberal positions.

[Mark @ Israel]

I think Knight is right when he said: "There can be no truth which is not open to question under liberalism". Post-modernists agree to this. Aside from that, the real truth is that, there is no dogmatic truth. But postmodern liberalists claim that there is truth.

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