Feyerabend, Open Exchange, and Collective Decision-making

I have been asked (recall) to comment on a paper by Stephen Turner (USF) that is forthcoming in Epistemology and Philosophy of Science 2024. Turner treats Feyerabend’s account of the coercive nature of science as a kind of (partial) anticipation of recent interest in testimonial injustice. In particular, according to Turner, for Feyerabend “the role of epistemic coercion in science and in society in general was intrinsic and ineliminable.” As I hinted a few weeks ago (recall) this interpretation of Feyerabend makes sense because Feyerabend has a tendency to treat contemporary science as taking on the same functional and authoritative role in witnessing truth as the Church once had. Of course, Feyerabend is a critic of such roles for science.

But the claim that epistemic coercion is intrinsic to science and society strikes me as too strong when offered as an interpretation of Feyerabend. After all one of the theses Feyerabend wishes to defend is: (VIII)

“…a free society will not be imposed but will emerge only where people solving particular problems in a spirit of collaboration introduce protective structures of the kind alluded to. Citizen initiatives on a small scale, collaboration between nations on a large scale are the developments I have in mind. (Science in a Free Society; p. 30 emphasis in original)

So, regardless whether epistemic coercion is ineliminable in science, a considerable form of epistemic non-coercion seems possible in a free society. (That’s compatible with some forms of epistemic coercion being necessary even in, say, the education of a free society. That’s for another time.)

Before I continue, it is worth noting how echt liberal Feyerabend is in the quoted passage. At least from (1952) The Sensory Order onward (see for a nice paper by Paul Lewis), emergence plays a crucial role in the thought of (say) Hayek. (Feyerabend knew Hayek personally, but there is no reason to believe they took each other very seriously, and undoubtedly there are common sources of influence in Viennese psychology.) And Hayek, too, was enamored of voluntary interstate federalism and, while critical of democratic majoritarianism, not adverse to citizen initiatives (see DiZerega "Democracy as a spontaneous order.")

Okay, be that as it may, one may well wonder how non-coercive society is even possible on Feyerabend’s own view. It’s worth quoting anew, Feyerabend’s treatment of open exchange, which he offers just before his thesis about a free society:

An open exchange…is guided by a pragmatic philosophy. The tradition adopted by the parties is unspecified in the beginning and develops as the exchange goes along. The participants get immersed into each others' ways of thinking, feeling, perceiving to such an extent that their ideas, perceptions, world views may be entirely changed - they become different people participating in a new and different tradition. An open exchange respects the partner whether he is an individual, or an entire culture while a rational exchange promises respect only within the framework of a rational debate. An open exchange has no organon though it may invent one, there is no logic though new forms of logic may emerge in its course. (pp. 29-30)

Remember that an open exchange is a species of collective decision-making (and contrasted with what he calls a “a closed exchange.”) In an earlier post I noted that Feyerabend’s account of open exchange seems to anticipate L.A. Paul’s account of transformative experience on the individual or collective/social level. An open exchange intrinsically involves the possibility of transformation or hybridization.

Back in 2016, Martin Kusch (here), when commenting on this material, also must have discerned the affinity with liberalism because he writes “[t]his idea of “open exchange” is of course closely related to the idea of Tolerance.” By ‘tolerance’' Kusch means something like the willingness not to eliminate or to endure “epistemic systems or practices other than one's own.”

By contrast, while I agree that something like such tolerance is, under some conditions, a necessary condition for the initial possibility of open exchange, it has a very different spirit. Toleration involves an attitude taken by a majority toward a minority. It is then very much treated as a privilege extended by the former, understanding itself as a physically and morally superior majority, toward the later. That is, the very idea of toleration also presupposes that such a privilege can be revoked at the majority’s discretion.

As regular readers know, this one of the reasons I think toleration is a bad way to conceive the self-understanding of liberalism. Rather, as conservatives and post-liberals discern (and hate), liberalism’s trust in the pursuit of meaningful choice by individuals and associations of individuals creates the conditions of the permanent possibility of new identity formations that cut across existing social groups and risks altering pre-existing affective ties. One of the means to get there is, as Fayerabend explicitly recognizes, open exchange.

One crucial feature of Feyerabend’s conception is that he views social decision-making as itself a mechanism of tradition formation: (to repeat) “The tradition adopted by the parties is unspecified in the beginning and develops as the exchange goes along.” That is to say, Feyerabend’s approach to collective decision-making, where hybridization or social transformative experiences are possible, is decidedly forward-looking. This is in marked contrast to what happens within traditions which curate or invent/revive their own past on an ongoing basis (and, on Feyerabend’s view) should always have freedom to do so.

In a recent paper in Synthese, Jamie Shaw suggests that “In open exchanges, Feyerabend is picturing representatives of different traditions having on-going discussions in good faith who actively seek to understand other traditions and, possibly, revise their own beliefs as a result.” This strikes me as largely correct. But I don’t see much textual evidence for the idea that for Feyerabend open exchange involves representatives of different traditions. (In Shaw’s paper this seems to me imported from Jasanoff’s account of the use of public reason.)*

I don’t mean to suggest that it is impossible to treat Feyerabend as relying implicitly on a notion of representation or representatives of different traditions. After, all it is difficult to imagine “collaboration between nations” without some kind of representatives. And it is not entirely obvious how one can listen to an “entire culture” if the culture is not mediated by some kind of representative.

However, Shaw’s reading of Feyerabend nudges Feyerabend toward a ‘pillars model’' of deliberation as articulated in (say) Arend Lijphart’s treatment of Dutch politics, The Politics of Accommodation. The problem with emphasizing representation here is that it risks a structural disconnect between the immersive and in-principle-transformative experiences of elites (who represent) from the experience of ordinary members of a tradition who are not part of the exchange and how go on with their lives unaware of the hybridization happening elsewhere on their behalf. That would involve replacing one kind of tutelage for another. So, let’s see if we can interpret Feyerabend in a different way.

To be continued.

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*Shaw seems to treat Feyerabend’s version of the all-affected principle — “problems are solved and solutions are judged by those who suffer from the problems and have to live with the solutions” — as evidence for the claim about representation. But I find that (ahh) puzzling. He also seems to confuse Feyerabend’s advocacy of direct democracy — “A democracy is an assembly of mature people and not a collection of sheep guided by small clique of know-it-alls” with representation.