Overview of Kindly Inquisitors by Jonathan Rauch

As some of you know, I was working on a conversation about evolutionary epistemology with David Sloan Wilson last year, but that has stalled for a number of reasons. While I do still hope it will resume (David has apologised and promised to get back to it!), I have decided to carry on with my own research towards what I think will be my next academic paper. So, I've been working through lots of essays on the subject as well as a few key books, which I thought I'd review here as a way of building towards my own eventual contribution. As a reminder for where I stand on this, my most important blog post to date about epistemology is the one titled Knowledge Cannot Be Justified, True, Belief. The ideas there are the ones I will be expanding on in my paper, and they provide the lens through which I will be reviewing these other epistemological works.

First up is Kindly Inquisitors by Jonathan Rauch, which was published in 1993. Rauch is an American author, journalist, and activist. After graduating from Yale University, he worked at the Winston-Salem Journal in North Carolina, the National Journal, and The Economist, in addition to being a freelance writer. He is currently a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution as well as a contributing editor of The Atlantic.

That isn't the typical profile of someone I'd look to for thoughts about epistemology, but Rauch had a new book out in early 2021 called The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, which I've heard him speak about on a couple of podcasts. Those conversations were excellent and they spurred me to go back to his original work. From what I've seen of the reviews of his new book, he's basically updating the same core ideas from Kindly Inquisitors in light of the modern war on truth by Putin, Trump, and other demagogues around the world. That's great, but Kindly Inquisitors does a fantastic job reviewing the history of the search for truth, and it sets down some good ideas about epistemology, so I'll stick to reviewing that one from Rauch for now.

Rather than provide a full review, I'll just share selected excerpts from Kindly Inquisitors and insert some of my own thoughts and interpretations where necessary. All page numbers are from the 2013 paperback edition with a new forward from George Will.

​Kindly Inquisitors by Jonathan Rauch

• p.4 We have standard labels for the liberal political and economic systems—democracy and capitalism. Oddly, however, we have no name for the liberal intellectual system, whose activities range from physics to history to journalism. So in this book I use the term “liberal science,” for reasons to be explained later.
• p.5 The liberal regime for making knowledge is not something most of us have ever even thought about. … What is the right standard for distinguishing the few true beliefs from the many false ones? And who should set that standard?

It's a great idea to name this epistemology (and it's alternatives), although I'd probably propose something different than "liberal science". I'll have to work on that later. For now, I'll just add that I thought many of the answers Rauch is looking for were in Naomi Oreskes' book Why Trust Science?, which I discussed in my published review of that book. In short, Oreskes builds the argument that the requirements of "what it takes to produce reliable knowledge" are fivefold: 1) consensus, 2) method, 3) evidence, 4) values, and 5) humility. This fits well with Rauch's views, as we will see below.

• pp.5-6 To the central question of how to sort true beliefs from the “lunatic” ones, here are five answers:
  • The Fundamentalist Principle: Those who know the truth should decide who is right.
  • The Simple Egalitarian Principle: All sincere persons’ beliefs have equal claims to respect.
  • The Radical Egalitarian Principle: Like the simple egalitarian principle, but the beliefs of persons in historically oppressed classes or groups get special consideration.
  • The Humanitarian Principle: Any of the above, but with the condition that the first priority be to cause no hurt.
  • The Liberal Principle: Checking of each by each through public criticism is the only legitimate way to decide who is right.
• p.12 The biologist and feminist theorist Ruth Hubbard says, in a phrase that could come from any of a variety of contemporary writers on knowledge, “The pretence that science is objective, apolitical, and value-neutral is profoundly political.”
• ​p.30 This essay proposes a more fundamental, and more radical, kind of answer to the enemies of criticism. It requires thinking of science in a way which at first may seem strange—in a very broad way, and particularly in a political way. It requires thinking about science as a set of rules for social behaviour, rules for settling conflict. To think that way means, to begin with, understanding what the rules of the game are, and how philosophers like Descartes and Hume launched a social revolution no less than a philosophical one.

This is an excellent reminder that epistemology is a normative discipline. It's not descriptive—it's not about what we know. Instead, it's about how we know that we know things. What are the norms of behavior that lead to agreements about knowledge? As Rauch is getting at here, the scientific method may play a very broad role in this discussion and should not be confined merely to the realm of scientific facts. Is this "scientism"? Yes, but in the good sense; not the pejorative one spat out by religious scholars.

