Introduction: Academia's Epistemic Shortfalls and Entitlement Pretensions

‘Academic freedom’ may be the pursuit of truth wherever it may lead, but it is not obvious that left to their own devices academics will necessarily explore, let alone exploit, all that is knowable to the fullest extent. Put more provocatively, the university is inclined to compromise its own liberal universalism, unless it is compelled by external forces to alter its default patterns of behaviour. Perhaps the two most historically important countervailing forces to the university's tendency to compromise – the external drivers of academic universalism, as it were – came together in the twentieth century in what US President Dwight Eisenhower called, albeit with pejorative intent, ‘the military- industrial complex’. The bulk of this chapter deals with this matter.

But right at the outset, my claim is both controversial and counterintuitive. After all, the military and industrial sectors of society are generally portrayed as inhibitors or distorters of pure academic enquiry. However, this depiction is misleading, though it has skewed the narratives that historians have told about the development of the sciences. It has led to a neglect of what US National Science Foundation (NSF) programme officer Donald Stokes (1997) originally called ‘Pasteur's Quadrant’, namely, basic research that is use- inspired – specifically, major intellectual breakthroughs that result from addressing large- scale or long- term practical concerns. The post-truth research agenda dwells here, one which distinctly stands against business as usual in academia.

The phrase ‘Pasteur's Quadrant’ recalls that Louis Pasteur's enduring achievements in what is now called microbiology involved bringing together knowledge from different academic disciplines, typically by challenging one or more of their fundamental assumptions. As witnessed in Pasteur's lifelong ‘Franco- Prussian’ rivalry with Robert Koch, his efforts were in aid of solving major practical problems relating to the national interest in commerce and war. To be sure, these efforts are claimed by academia today as having been ‘biomedical’ in nature. Here the normative term ‘disease’ serves as a pivot to convert Pasteur's achievements from ‘applied’ to ‘basic’ research, and his original attempts to stop bacteria from destroying the silk, milk, wine and beer industries or killing troops in the field are seen as proper ‘scientific discoveries’ in the disciplines of biology and medicine.

Notwithstanding the academic co- optation of Pasteur's work, Stokes's original insight stands.

Introduction: The Alchemy of Deriving Truth from Error

In the past, under the inspiration of Popper, I have argued that fundamental to the governance of science as an ‘open society’ is the right to be wrong (Fuller 2000a: chap. 1). This is an extension of the classical republican ideal that one is truly free to speak their mind only if they can speak with impunity. In the Athenian and the Roman republics, this was made possible by the speakers – that is, the citizens – possessing independent means which allowed them to continue with their private lives even if they are voted down in a public meeting. The underlying intuition of this social arrangement, which is the epistemological basis of Mill's On Liberty, is that people who are free to speak their minds as individuals are most likely to reach the truth collectively. The entangled histories of politics, economics and knowledge reveal the difficulties in trying to implement this ideal. Nevertheless, in a post-truth world, this general line of thought is not merely endorsed but also intensified.

Behind the right to be wrong is a sense that humanity has made progress over its animal ancestors by our ideas dying in our stead (Fuller 2007b: 115– 16). The long- term trend has been certainly towards minimizing the personal consequences of error. Consider three indicators. First, fewer people are put to death, or even tortured, for holding heretical beliefs. And when such things do happen, the violence committed – even if purportedly in the public interest – is roundly condemned. To be sure, whenever possible, heretical views are put to a strict ‘scientific’ test, the outcome of which may humiliate one of the parties. But that is as far as it goes. Second, environments have been made increasingly ‘smart’ so as to lower the likelihood that people will die or be severely harmed simply as a result of getting lost or misusing an artefact. Third, law enforcement's objective has gradually shifted from stopping to preventing crime, and even punishment has been increasingly interpreted in terms of compensation rather than retribution or even rehabilitation.

In all these cases, the propensity for error is far from outright eliminated. In some cases, it might even be encouraged.

‘Post-truth’ may have been declared word of the year for 2016 by the Oxford English Dictionary, but the concept has been always with us in both politics and science – and in much deeper ways than those who decry its existence realize. A long memory is not required to see its roots in politics. Recall 2004–s coinage of ‘reality- based community’ as an ironic counterpoint to George W. Bush's approach to foreign policy, especially after the start of the Iraq war. Nevertheless, it is interesting to see the exact dictionary definition of ‘posttruth’, including examples of usage:

This definition is clearly pejorative. Indeed, it is a post-truth definition of ‘posttruth’. It is how those dominant in the relevant knowledge- and- power game want their opponents to be seen. In this context, the word ‘emotion’ is a bit of post-truth jargon that only serves to obscure the word's true function, which is to gain competitive advantage in some more or less well- defined field of play.

