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Rawls on justification

February 13, 2014

I have a PhD student working on justification in epistemology. He just got started a few months ago, so for now we are sort of ‘sniffing around’ before we define a more precise focus. (He wrote his Master’s thesis on John Norton and the justification of induction.) Now, by a nice twist of fate, last week I received a Google Scholar citation alert which put us on a very promising track: Rawls’ notion of justification. (My book Formal Languages in Logic was cited in this Pitt dissertation, in the same section where there is a discussion of Rawls on justification. The dissertation, by Thomas V. Cunningham, looks very interesting by the way.)

Here is the crucial passage as quoted in the dissertation:

Justification is argument addressed to those who disagree with us, or to ourselves when we are of two minds. It presumes a clash of views between persons or within one person, and seeks to convince others, or ourselves, of the reasonableness of the principles upon which our claims and judgments are founded … justification proceeds from what all parties to the discussion hold in common … thus, mere proof is not justification … proofs become justification once the starting points are mutually recognized, or the conclusions so comprehensive and compelling as to persuade us of the soundness of the conception expressed by their premises…[C]onsensus…is the nature of justification. (Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1999 ed.), 508-509).

Readers who recall my posts on ‘philosophy as conversation’ and the value of ‘virtuous adversariality’ for intellectual inquiry will probably immediately see the connections between my ideas and Rawls’ conception of justification as involving debate and persuasion, so this seems like a very promising avenue to be pursued. One difference is that I attribute these properties to proofs as well, contrary to what Rawls seems to suggest here. But other than that, this conception of justification seems to me to be spot-on (hum, I should probably go back to A Theory of Justice…).

I am aware that similar ideas have been recently defended by e.g. Robert Brandom, in particular his idea of discursive practices as ‘games of giving and asking for reasons’. However, my student and I would welcome further literature suggestions. Has Rawls’ decidedly social conception of justification been more widely explored in the literature on justification in epistemology specifically? (i.e. outside ethics) As a non-epistemologist supervising an epistemology dissertation, I could definitely use some help from the philosophy hive here, so thanks in advance!

Posted in Catarina Dutilh Novaes, Philosophy, philosophy of language

23 responses to “Rawls on justification”

Christian Marks

February 13, 2014

As a logician you may be interested in justification logic, developed by Sergei Artemov and his students and collaborators. Some of this work relates to dialog, though not specifically to Rawls (that would be research). See the Justification Logic bibliography: https://sites.google.com/site/kuznets/justificationlogicbibliography

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Eric Schliesser

February 13, 2014

Jan Sprenger, Mark Colyvan and Carlo Martini have a paper “Convergence of Opinion through Mutual Respect: Scope and Limits” has a treatment of Rawls from an epistemic point of view. (I think they may even mention this passage.) I was talking about it with JWR (during the meeting I should have had with you). It’s a very nice paper, but I have misgivings, too.

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Ryan Muldoon

February 13, 2014

I have a paper with Chiara Lisciandra, Mark Colyvan, Jan Sprenger, Giacomo Sillari and Carlo Martini looking at Veil of Ignorance-style justification which is forthcoming in Phil Studies – “Disagreement Behind the Veil of Ignorance.” It may be worth looking at. We directly engage with Rawls, and then the veil of ignorance approach more generally, and argue that it doesn’t do as well with diverse populations as one might think.

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Curtis

February 13, 2014

This isn’t my area, but as we speak (write?), I’m reading an essay in Reading Rawls that touches on justification. David Lyons chapter. For what it’s worth . . .