• p.31 Read The Republic, putative wellspring of Western values, and you find that once you look past the glittering façade of Plato’s rhetoric you are face to face with the ethic of the totalitarian regime. It was that Republic of Plato’s which John Locke, David Hume, and the other founding fathers of the liberal epistemological regime rebelled against and, eventually, overthrew.
• p.33 Plato believed that knowledge comes from wisdom, and so knowledge belongs especially to the especially wise—to the true philosophers, who are rare indeed. The real philosophers are the people “who are capable of apprehending that which is eternal and unchanging, while those who are incapable of this, but lose themselves and wander amid the multiplicities of multifarious things, are not philosophers.”
• p.41 “One man is wiser than another and … the wiser man is the measure,” Plato says. To each, then, according to his wisdom: appoint the extraordinary thinker as arbiter of truth. Plato’s logic stood dominant for two thousand years. At last it was upended by an innovation in social thinking which audaciously replaced extraordinary philosophers with ordinary critics.

Count me among the philosophers who don't believe in such "true philosophers." Our post-Darwin view of the universe wipes out "that which is eternal and unchanging" and with it any claims to know that kind of truth. Just as Darwinism removed heavenly designers from nature — a view characterized as "a strange inversion" from top-down to bottom-up — the same must be done to our notions of knowledge. Knowledge is built from the bottom-up, agreement by agreement, never ultimately reaching a state of perfection, as opposed to being revealed or adjudicated from the top by some wise man.

• pp.42-43 Sceptical doubters have been around since at least the days of Socrates himself and of Pyrrho of Elis (fourth century B.C.), who is supposed to have made it his aim to withhold judgment on all matters on which there were conflicting views, including the matter of whether anything was known. … As Plato had understood almost two millennia earlier, the problem of knowledge could tear society to shreds, and indeed, as Catholics and Protestants bloodied each other in battles across Europe, it did so. … Perhaps more brilliantly and ruthlessly than anyone before or since, Montaigne argued in 1577 that for man to attain knowledge was hopeless.
• p.44 In 1739, David Hume, the brilliant twenty-eight-year-old enfant terrible of modern philosophy, came along with his bulldozer and made a ruin of the last pillars of certainty about the external world. … Knowledge has not been the same since. Hume demolished the logical underpinnings of all naïve claims, and most sophisticated claims, that we can have any certain knowledge whatever of the objective world.

Yep. And yet people are weak and seek certainty from their political, religious, philosophical, and economic leaders, many of whom are all too happy to oblige with far-too-sure pronouncements.

• p.45 The “scepticism” upon which liberal science is based is something quite different. (To distinguish it from the kind which says that we should never conclude anything, philosophers often call it “fallibilism”.) This kind of scepticism says cheerfully that we have to draw conclusions, but that we may regard none of our conclusions as being beyond any further scrutiny or change. … This attitude does not require you to renounce knowledge. It requires you only to renounce certainty, which is not the same thing.

Yes!! Shout that from the hilltops with certainty!  😁  Seriously, it's not a contradiction to say that fallibilism is and always will be the correct way to treat knowledge...as far as we can tell.

• p.47 Why did the sceptical fires not leave society in disarray, unable to believe anything, as seemed to happen during the sceptical crisis of Montaigne’s day? The answer is: because the fires cleared the ground for a new and extraordinarily powerful game—the game of liberal science.
• pp.47-49 The scientists and scholars of the Enlightenment were showing that uncertain knowledge is possible. … Freeman Dyson wrote: “The Royal Society of London in 1660 proudly took as its motto the phrase Nullius in Verba, meaning “No man’s word shall be final.” … With nullius in verba we have reached one of the two great foundation stones of the liberal intellectual system. … First, the sceptical rule. … No one gets final say. You may claim that a statement is established as knowledge only if it can be debunked, in principle, and only insofar as it withstands attempts to debunk it. … Second, the empirical rule. … No one has personal authority. You may claim that a statement has been established as knowledge only insofar as the method used to check it gives the same result regardless of the identity of the checker, and regardless of the source of the statement.

These two rules are the heart of Rauch's work, and from what I can tell they remain unchanged in his 2021 book The Constitution of Knowledge. They work well as simple statements of how inquiry works.

• p.50 Suppose a group needs to decide which of several conflicting ideas is right. ... First, each school of thought places its opinion before the group. Second, friends and enemies of the ideas begin testing and criticising, poking and prodding, checking and cross-checking. To check, players can do all kinds of things. Their tests can include real experiment, thought experiment, plausibility, simplicity, generality, utility, logical consistency, beauty—always understanding, however, that whatever test they use has to be a test that I or anyone else also can use, at least in principle (no personal authority). If, for you, a theory passes the test of experiment or beauty, then it must do the same for me and for others, or else the theory has not checked out conclusively. Third, everyone is entitled to modify one of the original ideas or to suggest a new one. Fourth, the opinion which emerges as the survivor is the winner—only, however, for as long as it continues to survive (no final say). Thus the liberal game of science. Whenever you and others agree to follow those rules, there are a million things you might do to investigate reality—but whatever you do will look a lot like science.

