Can't We Just Be Reasonable?

How do we disagree with each other? What do we owe to those who deny what is plainly true? These are questions that, rather unfortunately, seem increasingly pressing. 

As political polarization and fragmentation continue to silo people into ideological echo chambers and domestic politics becomes increasingly hostile, a shared grasp of the truth has seemed to weaken.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, misinformation regarding masks and vaccines ran rampant. Social media companies and governmental bodies had to intervene on the normal flow of information to try to bring people around to the prudent recommendations of scientific experts.

What such a crisis shows is that not all people respond to scientific evidence in the same way many scientists do; what counts as a convincing demonstration or a motivating public health message for one person does not count for another; what counts as salient information to one person strikes another as irrelevant, misleading, or outright manipulative. 

This signals a worrying trend in our collective relationship to ‘facts.’ 

Typically, we regard objective facts as having a universal validity in contradistinction to the partiality of subjective values, and we rely on the universality of facts to give some semblance of unity to political life. 

Meanwhile, global economic crises, the COVID-19 pandemic, and global ecological collapse demonstrate the extremely broad interdependence of our survival and livelihood on the cooperation of other people, even in disparate parts of the world; they also exhibit, however, a mounting crisis in the efficacy of top-down institutional or managerial approaches to coordinating the necessary social responses. 

Institutional recommendations grounded in fact can only coordinate the social whole if people take the facts to be facts: if people have different senses of what is ‘fact,’ as seems increasingly to be the case, then this spells doom for our collective responsiveness to the crises that threaten our ways of life.

The depth of this fragmentation is perhaps no more abjectly clear than in the January 6 attack: the attackers believed, with as much conviction as they might believe any fact, that a stolen election was about to be ratified, and they could reasonably conclude from that premise that their intervention was a gallant defense of democracy. Independent investigations from both before and after the attack concluded, however, that these claims lacked sufficient evidence; why did this not deter the attackers? 

It seems, despite the supposedly obvious falsity of claims of election fraud, that the attackers took it to be a fact, and they acted on that ‘fact’ in such a way as to attempt to defend democracy, as one might hope others would if in actual fact the election had been stolen; in this way, the conflict arose not out of a difference in values but a difference in ‘facts.’ 

Facts are losing the social force that the concept of ‘fact’ is meant to afford them, namely this: the facts are the facts regardless of what anyone in particular wants, feels, or thinks; what is a fact for one should be a fact for all. 

Especially when so much is on the line, as there is in democratic elections, we can scarcely allow ourselves to ‘agree to disagree’ on matters of fact.

What does it mean to be rational?

Accepting that facts should be the same for everyone, what do we expect from each other in our relationship to facts? Observing that many people’s most firmly held beliefs might not be facts, how do we qualify facticity beyond mere conviction?

To take a prudent and universal relationship to matters of fact is essentially the paradigmatic modern injunction to be rational: with respect to matters of fact, rationality demands that we judge impartially and, as much as possible, with respect to universal principles of logic, scientific method, journalistic integrity, and so on. 

By following such impartial rules as these, we can expect everyone to come to our same conclusions by following the same rules of fact-finding as us.

A specific claim is either obvious, or it can be justified by some supporting claims that entail it, but these claims, too, might stand in need of justification.

We cannot infinitely regress, however, so any claim must be supported, at bottom, by some claims that are accepted by all concerned parties as true. 

Such bottom-level claims are called axioms in logic and mathematics, and in other domains they might be called self-evident or a priori: they are the sort of thing that must be at once immediately true to every rational person in order for rational knowledge and discourse to exist at all.

Rational thought relies on axioms as its foundation. However, since axioms are the basis of all rational justification, they are also unjustifiable. 

If it is possible for two people to disagree on axioms, then there is no recourse through logical regress. 

Two interlocutors in such a conflict could only regard one another as irrational, for they see each other as having denied the very foundation of rational thought in a way that is completely unreachable by rational argument.

Axiom conflict and ‘irrationality’

As Eugenia Cheng notes in The Art of Logic in an Illogical World, two perfectly logical people can disagree if their axioms differ. She writes further that, outside the idealistic and regulated context of mathematics and logic, axioms can be furnished from all sorts of places, including religious convictions, methods of observation, emotions, or, especially pertinent to today’s political crises, the authority of trusted sources.

We cannot believe, however, that all axioms are created equal: if someone maintains as a matter of ‘fact’ that one times one is two, we cannot accept that the axioms underlying such a claim are as factual as our own.

Inherent to this notion of rationality and facts is the very impossibility of different facts: as soon as Kellyanne Conway brought “alternative facts” into the public lexicon, Chuck Todd responded: “Look, alternative facts are not facts. They're falsehoods.” 

Logical rationality, committed to the principle of non-contradiction, cannot tolerate incompatible ‘alternatives’ to its axiomatic facts, and whoever at an axiomatic level treats non-facts as facts must be callously denying what is supposed to be universally and immediately true to all rational people.

This concept of rationality leads us, therefore, to the conclusion that some people simply are not being rational if they believe non-facts to be fact. 

Separating reason and unreason

On this view, the problem of social and epistemic fragmentation seems intractable: not only can it precipitate the kinds of political crises we’ve described where people driven by non-facts turn against those driven by facts (or other contrary non-facts), but also these sects of ‘irrational’ people could never be persuaded by rational argument over to the side of facts.

Worse still, if people can believe they’re being rational when they’re not, then they have reason to take this very same attitude with respect to their own ‘rational’ beliefs: whosoever does not believe what they believe must, at some level, be persistently and irresponsibly irrational, so they cannot expect any benefit from attempting rational deliberation with such a person. 

Any self-styled rational thinker thus has reason to only engage in rational discourse with those people they take to be rational. 

In many cases, it may not even be too adventurous to say that every ideological silo takes itself to be the only rational one amid an irrational world.  But is this tendency to self-select against ‘irrational’ actors not just self-siloing into political enclaves and echo chambers?

As much as we regret the increasing fragmentation of what is taken to be facts, what I have endeavored to show here is how it can be brought about through the well-meaning deployment of the very concept of rationality and responsibility to the facts. 

Reconciling rationality

For this reason, it seems crucial for us to reevaluate what exactly we expect from each other when talking about facts. 

If healing the divides between epistemic enclaves is to be possible at all, we have to reexamine our commitments regarding facts and rationality, especially what we owe to those who believe with the conviction of fact what we know to be the contrary. 

Engaging seriously, openly, and vulnerably with supposedly ‘irrational’ people need not be a death sentence for facts and truth: accepting another’s position, even if only provisionally, can allow us to understand what appears to them to be true in its full depth of meaning and application and can make it more deeply vulnerable to criticism and change; meanwhile, if ours really is the veridical view, then we risk nothing by making ourselves open to the same kind of scrutiny. 

Rationality, if characterized by finite regression, has a crucial shortcoming: if disagreement goes down to the level of axioms, then there can be no rational way forward. 

What we consider ‘rationality’ might thus need to be reexamined: what do we owe each other in the face of a contradiction of what is seemingly obvious to us? What ethical commitments ought we make in order to make the reconciliation of our differing views possible?

In my view, proceeding toward the mutual exposition and ultimate reconciliation of opposing views should be the theme of what we consider ‘rational’ political discourse and the basis of the determination of facts, not a stubborn adherence to axiomatics that leaves us with no choices other than agreeing to disagree or ruthlessly dominating one’s opponents. 

Most simply, differences in knowledge should not be taken as a basis for disengagement from discourse, no matter how distant our opponents might seem from the truth: to disengage can only maintain or exacerbate the crisis of our fragmentation.

Opinions expressed are solely the author’s own and do not reflect the views of their employer.