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Patrick S. O’Donnell

February 13, 2014

I don’t think Rawls has a “decidedly social conception of justification” but rather a decidedly “political” conception of same. That’s a distinction with a significant difference. In any case, and not necessarily outside ethics, I would hope anyone hoping to do justice to Rawls’ views on justification would be familiar with Gerald Gaus’ work, especially his discussion of Rawls in Contemporary Theories of Liberalism (2003) in the last part of the book. Among other things, Gaus explains why, for example, and contrary to the arguments or assumptions of some deliberative democratic theorists (e.g., Habermas and Joshua Cohen), “the search for public justification and the search for consensus [‘the regulative ideal of real political consensus’] are distinct.” Rawls’ concept of justification will look rather silly, I suspect, from the view(s) of epistemology (epistemologists) proper (save perhaps ‘social epistemology’). In the political realm, claims can be undefeated yet victorious, in other words, the public justification of a principle or policy entails everyone holding reasonable grounds for accepting it over all challengers, but this allows for the possibility (and rather strong one at that) that not ALL relevant reasons have been “adequately canvassed and weighed.” Here Gaus reminds us to keep in mind the distinction between what we do as philosophers and what we do as citizens (at least in a would-be democratic polity), a difference at risk of being elided or lost in these sorts of discussions.
Gaus also nicely distinguishes two forms of inconclusive justification, one of which (the other one I will not discuss except to note that it can entail principled dissent and is relevant to matters of conscientious objection in the widest sense) involves a publicly justified principle in the sense that everyone has shown to have good reasons to accept it, but is also open to different interpretations:* this reminds me of Onora O’Neill’s point about universal principles that mandate differentiated treatment, meaning they are indeterminate insofar as they leave room for differentiated application. Individual reasoners relying on their private judgment as to what is called for in endorsing a specific principle or policy may come to different conclusions as to what’s required for it be properly realized. In addition, and thinking of public justification within the province of deliberative democracy, our time and space for the giving of reasons runs out, it meets an arbitrary (epistemically speaking) cut-off point: it must come to an end (hence the procedurally aggregative exercise of voting).
With regard to the aforementioned indeterminate conclusions about policy implementation or the application of principle, Gaus invokes an “umpire” analogy, which I find compelling, based as it is, “on the supposition that (1) there is intractable difference of opinion; (2) to proceed with practice, there must be a practical resolution of the dispute; (3) that this practical resolution need not be accepted by all the parties as the correct solution [Betty and Alf’s disagreement below] but (4) the authority of the umpire’s decision requires that it seeks to arrive at the best answer. Here, of course, we enter (as with Hobbes and Kant, albeit in different ways) the realm of justified (legal) coercion: “Because of their intractable disputes about what is the most reasonable interpretation of publicly justified liberal principles, free and equal individuals would embrace an umpire who is empowered to act [hence her, or their, authority is democratically derived] on its reasonable, but by no means conclusively correct judgment about these matters.”
Finally but relatedly, one should bear in mind Rawls’ later “epistemic abstinence” (a departure from ToJ) insofar as his avoids the concept of truth: public reason is not truth (for better and worse I suppose: for the downside of that avoidance I would invoke the work of Michael P. Lynch and look at relevant Platonic-inspired arguments from G.A. ‘Jerry’ Cohen), replacing it with a notion of “the reasonable.” Moreover, in the words of Hélène Landemore, “Rawls insists on the specificity of reasonableness as an objective standard without epistemic meaning”[!].
* “Here, we suppose, a principle P has been victoriously [i.e., publicly] justified, so others such as Betty have conclusive reason to embrace it, and to act in accordance with it (other things being equal). The problem, however, is that it remains an open question just what action P requires: Alf has an undefeated, unvictorious case that P requires, say, P1, but Betty offers a competing inconclusive case that P2 is the best interpretation.”

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Patrick S. O’Donnell

February 13, 2014

erratum (penultimate para.): …one should bear in mind Rawls’ later “epistemic abstinence” (a departure from ToJ) insofar as this avoids the concept of….

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Patrick S. O’Donnell

February 13, 2014

Although I mentioned her above, you might also want to look at Landemore’s brilliant epistemic argument for democracy (or political cognitivism), as it concerns a truly public conception of reasoned justification: Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many (2013) Cf.: “In deliberative settings, the truth-tracking properties of deliberation are enhanced more by inclusiveness than by individual competence.” [!]

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Patrick S. O’Donnell

February 13, 2014

See too Landemore’s brilliant defense of political cognitivism or an epistemic argument for democracy that concerns a truly public conception of reasoned justification in her book, Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many (Princeton University Press, 2013). To crib from the inside jacket: “In deliberative settings, the truth-tracking properties are enhanced more by inclusiveness than by individual competence.”

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Enzo Rossi

February 13, 2014

Jerry Gaus has done some of the most seminal work on Rawls’ conception of justification. I discuss him in comparison to Rawls (though with more focus on their respective notions of consensus) in this paper that just came out:
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11158-013-9223-9
(Non-paywalled version availabe from my homepage.)

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Moti Mizrahi

February 13, 2014

I think that your student might benefit from reading some of the literature on argumentation theory, specifically, dialectical and pragma-dialectical conceptions of argument (i.e., where the aim of argument is taken to be persuasion). Incidentally (my apologies for the shameless self-promotion), I have a paper on these conceptions of argument and the problems they face, especially as far as philosophical argumentation is concerned. Your student can find a preprint here: http://philpapers.org/rec/MIZTPO-2 . If he or she is interested, I’d be more than happy to email him or her a copy of the paper.