Those who are most resonant to our living in a ‘post-truth’ world believe that reality is fundamentally different from what most people think. This applies to both sides of today's ‘post-truth’ divide: the elite experts and the populist demagogues. Informing it all is Plato's view of the world, which Niccolo Machiavelli helpfully democratized in the Renaissance. It was then updated for the capitalist world by the political economist Vilfredo Pareto (1848– 1923), one of sociology's forgotten founders, an inspiration to Benito Mussolini and the man who was still cast in my youth as the ‘Marx of the Master Class’, given his respectful treatment by such Cold War liberals as Talcott Parsons and Raymond Aron (Parsons 1937: chaps. 5– 7; Aron 1967: chap. 2). If anyone deserves to be the patron saint of post-truth, it is Pareto.

For Pareto, what passes for social order is the result of the interplay of two sorts of elites, which he called, following Machiavelli, lions and foxes. Both species are post-truth merchants.

A Post-Truth History of Truth

Philosophers claim to be seekers of the truth, but the matter is not quite so straightforward. Another way to see philosophers is as the ultimate experts in a post-truth world. They see ‘truth’ for what it is: the name of a brand ever in need of a product which everyone is compelled to buy. This helps explain why philosophers are most confident appealing to ‘The Truth’ when they are trying to persuade non- philosophers, be they in courtrooms or classrooms. In more technical terms, ‘truth’ – and the concepts surrounding it – is ‘essentially contested’ (Gallie 1956). In other words, it is not simply that philosophers disagree on which propositions are ‘true’ or ‘false’ but more importantly they disagree on what it means to say that something is ‘true’ or ‘false’.

If you find my judgement too harsh or cynical, consider the careers of the key philosophical terms in which knowledge claims are transacted, not least ‘evidence’ and ‘truth’ itself. ‘Evidence’ is a good place to start because it feeds directly into the popular image of our post-truth world as ‘post- fact’, understood as a wilful denial of solid, if not incontrovertible, pieces of evidence, whose independent standing sets limits on what can be justifiably asserted about the world.

Yet it was only in the early modern period that philosophers even began to distinguish a purely fact- based conception of evidence from personal revelation and authoritative testimony. The break only became clean in the mid- nineteenth century when logic books regularly started to classify peoplebased claims to evidence among the ‘informal fallacies’, unless the people had direct acquaintance with the specific matter under dispute (Hamblin 1970). The concept of ‘expert’, a late nineteenth- century juridical innovation based on a contraction of the participle ‘experienced’, extended the idea of ‘direct acquaintance’ to include people with a specific training by virtue of which they are licensed to inductively generalize from their past experience to the matter under dispute. In this way, the recently proscribed ‘argument from authority’ made its return through the back door (Turner 2003).

This slow crafting of the concept of evidence was part of the general secularization of knowledge. At the same time, it would be a mistake to think that today's concept was purpose- made for scientific enquiry.

Protscience: Science Upfront and Personal

In a post-truth world, the very idea of a ‘scientific consensus’ may be regarded with suspicion, but science as such is by no means dismissed. On the contrary, it is taken personally. This change in attitude compares to the shift that occurred during the Protestant Reformation, the moment when Christianity ceased being a unified doctrine delivered with enormous Latinate mystique from a ‘high church’ pulpit. Thereafter it became a plurality of faiths, whose followers stake their lives on their own distinctive understandings of the Scriptures. In the case of science, I have dubbed this process Protscience, short for ‘Protestant Science’ (Fuller 2010: chap. 4), by which I mean to include a pattern evident in the parallel ascendancies of, say, intelligent design theory, alternative medicine and Wikipedia.

The Protestant Reformation was the first step on the road to the secularization of Europe, which Max Weber famously described as the ‘disenchantment’ of the Western mind. Protscience's relationship to this process is ambiguous, as it both disenchants scientific authority and re- enchants science itself as a lifeshaping form of knowledge (Fuller 2006b: chap. 5). In any case, Protscience takes very seriously the idea that any form of knowledge that aspires to universal scope for its claims must have universal appeal for its believers. In more fashionable language, it involves the reflexive shaping of self and world to enable one to live – or die, as the case may be – with whatever one happens to believe.

