"Liberal science's distinctive qualities derive from two core rules, and that any public conversation which obeys those two rules will display the distinguishing characteristics of liberal science. The rules are
- The fallibilist rule: No one gets the 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. That is, you are entitled to claim that a statement is objectively true only insofar as it is both checkable and has stood up to checking, and not otherwise. In practice, of course, determining whether a particular statement stands up to checking is sometimes hard, and we have to argue about it. But what counts is the way the rule directs us to behave: you must assume your own and everyone else's fallibility and you must hunt for your own and others' errors, even if you are confident you are right. Otherwise, you are not reality-based.
- 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. Whatever you do to check a proposition must be something that anyone can do, at least in principle, and get the same result. Also, no one proposing a hypothesis gets a free pass simply because of who she is or what group she belongs to. Who you are does not count; the rules apply to everybody and persons are interchangeable. If your method is valid only for you or your affinity group or people who believe as you do, then you are not reality-based."
I do believe that at times he does not go deep enough in his reasoning, especially when knowledge is the basis for policy-making. You need knowledge and expert opinions up to the level when political choices have to made that reside in the ambiguity, uncertainty or need for prioritisation between conflicting choices. A "reality-based community" as he describes it, will still need to make decisions that are beyond truth and knowledge, because only the future can tell wether a decision was right or not, meaning that it needs to measure its impact, and accept to change course if the decisions do not lead to the expected result. In politics today, we rarely go to that level: political parties usually just adapt the narrative.
I also disagree with his statement that "Some militant secularists insist that faith and science are bound to be enemies: that in effect, the Consitution of Knowledge cannot tolerate rivals. But that rigid view is wrong. The Constituion of Knowledge needs supremacy in the realm of public knowledge, but not in the realm of private belief." I may be a 'militant secularist', but for good reasons. The topic of his book needs to be part of education. Every schoolchild should learn how truth can be achieved, how the scientific method works, how important doubt and uncertainty are, how valuable observation, measurement and course-correction are. These important notions are incompatible with religious education, as I experienced during my years in catholic schools, or what we witness now in schools with religious students who reject the concept of the origin of the universe and evolution. You cannot push religion back to the privacy of the home, when society is still full of it. How can you believe one thing in private, and then defend truth in public? It simply does not work that way: either you stand by your beliefs all the time or are willing to subject everything to rules of knowledge. You cannot have it both ways.
Otherwise, Rauch's book gives a good overview of what I think most rationalists already think today. He does not come with very new ideas, but he has the merit to have placed them in context. Anything that advocates for truth and knowledge is welcome in our sad times.
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