ESSAY REVI EW

Habermas meets science

William Rehg: Cogent science in context: The science wars,argumentation theory, and Habermas. Cambridge,MA: The MIT Press, 2009, 360pp, $40.00, £29.95 HB

Stephen Turner

Published online: 29 June 2011

� Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

If we accept that there is something like normal science, that it operates and accepts

standards of evidence peculiar to local contexts (subdisciplines or research areas

limited to particular historical moments), in short, if we accept something like

Kuhn’s notion of paradigm, there is still a significant gap in our understanding of

scientific reasoning: how do we as consumers of scientific truth or arguments, and

how do scientists in the interregnums between paradigms, or scientists making

judgments about what to fund, or honor, and so forth, argue about and assess the

cogency of the claims made by and about science, especially claims made by

scientists? This might seem like a small problem, but it is a large one. Moreover, it

is a problem that is important for politics as well as science, perhaps even more

important. If we have an intellectual commitment to some sort of politics in which

the best argument wins and a significant subset of the arguments we engage in about

public policy involve assessing the claims of scientists, this is a major issue for us.

This is a major, challenging book which addresses these questions in a rigorous

and systematic way. The argument is ambitious, but painstaking and complex.

Argument after argument, from rhetoric, sociology of science, philosophy of

science, and Habermas’s theory of communicative action is carefully unpacked.

Rehg understands that each of the contributors to this discussion has a point, so he

does not polemicize against anyone. He makes clear, however, why none of them

can solve the problem of the gap, the problem of what is a cogent argument about

science, on its own. The puzzle, for him, is how the perspectives are linked and how

the good elements can be cannibalized from each and linked together into a serious

and cohesive overarching argument. Rehg’s critiques are genuinely dialogical

attempts to pull these elements out.

S. Turner (&)

Department of Philosophy, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL 33620, USA

e-mail: turner@usf.edu

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DOI 10.1007/s11016-011-9560-2

The gap

If science itself involves lots of stuff—decisions about funding, for example, that is

not merely the mechanical production of normal science results—then science itself

will involve a lot of this kind of reasoning, whether or not there are Kuhnian

interregnums. Indeed, one of the important contributions of this book is to show that

there is a significant topic here. The reason it has not been recognized as significant

is implicitly explained by the strategy of the book itself: to attempt to take seriously

not only philosophy of science but rhetorical studies and science studies, all of

which have something to say about this domain of ‘‘reason,’’ but fail to say enough.

The key issue is evident from Kuhn. If we give a practice based in a community

account of reason, we defer to sociology for answers to these questions (28) and do

not get answers about the cogency of the communities’ arguments. And, if we rely

on traditional philosophical arguments about induction, we get nothing that helps

either: at best, this accounts for some part of normal science reasoning.

Rehg is unwilling to give up on philosophical accounts. He suggests that one

argument points in the right direction: Achinstein’s realist theory of evidence has a

useful mind-independent notion of potential evidence, which can be used as a

standard to judge actual communities, for example, if we ask whether they have

accounted for potential evidence. Achinstein’s standard, however, has its prob-

lems—it involves the notion of a probability of an explanatory connection, which is

what, in the relevant situation, is contested. Nevertheless, it points to a standard that

might be usable if our concern is cogency, rather than truth. If we say that scientists

strive for potential evidence, meaning explanatory justifications based on true

claims, with some degree of probability of having a genuine explanatory

connection, we get ‘‘cogency’’ as something impersonal and mind independent

(85–86).

