I learned about The Constitution of Knowledge, - a 2018 National Affairs essay by author and journalist Jonathan Rauch, - from a recent OpEd by NY Times columnist David Brooks. In his “remarkable essay,” wrote Brooks, “Rauch pointed out that every society has an epistemic regime, a marketplace of ideas where people collectively hammer out what’s real. In democratic, nontheocratic societies, this regime is a decentralized ecosystem of academics, clergy members, teachers, journalists and others who disagree about a lot but agree on a shared system of rules for weighing evidence and building knowledge.”
Rauch’s essay asks a very important and timely question: what is objective reality? “In everyday vernacular, reality often refers to the world out there: things as they really are, independent of human perception and error,” he wrote. “Reality also often describes those things that we feel certain about, things that we believe no amount of wishful thinking could change. But, of course, humans have no direct access to an objective world independent of our minds and senses, and subjective certainty is in no way a guarantee of truth.”
The distinction between subjective opinion and objective facts is nicely captured in this widely used quote: People Are Entitled To Their Own Opinions But Not To Their Own Facts. It’s the essence of any discussion about objective reality. However, the distinction between opinion and facts has long been rather porous in totalitarian regimes, as well as in highly polarized periods, - like our own.
On top of which, we now have the impact of social media. “Over the last decade, we’ve doused our kindling fire of human interaction with high-octane gasoline,” wrote MIT professor Sinan Aral in his recently published book The Hype Machine. “We’ve constructed an expansive, multifaceted machine that spans the globe and conducts the flow of information, opinions, and behaviors through society.” We now have a global social media ecosystems that’s been designed to stimulate and manipulate the human psyche, and to persuade us that there’s no such thing as objective facts and objective reality.
“Some Americans believe Elvis Presley is alive,” said Rauch. “Many people believe that vaccines cause autism, or that Barack Obama was born in Africa, or that the murder rate has risen. Who should decide who is right? And who should decide who gets to decide?”
These are fundamental questions for every culture and country, going back to ancient Athens, where Plato concluded that it was up to philosophers, like himself, to decide. Reality is interpreted by religious leaders in orthodox communities, and by the supreme leader in autocratic nations. Throughout history, wars and violence have often been used to settle questions about reality.
“Disagreement about core issues and even core facts is inherent in human nature and essential in a free society,” notes Rauch. “If unanimity on core propositions is not possible or even desirable, what is necessary to have a functional social reality?… Who can be trusted to resolve questions about objective truth?
An elite consensus emerged in Europe with the scientific revolution and the Age of Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries. Reality-making was removed from the authoritarian control of priests and princes and placed in the hands of “a decentralized, globe-spanning community of critical testers who hunt for each other’s errors… Gradually, in the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, the network’s norms and institutions assembled themselves into a system of rules for identifying truth: a constitution of knowledge.”
A central tenet of the constitution of knowledge is that people don’t have to all agree on the same facts, but they do have to agree on a set of rules to manage their disagreements. These rules include:
- free speech - any hypothesis can be brought up;
- social testing - to be accepted as real, a hypothesis must persuade people after withstanding vigorous questioning and criticism; and
- the test of time - to qualify as knowledge, propositions must have withstood extensive testing and competing theories over a long period of time.
“[T]hink of the constitution of knowledge as a funnel. At the wide end, millions of people float millions of hypotheses every day. Only an infinitesimal fraction of new ideas will be proven true. To find them, we run the hypotheses through a massive, socially distributed error-finding process. Only a tiny few make it to the narrow end of the funnel. There, often years later, a kind of social valve - call it prestige and recognition - admits the surviving propositions into the canon of knowledge. People who successfully bring a proposition into the canon are greeted with publication, professorships, promotions, and prizes. Those who follow the rules without scoring a breakthrough receive honorable mention. Those who flout the rules are simply ignored.”
“Of course, it’s a free country, and anyone can say he has knowledge. But the constitution of knowledge is defined by a social pact: In return for the freedom and peace and knowledge the system confers, we ignore alternative claims on reality where social decision-making is concerned. We let alt-truth talk, but we don't let it write textbooks, receive tenure, bypass peer review, set the research agenda, dominate the front pages, give expert testimony, or dictate the flow of public dollars.”
This calls for a very delicate balance. “To protect the wide end of the funnel, we disallow censorship. We say: Alt-truth is never criminalized. At the same time, to protect the narrow end of the funnel, we regulate influence. We say: Alt-truth is always ignored. You can believe and say whatever you want. But if your beliefs don't check out, or if you don’t submit them for checking, you can’t expect anyone else to publish, care about, or even notice what you think. Striking this balance is difficult, and maintaining it involves a lot of implicit social cooperation. The constitution of knowledge requires high degrees of both toleration and discipline, neither of which is easy to come by.”
Its overriding objective is to organize social decision-making about what is and is not reality based on a governance framework and a set of principles, including:
- checks and balances: peer review and replication;
- separation of powers: specialization by disciplines;
- governing institutions: scientific societies and professional bodies;
- voting: citations and confirmations; and
- civic virtues: all beliefs must be checked and validated.
Its core community is composed of scientists, scholars, journalists, the courts, law enforcement, intelligent analysts, and other evidence-based professions. “Creating knowledge is inherently a professionalized and structured affair,” explained Rauch, because “testing hypotheses requires time, money, skill, expertise, and intricate social interaction. Of course, ordinary people can and should participate, and the constitution of knowledge welcomes their efforts. Anyone who follows the rules can make a contribution, as amateur astronomers and geologists have been doing for centuries, and no one is jailed for being wrong.”
Has the constitution of knowledge achieved its ambitious objectives? According to Rauch, the results have been spectacular in three key ways:
- Knowledge dissemination - it’s organized millions of minds to tackle billions of problems since the advent of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment;
- Validating reality - it’s established a decentralized, non-coercive process that forces us to convince each other with evidence and argument, instead of killing ideas by killing their proponents; and
- Freedom of thought - it’s placed reality under the control of no one in particular, thus dethroning intellectual authoritarianism and committing liberal society to intellectual pluralism.
It feels like something is missing. As you quote Rauch, “Many people believe that vaccines cause autism, or that Barack Obama was born in Africa, or that the murder rate has risen. Who should decide who is right? And who should decide who gets to decide?
It's not clear to me that anyone "gets to decide." For many issues, we don't have an agent that makes a decision about such issues, and after that decision is made, everyone agrees.
The more relevant question is operational. In which context does it matter, whether, for example, vaccines cause autism? At a friendly dinner party, it may not matter in any operational way. People may simply continue to disagree. On the other hand, school boards may decide that kids must be vaccinated before they are allowed to attend school. And the decision is not strictly whether vaccines cause autism but whether vaccinations should be required.
We like to think that most of our operational political decisions are grounded in objective reality. But ultimately, it's the political decisions that matter rather than the decisions about objective reality. I think it's important to distinguish one from the other.
Posted by: Russ Abbott | December 20, 2020 at 12:03 AM
In broad strokes, Rauch's argument is sound, but in the details, it is wrong. Or, perhaps I should say that it is changing, because what it means "to organize social decision-making about what is and is not reality based on a governance framework and a set of principles" no longer means what it used to mean. Why? Because replication fails in chaotic and dynamic environments, because specialization fails when every discipline is connected, because scientific societies fail when they represent only vested interests, because voting fails when consensus matters, and because civic virtues fail when our leaders are bad actors. Rebuilding this will take time, and will require that we flip the script: we no longer say that the (one) community defines how we reach consensus, but rather, how (the many ways) we reach consensus is what defines communities.
Posted by: Stephen Downes | December 21, 2020 at 01:47 PM