In other words, the scientific method could actually be extended and called the epistemological method. I'll have to defend that view another time, but here I want to focus on the fact that this passage ends up being a near perfect description of my own formula for answering the Gettier problem of knowledge. As a quick reminder about that issue, Plato defined knowledge as having three components—it must be justified, true, belief. Gettier, however, showed us examples that made us question if we could ever justify a belief to the point that we knew it was true. Since then, decades of epistemology work has tried and failed to do so, which is why I say we ought to abandon truth as one of the criteria for knowledge. Truth may be the guide we aim towards, but we will never be able to prove that we have it. What's left, then, is my formula for knowledge as justified beliefs that are currently surviving our best tests. Rauch never mentions the Gettier problem in his book, but his fourth step in this passage above almost perfectly describes my replacement for Plato's JTB theory as K=JBS.

• p.51 The game of science is not just for “scientists”. It encompasses the defining ethic of the whole vast culture of critical, liberal inquiry.
• pp.55-56 “One man’s experience is nothing if it stands alone,” the great American philosopher Charles Sanders Pierce wrote a century ago. “If he sees what others cannot, we call it hallucination. It is not ‘my’ experience but ‘our’ experience that has to be thought of, and this ‘us’ has indefinite possibilities.” … No one better understood the social implications of science’s liberal idea of objectivity.

More good points about how the scientific method can be extended to all knowledge inquiries. But is it exclusionary to do so?

• p.56 The creationist, or UFO-watcher, or minority separatist, or whoever, can [each] go off and play his own game. As he walks away, he leaves his challenge behind: “Who gave you the right to set the rules? Why is your ‘science game’, with its rules built by comfortable, secular, European males, the only game in town—especially if it hurts and excludes people?

The goal is not to hurt people, but the two principles that Rauch identifies above ("No one gets final say." and "No one has personal authority.") make it very clear that no one is actually excluded from this game. This is exactly why it gets us as close as we can come to independent and objective knowledge. If that is injurious to any ancient, exclusive claims of knowledge, then so much the better for overturning them. This is the logical progression of authority being reduced from many polytheistic gods, to one single monotheistic deity, and then right on down to zero figures of unquestionable revelation.

• p.57 If you had to pick a three-word motto to define the liberal idea, “order without authority” would be pretty good. The liberal innovation was to set up society so as to mimic the greatest liberal system of them all, the evolution of life. Thus, a market game is an open-ended, decentralized process for allocating resources and legitimizing possession, a democracy game is an open-ended, decentralized process for legitimizing the use of force, and a science game is an open-ended, decentralized process for legitimizing belief.

This does a great job of pointing out how how evolution has worked — it is open-ended and decentralized — but Rauch fails to recognize that evolution is not always good! The evolution of life is just an amoral fact, which we should not passively accept as some kind of argument for libertarianism. (That would be a big violation of crossing the is-ought divide.) Living systems discover many ways to manage and regulate their internal and social lives for the good of individuals and groups. That's an element of the evolution of life that we ought to mimic too.

• pp.57-58 Most of us think of science as a kind of machine whose equations and labs and research papers inexorably grind out data and theories and inventions. But philosophers of science have moved sharply away from that view, and toward what has become known as evolutionary epistemology. Evolutionary epistemology holds that our knowledge comes to us not from revelation, as religious traditions maintain; not from deep reflection by the wise, as in Plato; nor even from crisp experiments that unambiguously reveal nature’s secrets, as in the mechanistic view of science that prevailed until this century. Rather, our knowledge evolves—with all the haphazardness and improvisation that “evolving” implies. In evolutionary epistemology, hypotheses and ideas evolve as they compete under pressure from criticism, with intellectual diversity providing the raw material for change.

Yes! This is another description of my JBS theory of knowledge. And, in an analogy to natural selection, I label these changes in knowledge coming from criticism as a form of rational selection.

• p.59 The theory of political liberalism and the theory of epistemological liberalism were fathered by one and the same man, the father of liberalism itself. John Locke proposed, three hundred years ago, that the legitimacy of a government resides not with the rulers but with the rolling consent of the governed. … Locke himself never explicitly linked his philosophy of knowledge with his philosophy of politics, but the kinship is not hard to see. To begin with, he was one of the greatest of all the fallibilists.
• p.60 In passages which today define the morality of liberal science, Locke preached the sermon which every generation learns with such difficulty and forgets with such ease: “We should do well to commiserate our mutual ignorance, and endeavour to remove it in all the gentle and fair ways of information, and not instantly treat others ill, as obstinate and perverse, because they will not renounce their own, and receive our opinions. … For where is the man that has incontestable evidence of the truth of all that he holds, or the falsehoods of all he condemns?”

