On Scholar-Activists, Objectivity and Engagement with inconvenient evidence (Via Michael L. Frazer)
Many European and North American universities originate in religious missions. So, for example, it was not a category error when Francis Hutcheson, then Chair of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow, wrote Hume that his draft of book 3 of the Treatise lacked “a certain warmth in the cause of virtue.” Moral edification or improvement was part of the job description. Examples like this could be multiplied endlessly.
So, I am always a bit surprised when people inform me with great confidence that moral advocacy and other forms of social activism are intrinsically not part of the mission of the university. Politics and activism are thought to contaminate the purity of the pursuit of knowledge. Lurking in such views is the idea that there is no such thing as moral knowledge or truth, and I always kind of thought that this was the effect of a reductive or nihilist reading of Weber. I return to that below.
Now, because I teach a required survey course to a very large group of students, I prefer that my students view me as impartial. So, this has increasingly made me feel comfortable with a non-activist stance for myself.
But I always admire my colleagues, especially those who reflexively deploy ethnographic methods, and who try to advocate for some of the vulnerable populations (refugees, undocumented migrants, sex-workers, etc.) that they study. This strikes me as a major improvement over (say) anthropology’s (sordid) past where the study of a vulnerable population may be just a stepping stone to professional success. And as regular readers know, despite some modest reservations, I have long followed (recall) Dotson’s approach to philosophy as service. (See also here.)
Yet, while I am happy to defend activist science, I have also always felt that I am unable to provide this defense fully persuasive arguments. My best argument (indebted to Machiavelli in the first chapters of Discourse on Livy) is that political contestation is itself an important, social discovery process over time.
Even so, it’s often not always clear where activist science slides into punditry or epistemic trespassing into topics one should know to say silent. Often, and I say this without rancor, social scientists (including of the more straightforwardly inductive sort) and humanists are not especially good at disentangling the empirical and normative elements in their advocacy and when they address the public often they slide into a crypto-normativity that lacks solid foundations.
In a recent paper in Perspectives on Politics (December 2023, Vol. 21:(4), “Activism and Objectivity in Political Research,” Michel Frazer (Glasgow) argues that political activism is incompatible with conceptions of science that emphasize neutrality and impartiality. But it is compatible with a conception of science that emphasizes objectivity. In fact, while drawing on Max Weber and Heather Douglas, Frazer suggests that this conception of scientific objectivity requires or presupposes “active engagement with inconvenient evidence.” In particular, “evidence only counts as truly inconvenient when it provides good reason for a change in one’s belief.” (p. 1262) Frazer explains as follows:
Mere acknowledgment that such inconvenient evidence may exist, however, is not sufficient for objectivity. First, one must actively seek out and engage with inconvenient evidence however it might be found, using the best means available to uncover it. One who manages to evade inconvenient evidence successfully, and thus never encounters any, does not plausibly count as objective. To be sure, objectivity in this sense is a matter of satisficing rather than maximizing engagement with inconvenient evidence. There certainly could be Hamlet-like figures who seek out too much evidence against their pre-existing beliefs and commitments, paralyzing them from reaching any trustworthy conclusions at all. For most of us, however, the temptation is the opposite; we wish to avoid all inconvenience, evidentiary or otherwise, whenever possible. The virtue of objectivity usually involves taking active steps to combat this tendency.
Second, it is not enough simply to acknowledge the existence of the inconvenient evidence that one has uncovered. To count as reliable or trustworthy, one must also be willing to alter one’s beliefs and commitments because of this evidence, should it prove to be sufficiently strong to require such alteration. This openness to change is an important element in any account of objectivity; Longino (1990, 76) argues that a method of inquiry can be considered objective insofar as it enables what she calls “transformative criticism,” the provision of evidence with a capacity to change agents’ beliefs and commitments.—pp. 1261-62
Before I introduce Frazer’s argument for how this pertains to activism, it is worth saying something about the two quoted paragraphs. First, I warmly endorse the idea that receptivity to inconvenient evidence is a very important epistemic virtue and a significant feature of science worth having. I often try to capture this idea by talking of ‘stress-testing’ one’s concepts, data, inferential practices, evidence etc. I tend to contrast this with a (more permissive) tendency to treat science in terms of confirming evidence.
As the previous paragraph makes clear, I would deny it is an empirical fact that all science seeks “out and engage[s] with inconvenient evidence however it might be found, using the best means available to uncover it.” Too many scientists don’t do this as we learned during the replication crisis. In addition, because of the influence of Thomas Kuhn, it is quite common to hear scientists (and even philosophers) say that they can ignore inconvenient evidence (and heterodox scientists) until an alternative paradigm has been developed.
So, Frazer’s position is not an empirical description, but a normative one about what science should be. This is in line of what he says: He treats it as an “ideal” worth defending “normatively.” (p. 1263)
It is, however, not entirely clear whether the ideal he defends really characterizes scientific objectivity (to be contrasted with subjectivity). As Frazer himself notes what he is after is best understood as an “ethos” (that I would consider constitutive of objectivity). In an earlier era (inspired by Weber and neo-Kantianism), the objectivity of science would have been characterized by the need to follow certain impersonal rules and methods of enquiry available/recoverable by and teachable to other scientists and thereby exhibit a certain kind of (to use Julian Reiss’ felicitous phrase) faithfulness to the facts. So, simply put engagement with inconvenient evidence is necessary, but not not sufficient for objectivity. Okay keep that in mind.
What’s neat about Frazer’s approach is that sensitivity to inconvenient evidence is on his view also characteristic of scholar-activists. If I understand him correctly, this is, in fact, what distinguishes a scholar-activist from an advocate or partisan. In this way, the scholar-activist can exhibit the same ethos as a scientists who does not engage in activism. As Frazer puts it, “when activists are fighting for important causes, this inconvenient evidence is of utmost importance for advancing their laudable goals.” (p. 1265)
This strikes me as an important insight; scholar-activists may well exhibit scientific virtues and ethos that help generate authority for their views/positions (despite not being neutral or impartial). In fact, if they can demonstrate or exhibit their sensitivity to inconvenient evidence while part of a larger social movement or party this will be especially so. But in a polemical or existential/urgent context it may sometimes be tempting for some scholar-activists not to be fully transparent about calling attention to inconvenient evidence for one’s own position. (Their incentives are not especially conducive to this.)
But can activist-scholars instantiate objectivity in the broader sense of following impersonal rules and methods of enquiry available/recoverable by and teachable to other scientists and thereby exhibit a certain faithfulness to the facts? Conceptually the answer is clearly, yes. In fact, if scholar-activists can convince others of this fact this should enhance their authority.
So, to sum up, for Fazer there is potential for “a similar form of objectivity among both activist and non-activist academics.” (P. 1267) As Frazer notes, this could be cultivated by universities in their staff and also lead to more mutual understanding among scholars and scholar-activists. Crucially, too, it provides the basis for mutual criticism and learning without having to question each other’s vocation.
In history, as in journalism, objectivity and neutrality/impartiality are directly opposed values. It's an objective fact that the subjects of journalism history do things which are good and evil (or, if you want to be pernickety, considered good and evil by most people). Neutrality/impartiality requires suppressing or downplaying this fact, almost invariably selectively in a way that panders to the powerful. No one in journalism or history has any problem in describing discredited figures (say Charles Ponzi) as liars and frauds. But when it comes to those who are (for journalists) or were (for historians) important and powerful, the need for neutrality is prominent. Trump has said 100 untrue things a day, but since we can't know his mental state, we can't call him a liar. And so on.