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Jeff Bell

February 13, 2014

Hi Catarina,
I’m not sure if you’re familiar with this book but it seems like it will tie in nicely with a number of the arguments you have made in other posts about dialogue and conversation and the role they play in proofs. The book is Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thevenot’s On Justification. They work in the context of a Bourdieu-styled sociology, and they rely upon a lot of empirical data, though I do find the six logics they argue for somewhat misguided. Here’s the book:
http://www.amazon.com/Justification-Economies-Princeton-Cultural-Sociology/dp/0691125163/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1392299961&sr=1-1&keywords=on+justification

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Thomas V. Cunningham

February 13, 2014

Thank you for the shout out! Drawing on my dissertation work (and shortening considerably!), I have put together a paper where I argue that Rawls should be understood as offering a dialogic and social account of justification in ethics. It was inspired in part by remarks made by Dutilh Novaes in her recent book. I am giving it on Wed, April 16 at the APA Pacific and am happy to share it. It was not well received by a few journals so I am expanding the analysis and would welcome feedback. I note, though, that I distinguish ethical from epistemic justification and focus on the former.
-Thomas
UAMS Div. of Medical Humanities

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Eric Schliesser

February 13, 2014

I think I was confusing two of Jan Sprenger’s papers. I am glad Ryan mentioned the relevant one!

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Catarina Dutilh Novaes

February 13, 2014

Thanks, everyone for the many, many useful pointers! My student and I will go through all of them carefully.
Also, I want to say that I’m going on holiday tomorrow and will be pretty much offline for 10 days. But please do keep commenting! I’ll see the comments when I come back 🙂

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Catarina Dutilh Novaes

February 13, 2014

Hi Thomas!
Glad to hear you found something in my book that turned out to be useful 🙂 You know, there is something else about the Google citation alert that I didn’t mention in the post. When I got it, I first thought it would have been a mistake: me, cited in a work on medical decision making?? The irony is that this is precisely my mother’s field of research (public health and health policies), and since we share the same surname, I thought it would have been a reference to one of her articles. So that was a nice surprise 🙂
What my student and I are interested in is whether this Rawlsian conception of justification in ethics can be transferred over to epistemic justification. To me, it would make good sense if this were possible. I’ll be at the Pacific APA, I can try to attend your talk. When are you speaking?

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Matt

February 13, 2014

The papers mentioned here are all good (insofar as I’m familiar with them, though even in the cases where I’m not, the identity of the authors make me optimistic that they’ll be good) but I’ll also mention Scanlon’s contribution to the Cambridge Companion to Rawls, “Rawls on Justification”. It’s obviously geared towards ethics, but widely thought to be the best piece for explaining Rawls’s own ideas in this area, so might be of some use and interest.

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Enzo Rossi

February 13, 2014

It may also be worth looking at the literature on epistemic democracy (J. Cohen, D. Estlund and others). The Social Epistemology Research Group at the U. of Copenhagen had a whole research programme on this — not sure if it’s still ongoing.

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Thomas V. Cunningham

February 13, 2014

My talk is actually on Thursday, April 16, from 1-4 pm, in Session 5K. The paper is available through the APA preprint service: http://apa-pacific.org/framed/abstracts.php#451 (best to search “Cunningham” to get to it rapidly).
Part of the reason the paper viewed unfavorably is that it currently ignores much of the secondary literature in political philosophy, such as those referenced by O’Donnell above. For my particular concerns this seemed like literature I could ignore but I have been persuaded otherwise by reviewers and other smart folks. So my aim for the paper is to alter it after becoming more informed with this literature. I then want to focus more on how “reflective equilibrium” is presently understood in applied ethics (esp. bioethics). I want to claim it is mistakenly portrayed when we take into account a closer reading of Rawls (and hopefully how he has been interpreted).
Thanks to all for the references and comments. This is a great discussion!

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Andrew Sepielli

February 13, 2014

That bit from Rawls sounds like something out of Rorty, actually, except that Rorty would probably replace the “proof isn’t sufficient for justification” part with something like “it’s not useful to talk about proof”. So yeah, maybe Rorty’s later stuff would be of interest. Obviously, the anti-Rorty literature is huge; a very nice paper that may be relevant to your student’s work is Thomas McCarthy’s “Private Irony and Public Decency”.
Gotta put a few more things on my reading list thanks to this post + comments.

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Luke Maring

February 13, 2014

Would you share it, please? I’m starting to think about this issue too, though I start from a different place. Retributivists about legal punishment have had a famously difficult time justifying their view; a few have responded by arguing that retributivism doesn’t need to be justified. I doubt their gambit works, but I suspect that my reason for thinking so traces to the suspicion that the aim of political/social philosophy is justification in something close to Rawlsian sense.
So, anyway, I’d really appreciate a look at your paper. I poked around the internet looking for your email address, but couldn’t find it.

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Luke Maring

February 13, 2014

Well, shit. The link you so kindly posted wasn’t yet up when I asked you to share your paper. Thanks for sharing it.

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Thomas V. Cunningham

February 13, 2014

Hi Luke – I’ve uploaded a draft onto my profile on PhilPapers: http://philpapers.org/profile/32246. Enjoy!

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Thomas Fossen

February 14, 2014

To add to the list: Anthony Laden defends a decidedly social conception of justification in his recent book Reasoning: A Social Picture (OUP 2012)

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