But, Rehg adds that cogency also requires public acceptability. And, this raises a

question about how to add this and also fit it into a democratic vision, in the fashion

of Habermas or otherwise. Rehg is a translator and interpreter of Habermas, and his

discussion of the issues with him is especially acute. Habermas wants something

more than conventional standards of the acceptability of arguments. So, intersub-

jectivity is not in itself enough. The theory of communicative action, which says

that valid claims need to be sincere, right, and true, presupposes the objectivity of

the world and leads to the idea of truth as agreement in an ideal condition. This does

not work as a theory of truth, however, because it produces the counterintuitive

results that ‘‘a true empirical result is true because all competent observers could

accept it in an ideally rational discourse’’ which ‘‘misses the core intuition that truth

depends on the world’’ (116). But, it still works, Habermas later argued, ‘‘as a theory

of conclusive justification or ideal warrant’’ (116). Given the fact, however, that

‘‘our shared access to the objective world always depends on the available epistemic

resources’’ (117), we can only ever have a provisional consensus.

Rehg thinks that this kind of theory of communicative action, deflated into a

theory of cogency rather than truth, can close Kuhn’s gap. The reason the ‘‘ideal

speech situation’’ was dropped by Habermas almost as soon as he articulated it was

that it is not realizable. But, it shows its efficacy as a ‘‘process idealization’’—in the

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doubts that are expressed when its demands are violated. But what would an account

of the relevant processes in science look like? It would certainly need to account for,

or take into account, a lot of things, given the reality that science consists in a

pluralist distribution of research agendas, that questions of the character of the

scientists matter if we are to have confidence in the dialogical character of scientific

exchanges, and so forth. But, dialogical considerations are not enough: we need to

think about the efficacy of the social institutions that support dialogue.

Here, Rehg turns to an actual case, discussed by Kent Staley, in The Evidence forthe Top Quark (2004): discussions between image and statistically driven logic

approach orientations to quark finding at Fermilab. The discussions involved the

writing of the paper announcing evidence for the top quark, which involved

convergences between the two kinds of evidence. The problem was a second order

one: does the evidence support the conclusion? The group was concerned about

making too strong a claim, which they expected would be challenged when they

made the announcement (170). This was a dialogical or rhetorical problem. The

group also constructed a procedure for writing the paper, with ‘‘godparents’’ who

would serve as surrogate reviewers, presentations to the whole group and so forth,

thus creating a social institution. The goal was consensus, but of course also a

defensible consensus. The arguments themselves had their internal issues, which

Rehg notes were issues that could not be settled simply by the logic of experimental

inference itself. There were discussions of who should be given credit as coauthor,

also a ‘‘social’’ question, and of satisfaction with the process itself, with its

openness, rigor, and so forth. In short, the events leading up to the production of the

paper can be redescribed in accordance with something like the Habermasian theory

of communicative action, as a dialogical activity which required social analysis.

Normative theism

Rehg’s aim is to integrate something from the sociology of science, and perhaps even

from the sociology of scientific knowledge or SSK, into his interdisciplinary approach.

Here, we get into some problems. SSK is atheistic about the normative force of reason.

For them, reasons, or what are taken to be reasons in science, have causal force, and it is

in this sense, and not in the normative sense, that reasons have any explanatory

relevance to outcomes. Rehg, however, does not address this argument, but a totally

different claim, often attributed by philosophers to SSK, namely that scientific

outcomes are underdetermined, and that ‘‘social factors’’ actually determine them.

This is not the argument, and it leads to some confusion in what follows.

SSK thinks all the causes in question, scientific reasons and the rest of it, explain

outcomes—their point is that ‘‘nature’’ cannot explain changes in science, because

nature doesn’t change. Grasping the wrong nettle of ‘‘social factors,’’ Rehg

ecumenically argues that we can avoid dispute between the normative approach and

atheists about the normativity of scientific reason if we look at cases and avoid making

a priori assertions about normativity. He suggests that when we do this we find that

scientists themselves claim that their opponents are influenced by social interests—

such as patriarchy and whatnot. We can avoid what he takes to be the cause of the

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conflict by not making top–down context-free claims about the nature of science or the

boundaries of what counts as scientific reason and just going with the boundaries as

defined by the participants, which would mean, for example, that the science of

Newton’s time would have considered issues about God relevant to science (202). This

allows both sides to talk about the actual history without disagreeing. But, he concedes

that atheism about the normativity of reason is an insurmountable obstacle to full

cooperation: without something normative there is nothing to base criticism on.

