Inevitable or Controversial? The Role of Scientific Facts and Reasoning in the Liberal Democracy

Despite the general belief that liberal democracy relies on the epistemic authority of science (originated in the influential Rawlsian account attributing superiority to the arguments based on uncontroversial or widely accepted methods and conclusions of science), the state of art in the contemporary philosophy of science does not offer a sufficient and consensually acceptable justification for the superiority of scientific evidence and reasoning in the context of public reason and political or normative disagreements. Yet, in many areas subjected to deep normative disagreements (such as mandatory vaccination, abortions, prohibition of drugs and pornography, etc) the representatives of the liberal paradigm tend to refer to the scientific facts as to conclusive evidence that is to be superior to the arguments based on the comprehensive, religious, or non-scientific beliefs. To this end, I shall illustrate that the core elements of scientific reasoning itself prevent scientific facts to play the role of conclusive and normatively superior evidence. There are three categories of objections that can be raised against the normative superiority of scientific facts and evidence in the context of public reason from the scientific perspective itself. First, I aim to dispute the purely epistemic status of scientific facts and reasons; in this regard, I rely on the existing body of literature examining how non-epistemic values enter a research process and directly influence scientific outcomes. To this end, we can basically distinguish three ways in which values enter the research process in the phase of gathering and interpreting data. 1) Underdetermination: The gap between theory and evidence must be bridged by background assumptions that can or should be decided according to (non-epistemic) values; 2) Inductive risk: the trade-off between false positive and false negative errors, and the consequences of such errors, require the use of value judgment to determine standards; 3) a conceptual choice: scientists often make use of thick ethical concepts that require both empirical and normative evaluation. Therefore, the sole distinction between purely scientific arguments and arguments based on e. g. the ethical ground is contestable. Secondly, especially in the domain of social and political science, there is no widely accepted scientific consensus, nor preferred unified methodological practice that can claim epistemic superiority. Quite the opposite, current pluralism, specific to the sphere of political science and social sciences in general, represents not only a variety of methodological approaches to the study of politics but also the plurality of values and normative sources of diversity in the society. Hence, in regard to the domain of politics, we cannot refer to high-order evidence that would represent scientific consensus. The third objection is based on the “epistemic humility” argument linked to the awareness that our epistemic capacities are limited and none of the scientific postulates cannot be in principle considered infallible and therefore cannot play a conclusive role in the political argumentation within the public reason.