This column is by a conservative. He's "sort of" debating a liberal about idealogy and the general acceptance of "real-world" facts. The liberal is claiming that he is generally open to acceptance of facts, and the conservative claims that we all tend to attach a relative importance to different facts based on our ideology, or
You can go through the whole debate using the links. Here's an excerpt from the exchange:
In response to
my post last week about epistemic closure, the blogger Anonymous Liberal, whom I questioned in the post,
has responded. Here's part of what he wrote:
Similarly, there is a major difference between someone who makes a real effort to expose himself to all relevant facts - even unpleasant ones - and conform his beliefs accordingly, and someone who makes no such effort. We may all be epistemically closed to some degree, but not to the same degree. Some of us are much worse than others. In proclaiming myself to be a member of the empirical world, I was not claiming to be a perfectly rational super human, someone beyond the reach of bias or the limitations of human knowledge. Rather, I was claiming to be a guy who tries very hard to let facts drive my opinions and not the other way around.
Good for Anonymous Liberal! I mean that; we should all aspire to being people who try very hard to let facts drive our opinions, and not the other way around. And while not wishing to get into a lengthy political discussion, I also agree with him that at the present time, it does seem that people on the Right, generally speaking, are having a relatively tougher time letting facts drive opinions rather than the other way around.
That said, it's a struggle for all of us, especially if we live and work in social circles where our epistemic bias is enforced. As a Guardian writer I quoted on my blog the other day put it, facts are facts, but our values determine which facts matter to us. Let me be clear: I'm not saying that facts are, in an ontological sense, whatever one wants them to be; I'm saying that our values condition the way we value facts.
From the point of view of social conservatives, for example, social liberals ignore certain facts that go against their deeply held principles about sexuality and race. I have seen this happen too many times to count, both in the university and working in the mainstream media. One reason I was first attracted to conservatism as an undergraduate in the 1980s is because conservatives in those days seemed far more willing to deal with the world as it was than the rigidly dogmatic liberals I sympathized with at the time. These things come and go in cycles, and conservatives are no more or less temperamentally inclined to epistemic closure than liberals.
The thing is, I really do believe that most of my liberal friends and colleagues did not believe they were disbelieving inconvenient facts; they really did think they were judging matters with empirical rigor. I have written before about how my own past conservative political and religious biases blinded me to facts I ought to have considered. In fact, the fallout from having learned otherwise is why I am so fascinated by how we know what we think we know, and am immediately suspicious when I read someone of whatever political tribe claiming to be part of the reality-based community. None of us can have the full picture, and I have learned from my own bitter experience to be more skeptical of things that I and my circle believe are obviously true. Insofar as Anonymous Liberal and I are both trying to do that, then we share the same goal, even though we come from politically different positions. But I can't follow him here:
Liberalism, in its truest and most noble form, is an epistemology; it is a way of approaching problems through the use of empiricism and the application of universal principles of justice. A true liberal is defined not by what he believes on any given issue, but by how he arrives at his conclusions. And those conclusions, whatever they may be, are always provisional, for a true liberal is always open to the possibility that his conclusions are wrong and is always receptive to arguments which are grounded in empiricism and concern for justice.
Well, that sounds nice, but what are universal principles of justice -- and what happens when they conflict with empirical data? What is true, in the factual sense, is not always compatible with what is just. Justice is not a fact, it's a value. I'm sure that A.L. and I would both stand together against any attempt to revive eugenics, because to do so would violate our shared sense of justice -- and we would do so even if empirical data rationalized eugenicist policies. But to do so could mean denying facts -- not denying their factuality, necessarily, but denying that those facts are so meaningful that they should compel us to act in a way we believe to be unjust. That's well and good -- we all have to have an interpretive framework in which to analyze data -- but see, already, then, one's claim to be driven by facts is compromised.
They both make good points. But, I can't help thinking that our outlooks always colors the way we see things, and none of us are as accpting of fact as AL contends. What do you think?
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