Reflective Disequilibrium and Directionality
The View from Oregon — 306: Friday 13 September 2024
In last week’s newsletter I discussed John Rawls’ conception of reflective equilibrium, which is a methodological procedure in which we make a wide survey of principles and judgments, then revise our principles and judgments to be in harmony with each other as well as with the principles and judgments of others, which then represent a kind of consensus rationality. If I wanted to be a little cynical I could observe the similarity between this consensus version of rationality and Rawls’ consensus conception of society — the risk-averse, milquetoast society that is usually judged to be Rawls’ primary contribution to political philosophy. But I will allow that Rawls’ methodological conception can be treated separately from his political philosophy, which I find thoroughly repulsive, though I would still argue that both consensus rationality and consensus sociability have their origins in the same fundamental (normative) intuitions. Against consensus rationality I can cite Galileo:
“…even in matters which can only be resolved by reasoning, I would give scarcely more weight to the testimony of many than of few, since we know that those who reason correctly on a difficult subject are far fewer than those who reason badly. If reasoning on a difficult problem were like carrying weights, then I would agree that the reasoning of many counts for more than that of one, just as several horses will carry more sacks of grain than one; but reasoning is like racing, and not like carrying, and a single Barbary steed will run more than a hundred Freisian draught horses.”
In Galileo’s works there are many comments to similar effect, but this is the most colorful and the most memorable. Frege makes a similar point, but focusing on realism instead of consensus:
“‘2 times 2 is 4’ is true and will continue to be so even if, as a result of Darwinian evolution, human beings were to come to assert that 2 times 2 is 5. Every truth is eternal and independent of being thought by anyone and of the psychological make-up of anyone thinking it.”
To Frege’s point about evolution we can add that ‘2 times 2 is 4’ will remain true, even if, as a reflective equilibrium, we abandon it as failing to affirm the same conception in everyone’s considered judgments. Now, this kind of claim seems prima facie absurd, but we know from the Asch conformity experiments that many will abandon the evidence of their senses when a group fails to affirm their observation — but, as importantly, a single dissenting voice will result in a plurality of individuals breaking from social consensus to affirm the truth that social consensus denied. And here we come upon a deep irony in Rawls conception of reasoning and society. Rawls’ political thought is perhaps the ne plus ultra of liberalism, and its pursuit of consensus is largely driven by its horror of violence and coercion, but what is the pursuit of social consensus other than the pursuit of effective social coercion? It is an ugly truth of the world that social consensus is often a first step toward tyranny. Consensus does the work of coercion without the bloodshed.
Galileo and Rawls represent opposite ends of a spectrum, with Galileo placing no faith in a large number of reasoners, and Rawls suggesting that this is the ultimate court of appeal in reasoning. (Another position would be to appeal to a subset of the totality of reasoners who have distinguished themselves.) Galileo, of course, found himself under house arrest because he wouldn’t knuckle under to the extent that the powers-that-be wanted to see. His recantation was tardy and still defiant; the church had wanted a performative demonstration of obeisance, but didn’t get it. We understand this kind of thing well enough in our own time from the convention of the “apology tour” and similar social institutions meant to humiliate those who have demonstrated wrongthink: social rehabilitation is granted on condition that one humiliates oneself before the falsehood one previously had the temerity to deny.
Also in last week’s newsletter I asked whether the actual historical process of attaining reflective equilibrium was rational, but I didn’t give an exposition of why I posed this question. I had previously made a distinction between normative and descriptive interpretations of reflective equilibrium, and the apparent irrationality of the process is brought home when we consider how this plays out in actual experience. On a purely anecdotal basis (I urge the reader to consult his own experiences on this matter), my observation is that the individual will seek a reflective equilibrium when embedded within a given community. He trims and adjusts and revises his principles and his judgments (perhaps too much, and too readily) in order to bring himself into reflective equilibrium with the given community, but then he departs this community and, upon entering another community, again seeks reflective equilibrium with this community. Only now, the trimming and adjustments and revisions are different from those of the previous community, and the reflective equilibrium is different in each and every community. This is transparently obvious across the totality of a society, but we can even see this process at work within the silos of institutionalized science, whereas we would hope for a little more backbone from science.