Ethnomethodology is not atheistic about normativity, though its God is different

from Habermas’s ‘‘highly idealized dialogical standards’’ (213). But with ethno-

methodology, there is still a danger of collapsing back into sociology, the kind

which says that the practices of a community are the source of its norms, and there is

no other source. Rehg wants to preserve the ‘‘context-transcending modes of critical

intervention’’ that make critical theory critical. And to the extent that science is a

part of political discussion, this is crucial to the project of critical theory as a whole:

if it were to concede that a large chunk of civil society legitimately operated by

different standards than those that are the source of critique, the larger project of

critical theory would be effectively bankrupt. Rorty’s ‘‘frankly ethnocentric’’

alternative, celebrating merely local standards, would win (215).

Habermas ‘‘assumes that we can derive [his idealized] standards through

transcendental arguments that demonstrate performative self-contradictions in

skeptical attempts to reject them’’ (215). Ethnomethodology is the perfect foil to this

highly formal argument, in that it focuses on ‘‘the messy, largely ungeneralizable,

details of social interaction in local contexts’’ (215) and asserts that any effort to

apply general categories in specific contexts, including the general standards on

which critical theory relies, will necessarily rely on local ad hoc devices. Is there a

bridge?

Rehg finds two: one is the supposition that, in spite of local differences, scientists

think they are talking about the same world, a supposition which does exert some

influence in the face of disputes arising between fields. Second, there are process

ideals that work in more or less the same way. They arise in considerations of

relevance, which are in effect meta-theoretical considerations that force one to

scrutinize and assess the practices of a field for their truth-producing capacities. Do

these provide ‘‘sufficient leverage for critique’’ (231)?

Rehg gives a final elaborated example, involving National Academy of Sciences

recommendations on diet, to show that they do. In this case, public advice was

given, and challenged on various grounds, which he characterizes in terms of the

idea of dimensions of cogency. Some of these are public and more general, but they

feed back to and constrain the consensus itself: scientists know that they need to

present things that make sense to the public on the public’s own terms. This is not

universalization: but it is relevance between different contexts.

A deflated normativity

So how does one get normative blood out of this descriptive turnip? Or to put it in

Rehg’s terms, what is the ‘‘prescriptive force of the contextualist model of cogency’’

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(277) he has been constructing and testing against these cases? Rehg concedes that

‘‘metacritique does not fully determine critical assessments’’ (280). But, we do get

something. Considerations about relevance extend the boundaries of who it is whose

two cents needs to be included in deliberation. The list of who is to be included is

not fixed: the outer limit of inclusion is everyone, which is democratic deliberation

itself. But would we want to make scientific results a matter of democratic

deliberation? What if the demos want to judge science by religious criteria? Rehg is

an optimist even here. He thinks that the conflict between religious expertize and

scientific expertize has forced Christians to reconsider their views.

The result of this argument is this: Rehg has preserved normativity, as a kind of

demonstrated transcendental presupposition of actual scientific talk, which includes

talk that acknowledges the existence of a public. This kind of normativity does not

produce much in the way of determinate results, but it warrants various process

considerations and requires contextual standards of cogency together with

considerations of relevance rather than a universal theory of correct standards.

Indeterminacies are at the core of this radically deflated version of Habermas’s

theory of communication. It avoids the pitfalls both of universalism and of localism

by stressing indeterminacies: the indeterminacy of the borders between fields and

considerations of relevance. Indeterminacy in general makes universalism unten-

able: ad hoc applications are normal and necessary. But indeterminacy with respect

to relevance and the boundaries of fields also makes limiting relevant considerations

to those recognized in a particular local scientific community untenable. So Rehg,

despite the rigorous standards he has set for himself, gets some normative blood

from his turnip. Cogency in a deflated sense, local but requiring the acknowledg-

ment of other local standards, survives.

References

Staley, K. 2004. The evidence for the top quark: objectivity and bias in collaborative experimentation.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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