Joshua Cohen argues that a political conception of truth plays a role in public political justification. He draws a distinction between a conception of truth, which consists in a “set of claims about truth—for example, that truth is distinct from warrant, and that it is important—that is suited for the purposes of political reflection and argument in a pluralistic democracy” (3), from the concept of truth, which consists in a theory about the nature of truth. Thus, Cohen says that the correspondence theory of truth—i.e., “the view that truth consists in a correspondence of truth bearer and fact” (3)—is about the concept of truth, not a conception of it. By defending a political conception of truth, Cohen seeks to avoid “sectarian” commitments to metaphysical theories about truth.

While Cohen agrees with John Rawls in confining political deliberation to “public reasons,” which are “political, not metaphysical,” he takes issue with Rawls’s denial that truth may play a role in political deliberation. Cohen reminds us that Rawls wanted to rule out appeals to truth in political deliberation because such appeals would deprive political deliberation of the common ground that makes it possible. Thus, Rawls claimed that supporters of “justice as fairness,” i.e. Rawls’s preferred conception of justice, should offer that conception of justice as reasonable, or even the most reasonable conception of justice, yet they cannot, consistently with political liberalism’s aspiration to public justification, proclaim justice as fairness as the truth about justice. For Rawls, the concept of truth and its relation to other concepts, such as the concept of objectivity, lie outside democracy’s public reason for much the same reason that other “comprehensive doctrines” about the self, religious salvation, the importance of personal autonomy, etc. cannot be publicly justified in a society characterized by doctrinal pluralism. Invoking such doctrines would be divisive. In contrast, values such as liberty of conscience serve as a basis for public justification because virtually everyone embraces them despite their widely different comprehensive commitments.

Against this view, Cohen questions the intelligibility of dispensing with the concept of truth in public political deliberation, given how truth is connected to having beliefs (they inherently track the truth), making assertions (we present “the asserted content to others as true” (14)), deducing conclusions (valid deduction carries the truth of the premises to the conclusion), and other mental states and speech acts that are involved in public political deliberation. He nevertheless concedes that it would be unnecessarily divisive to make one’s public political arguments depend on a theory of truth, including a theory about the truth of normative political utterances. (13-15)

Rawls’s public reason makes room for public endorsement of, say, religious liberty, yet it rules out claims to the effect that the principle of religious liberty is true or that it derives from true propositions about natural law. However, Cohen says that such exclusion of the concept of truth—the No Concept View, in his terminology—does not follow from a commitment to non-cognitivism. For, as we saw, public political deliberation involves a number of mental states and speech acts inherently connected with truth, even if recognition of such connections does not presuppose any specific conception of truth. Cohen also finds differences between the No Concept View and recommending an abstinence from using the concept of truth in public reason: he reads Rawls as denying that public reason even has the concept of truth. Finally, Cohen distinguishes the No Concept View from what he calls the No Big Deal view, according to which political judgments are, at least sometimes, truth bearers yet their truth is trivial.  He illustrates the No Concept View by the example of the Hobbesian picture of legal validity, according to which positive enactments by the state are the only thing that makes the law legitimate—there cannot possibly be independent moral questions about positive law. Clearly, Rawls sees such independent questions as both meaningful and important.

The political conception of truth advanced by Cohen “needs to include at least four commonplaces about truth:

Attitudes: Believing (asserting, judging) is believing (asserting, judging) true, where this slogan is understood to mean that truth is the norm governing beliefs, assertions, and judgments;

Correspondence: True beliefs present things as they are, . . . and in that uncontroversial sense correspond to how things are, although it will not add (or deny) that such beliefs present things as they really are in themselves, determinately and mind-independently;

Contrast: There is a distinction between truth and warrant or justification, so that an account of justice, for example, may be warranted—we may have grounds for endorsing it—but not true. . . .

Value: Truth is important.” (26-27)

Cohen thinks that this conception of truth “serves the purposes of public political argument, but does not go beyond those purposes” (28). In particular, it does not involve commitments about the nature of truth, including the minimalist commitments expressed by deflationary accounts of truth. On these accounts, truth is not a substantial property; rather, it is a concept that is eliminable in virtue of the following schema:

The proposition that p is true if and only if p.

Cohen’s political conception of truth is intended to be agnostic even on this minimalist theory of truth.