Obviously this is mess, and a mess that sometimes accurately reflects our world, but even here there is a way to save reflective equilibrium, albeit at the cost of denying equilibrium in order to retain reflection. Consider another and very different instantiation of reflective equilibrium: the coherence theory of truth. In the coherence theory of truth, justification of a claim is found in its coherence with other truth claims. As with reflective equilibrium, with the coherence theory of truth, “no specific kind of considered judgment, no particular level of generality, is thought to carry the whole weight of public justification” (in the words of Hao Wang).
While the correspondence theory of truth has been mostly favored by empiricists, the coherence theory of truth has been largely favored by idealists, who want to show a conceptual framework that is internally integrated and exhaustively internally consistent, so that any one truth in a network of truths is supported by the whole network of truth, regardless of whatever truth we pluck out of this network of truths. In one of his lesser known works, British idealist F. H. Bradley’s The Presuppositions of Critical History paints a picture of the historian as an individual who is caught up in a network of truths (or would-be truths) and must sort them out.
The account of the self in The Presuppositions of Critical History is essentially Hegelian, though in Bradley’s distinctive voice. For Bradley, the historian is the criterion of history:
“The historian, as he is, is the real criterion; the ideal criterion (if such an antithesis can be pardoned) is the historian as he ought to be. And the historian who is true to the present is the historian as he ought to be.”
But the historian himself has a history, and that means he is always taking in new evidence and making new judgments, which the mind tries to square within itself and with its history:
“The proceeds of experience are contradictory, and the mind is a principle of unity. It feels the contradictions and, without knowing it, is more or less alienated from its contents, but comes to no downright breach with the world. On the contrary it imagines itself to be bringing all new details faithfully under the old world or old self; and it does not know that itself is the active principle of subsumption, and that it no longer is one with the former self. From that old self it separates itself more and more, develops and partially solves its contradictions, critically corrects its one-sidednesses, rules out its inconsistencies with unconscious but incessant activity; and all the time is subsuming new matter under this innovating and perpetually growing self. The assimilated details, it is obvious, no longer will bear the character and form the counterpart of the old self, but show more and more in their development the results of the mind’s unconscious work; and, being subsumed into the new self, react powerfully upon it to increased separation from the former stage of consciousness, and to the production of fresh facts which are still less in harmony with the old system of belief.”
What Bradley presents is a mind — in this context, the mind of an historian — in reflective disequilibrium.
Reflective disequilibrium could be mere chaos, but in reflective disequilibrium as Bradley describes it, it is not chaos but a mind seeking unity in the midst of a disunity of experience. In the process of reflective disequilbrium as Bradley describes it, it is a process of directional reflection rather than reflective equilibrium. In equilibrium, all is stable; in disequilibrium, there is directionality. This is as much a process of reconciliation as reflective equilibrium, but it is given directionality by the mind’s journey through the world, which involves new experiences that must be reconciled with the self that is continuous throughout experience. The same process of revision is taking place to overcome contradictions, but Bradley puts the emphasis on the growing self that emerges from this process, while Rawls places his emphasis on the social consensus that results.
In evolutionary theory we distinguish between stabilizing selection and directional selection. The size of a baby’s head is subject to stabilizing selection (at least, this was the case before Caesarian births became as common as they are today). Fisherian runaways — and I would argue that the human brain is a Fisherian runaway — are the result of directional selection, with spectacular results. If two populations of one species are subject to different directional selection pressures, the populations diverge and the result is speciation. Reflective equilibrium is the stabilizing selection of the mind, but reflective disequilibrium is (or, at least, can be) directional selection of the mind. From this we can see that two populations of the same mind subject to distinct directional selection in the form of reflective disequilibrium, will diverge and ultimately mind will speciate.