Nice. If only our populations of voters were to take this to heart and stop listening to authoritarian demagogues.

• p.72 The constant threat to any social system from choosing between ideas is schism. That was the threat which the geologists of two hundred years ago were confronted with. Their success in coping with it illustrates an important point. One of liberal science’s greatest triumphs is what it has not done: split apart. We do not have two or ten incompatible kinds of physics or history, each denying the legitimacy of the others; there has been no Great Schism in science.

This is an excellent and overlooked point! Surely a schism in science would have happened by now if it was going to. Instead, the norms of science have evolved slowly and effectively.

• p.77 No one, however, has managed to say just what reason is, and where it differs from faith. (Why is it “reason” for a layman to believe Darwin’s story about human development but “faith” to believe the Bible’s story?) The truth is that liberal science rests upon faith in its rules; it is not a system for doing without faith but a system for managing it.

No!!! This very much depends on your definition of faith, but a good one to distinguish it from reason is "belief without evidence." Understood that way, faith is not like reason at all. Liberal science doesn't "rest" on anything. It is always active. It starts with hypotheses and maintains that all of them are fallible and could one day be disproven. We have reasons to believe the ones we hold. That's entirely different than acting on faith alone.

• p.82 However, a critical intellectual system cannot fill our spiritual needs and does not pretend to; it sends us off to fill them privately as best we can. It is incomplete—utterly so—as to providing for our souls.

Gah! No! This is blind, religious hogwash and very sad to see. Any "spiritual needs" that "provide for our souls" are fictional inventions that can only pretend to soothe. Too often, they blind us to reality and lead us into extinction. The incredible story of life evolving and surviving is enough to give us purpose and goals at the top of our evolutionary hierarchy of needs.

• pp.116-117 To believe incorrectly is never a crime, but simply to believe is never to have knowledge. In other words, liberal science does not restrict belief, but it does restrict knowledge. It absolutely protects freedom of belief and speech, but it absolutely denies freedom of knowledge: in liberal science, there is positively no right to have one’s opinions, however heartfelt, taken seriously as knowledge. Just the contrary: liberal science is nothing other than a selection process whose mission is to test beliefs and reject the ones that fail. A liberal intellectual regime says that if you want to believe the moon is made of green cheese, fine. But if you want your belief recognized as knowledge, there are things you must do. You must run your belief through the science game for checking. And if your belief is a loser, it will not be included in the science texts. It probably won’t even be taken seriously by most respectable intellectuals. In a liberal society, knowledge—not belief—is the rolling critical consensus of a decentralised community of checkers, and it is nothing else.

This is another wonderful illustration of my JBS theory in action. It's a shame Rauch didn't attempt to use Gettier to help explain this clearly. If you don't have any justifications (J) that come from the ongoing scientific method, you are just left with BS. And that is not knowledge.

• pp.146-147 When activists insist on introducing the “gay perspective” or the “black perspective” or the “women’s perspective” into a curriculum or a discussion, they really mean introducing the activists’ own particular opinions. Those minority activists want power and seek it by claiming to speak for a race or a gender or an ethnicity. Accept their premises, and knowledge comes in colours.

Written in 1993, this may be (if I'm being generous) a prescient warning against the excesses of claims about "my truth" that we see from some activists who demand they cannot be challenged. However, In line with the values of the scientific method, all of these other perspectives must certainly be listened to, respected, and valued. They may also be impossible or very difficult to perceive for people that do not inhabit the same embodied subjective experience. So, in that sense, knowledge does indeed come in colors. For an extreme example that proves the point, it's uncontroversial to say the knowledge of a bat has a different flavor than our own. Surely we can extend that principle to the differences among the varieties of human experience, even if our requirements for social cohesion demand that we strive for consensus and integration across the full and complicated spectrum of those varieties.

• p.171 Knowledge, then, is often empirical, but it is always social. By its very nature, it transcends individual effort. “We are all putting our shoulders to the wheel for an end that none of us can catch more than a glimpse at—that which the generations are working out,” wrote Pierce. ... Half a century later, Popper pioneered the insight that the social process of checking is evolutionary in nature. Hypotheses provide raw material; competition to withstand the rigors of public criticism then weeds out the many errors, and what survives on any given day is our knowledge. As in biological evolution, we cannot assume that any result is final. “We should not dismiss the possibility that we may have to be content with improving our approximations forever,” wrote Popper.

Fantastic. I'm excited to have this confirmation that evolutionary epistemology is the way to go. What do you think? Can we reach consensus on that?