Dispensing with the concept of truth in public reason is, for Cohen, no guarantee against divisiveness or even intolerance. Saying, for instance, that mine is the “most reasonable” conception of justice seems hardly less divisive than proclaiming it as “the” true conception of justice. Conversely, truth need not be divisive: Cohen imagines that parties to public political deliberation may hold their positions as true while recognizing that opposing positions are reasonable, and that reasonableness is enough for public reason. Moreover, truth is insufficient to establish the relevance of a claim for public reason. Thus, religious claims, even if true, play no legitimate role in public reason, given the persistent doctrinal disagreements among reasonable believers and between believers and non-believers. For Cohen, it is within the confines of “a shared ground of argument between equals” (35) that the concept of truth may be relevant, for instance, to express agreement with someone’s description of a social problem by saying that that description “is true.”

Cohen points out that the limited role he assigns to truth in public reason differs from what he calls the “limited display” view, according to which, since asserting a political claim (e.g., the principle of equal basic liberties) commits the speaker to full display of his grounds for endorsing that claim (including religious, autonomy-based, and other comprehensive grounds), “we should leave the concept of truth out of public reason because its inclusion leads to a concern with philosophical depth that is unsuited to public reason.” (35) Cohen’s reply is that even if assertion involves a commitment to justification, it does not commit one to a full display of such justification—only to those components of it that are admissible within public reason. Moreover, it is assertion, not truth, which on this view commits the speaker to justification. And in any event, Cohen doubts that assertion calls for justification, or that such a justification must be as divisive as the full display view maintains.

The article concludes with a contrast between the limited, political, role that truth plays in Cohen’s account of public reason and Richard Rorty’s recommendation that we substitute pragmatic, culturally-embedded beliefs for a concept of truth with any transcendent, realistic pretension. Cohen’s basic problem with Rorty’s proposal is that we cannot jettison the (political) concept of truth if we take the principles and values at stake in political deliberation seriously. Thus, “we are concerned to do . . . not simply what we think justice requires, or what we warrantedly believe it to require, but what justice requires. But caring about justice, as the political conception indicates, requires caring about the truth about justice. . . . We of course should, while keeping a concern for the truth, steer clear of needless controversy about the nature of truth: the political conception of truth suffices to meet that aim; nothing either so extreme or so fugitive as leaving the concept of truth out is needed.” (42)

Cohen does not offer criteria for membership in the set of public reasons. Like Rawls and other theorists of public reason, he hints at the ideas of divisiveness and persistent doctrinal disagreement, and at religious claims as paradigmatically foreign to public reason. Such ideas and examples suggest that his underlying criterion for membership in the set of public reasons is either sociological (e.g., claims subject to persistent disagreement among significant numbers of people are excluded) or epistemic (e.g., claims that cannot be established by ordinary logical or empirical methods are excluded). Notice that on the epistemic interpretation, the very idea of public reason turns out to be divisive: at the very least, (some) religious people will reject it. On the other hand, the sociological interpretation may well yield an empty set of public reasons, since virtually all (if not all) normative and factual propositions which are of political interest seem subject to persistent disagreement among large groups of persons. This fact may be hidden by the appearance of widespread agreement on abstract, essentially contestable, principles, such as the principle of equal basic liberties that Cohen mentions as paradigmatically belonging to the domain of public reason. One telling ingredient in the social divisions engendered by the debates on anti-terrorist measures, affirmative action, abortion, drugs, the regulation of markets, and other hotly debated public policies is that the parties to political deliberation often accuse their adversaries of ignoring fundamental principles, as something different from being mistaken on their implications for public policy. They take an adversary’s  rejection of their policy proposals as evidence that she rejects the principles they invoke in justification of  such proposals. When, for instance, Milton Friedman vocally supported massive privatization and deregulation over several decades since the sixties, he often faced the charge that he did not care for the poor. (I am talking about instances of public political deliberation such as lectures to students’ unions, as opposed to more strictly scholarly settings. I take it that the latter are not centrally relevant to Cohen’s article.) Moreover, since such a charge was maintained notwithstanding Friedman’s claims to the contrary, an additional charge of insincerity more or less explicitly compounded the divisiveness engendered by the feeling that he and his supporters rejected widely held principles or values. Behind such charges is of course the assumption that certain policy proposals derive straightforwardly from the relevant principles. Whether Cohen succeeds in finding a limited role for truth in public reason depends, then, on identifying a set of political claims that are sufficiently shared and widely seen to be shared to constitute the “common ground of political reflection and argument.” (15) These requirements may well lead to viewing public reason as constituted by principles considerably less abstract than those envisioned by Cohen and other theorists of public reason, as well as by logical or methodological rules (e.g., rules for the acceptance and rejection of causal claims) for deriving public policies from abstract principles of political morality.

1 Comment

• By Dr.Priganica mirsad, February 11, 2010 @ 11:21 am

  truth is quite unnecessary for “public reason”. but at the same time “truth talk” may enrich the discussion.

Other Links to this Post

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment