Science and Political Authority: On the Possibility of Epistemic Justification of Political Authority

While liberal democracies widely accept the belief that the legitimacy of political authority relies largely on the epistemic authority of science (Anderson 2011, Kitcher 2011), the authoritative status of scientific knowledge – not to mention its superiority to other sources of authority – is far from obvious. This problem is particularly relevant in the context of the debate on public justification where, according to the so-called 'classical view' (Kappel and Zahle 2020: 397), science should deliver the facts, and just the facts, needed for political decision-making, while liberal democracy should make decisions based on these facts. Subsequently, the role of science is considered to provide a public depository of knowledge available to all citizens, regardless of their comprehensive doctrines, to provide a unifying means to guarantee the 'Freestandingness' of our knowledge and, subsequently, also political arrangements based on such knowledge. However, I shall illustrate that such a strict division of epistemic and political labor is problematic in many aspects. Henceforth, the presented paper aims to examine the role of scientific knowledge (including scientific facts and scientific reasons) in relation to political authority. Firstly, the paper outlines the logical problem of deriving political authority on the grounds of epistemic authority, as there is no possibility of normative inferences from mere factual knowledge (the well-described is-ought dichotomy). Therefore, even a political proposition based on epistemically correct grounds shall not possess a normatively superior status in public justification, as normativity represents a freestanding domain that is independent of the domain of truth. Furthermore, the paper disputes the purely epistemic status of scientific facts and reasons while outlining how non-epistemic values often enter a research process and directly influence scientific outcomes. Therefore, the sole distinction between purely scientific arguments and arguments based on, for example, ethical or comprehensive grounds is contestable. The paper therefore argues, that rather than treating political propositions relying on scientific facts and evidence as set in stone, the principles of scientific reasoning (such as falsifiability, representativeness, dispersal of knowledge, diversity, or dissent and experimentation) should be inherent to the process of justification of political authority as a means to increase its self-corrective and truth tracking capacities. The principles of scientific reasoning (rather than merely scientific facts) therefore represent a set of procedural means to tackle the political disagreement and subsequently outline an approach to content-independent epistemic justification of political authority.