Wish I Were Here by Mark Kingwell

Author:Mark Kingwell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MQUP
Published: 2019-05-12T16:00:00+00:00

REASON WITHIN REASON

Traditional scientific method might be considered, with some justice, the ideal form of discursive scaffolding. In addition to providing essential curbs on bias and prejudice – falsifiability, reiterability, strict disinterest – the method also acts as a gate for participants. If you do not accept the rules of the game, you are not a valid player in the game. If you attempt to fabricate studies or twist the rules, you (and your results) will be expelled from the game. You can’t game the rules of this game, nor can you trump them, because any attempt to do so is an automatic disqualification in essence if not in (short-term) effect. There is no possible transactional corruption: you can’t buy your way to validity, nor can you overpower the game with sheer force of wealth.

In other forms of discourse, all of these depredations are possible. It is, as it were, always an open chance that someone losing at the Monopoly game of public discourse will attempt to overwhelm opponents with real-world money rather than the conventional money that operates within the game. There are, further, no clear gates in public discourse: anyone can play who wants to. This is of course a huge positive, and yet just as surely invites false trading, cheating, parasitic undermining, and all the other familiar pathogens of the public square. Most dangerously – and this is, after all, how we got here in the first place – there are precious few external constraints on such discourse. Factual claims and logical validity possess normative power, yes, but it is tenuous and variable at best, dangerously misleading at worst.

Now, it is easy to oversell this contrast. We know that scientific discourse is, like all human undertakings, shot through with social and psychological forces that mitigate against “pure” rational results. We know, too, that there is enduring disagreement within scientific subspecialties, something we might expect not to see if the results are as method-driven as we sometimes desire. This is simply the nature of complexity in discursive practices, of course. There are no such disputes in logic; there are considerably more in law, and even more in, say, literary criticism or art theory. Good interpretation becomes the essential goal, not knock-down correctness. Naturally, what counts as “good” in the realm of interpretation will itself be a matter open to interpretation. This is the best we can hope for, and it is a great deal. But even this multiplicity of dispute requires, at a minimum, some measure of good faith as interlocutors come together to compare and argue.

This last criterion of discourse in the public square can no longer be assumed – if it ever really could be. Social and technological factors have only worsened a problem that is as old as human society itself, and found in everything from large-scale politics to the tiniest domestic dispute or argument between siblings. Scientific study of our rational practices holds the key to understanding why.

Two findings stand out here. The first,

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