Interestingly, just as the original Protestants were demonized by Catholics as ‘atheists’ for their refusal to defer to papal authority, today's Protscientists are denounced as ‘anti- science’. In both cases, however, the people concerned are generally well educated and quite respectful of the need to provide reasons and evidence for their beliefs. Not surprisingly, then, Protscientists make much of the hypocrisy of established authorities that fail to live up their own avowed epistemic standards. Thus, any report of scientific fraud is grist for the Protscience mill, yet one more reason to take matters of knowledge into one's own hands before the entire enterprise of enquiry becomes corrupt.

Unsurprisingly, just as Catholic theologians said of Protestant readings of the Bible during the Reformation, scientists have complained that this availability of information has only served to foster misunderstanding and charlatanry.

Introduction

I should start by saying that I would be happy to reverse the course which the United Kingdom has taken since that fateful 52/ 48 decision on 23 June 2016 to exit the EU after more than 40 years of membership (hence ‘Brexit’). Any path that would lead the United Kingdom back to the EU is fine with me: a parliamentary vote, another general election, a second referendum – you name it. But suppose Brexit is inevitable. My view then is that we should examine more closely – and even more charitably – what some of the more ‘visionary’ Brexiteers have been projecting. However, this is not as easy as it first sounds because their vision is a strange amalgam of populism and elitism, which when taken together threatens not only the sovereignty of Parliament, which has been much discussed in the media, but also the authority of expertise more generally. Such are the ways of the fox, in Pareto's terms. Here it is worth recalling that virtually all of UK academia, business leaders – including the Bank of England – and world politicians who expressed an opinion wanted to see the United Kingdom remain in the EU. (Russia was a notable exception.)

However, as we shall see, Brexit has turned out to be a poisoned chalice for the Brexiteers, who had not anticipated that the public would treat its newfound voice as though it were a sort of collectively manifested expertise of its own. I present the argument that follows in three parts. First, I consider Brexit in relation to my own long- standing anti- expertist approach to social epistemology, which in many ways makes me a kindred spirit to the Brexiteers. Next, I turn to the struggle of parliamentary elites which eventuated in the win for Brexit, focusing on the Brexiteers’ distinctive epistemic and ethical strategy with regard to public opinion. Finally, I consider the unforeseen emergence of a Rousseau- style ‘general will’ with regard to Brexit, which is where British democracy stands for the foreseeable future, ending on the role of academia – and specifically business schools – in the anti- expert revolution.

The Weberian Dialectic: Where Political Philosophy and Philosophy of Science Meet

The idea that science and politics are somehow metaphysically different has helped keep politically oriented academic disciplines, such as political science and international relations, distinct from the actual politics. Max Weber had an especially influential way of making the point a century ago in a couple of lectures delivered to university students in Munich: ‘Science as a Vocation’ (1917) and ‘Politics as a Vocation’ (1919). Weber saw science as wertrational (‘value- rational’) and politics as zweckrational (‘ends- rational’) pursuits. To be sure, he claimed to be talking about what he called ‘ideal types’ of the scientist and the politician, but for us to call them ‘stereotypes’ would not be inappropriate.

The scientist is principled in her pursuit of the truth without necessarily knowing the end. She is a ‘realist’ in that peculiar post- Kantian sense of holding herself accountable to a standard over which she ultimately has no control. This sense of a ‘mind- independent’ reality is the secular residue of the transcendent Abrahamic deity. Thus, the ultimate truth of our knowledge claims is akin to the Final Judgement that God passes over our lives. Method in science functions as moral codes do in such religions – not as foolproof formulas to salvation but as heuristics whose value is always demonstrated indirectly. (No surprise perhaps that the person who coined ‘heuristics’ – who also coined ‘scientist’ to name a profession – was William Whewell, the nineteenth century's exemplar of the hybrid scientist- theologian.) Popper's philosophy of science is based very clearly on this idea – that a positive outcome to an experiment does not outright confirm a hypothesis but simply fails to falsify it. Thus, the scientist is licenced to continue promoting the hypothesis, which in the long run may only have provided the scientist enough rope with which to hang herself.

In contrast, the politician is focused on ‘the ends justifies the means’, which can leave observers with the impression that the politician is unprincipled, even unscrupulous, in her dealings with others. However, the politician wishes to be seen as so convinced of the rightness of his vision that he will do whatever it takes to bring it about.

Sociology and the Social Construction of Identity

It is tempting to understand ‘post-truth’ from the standpoint of those who promoted it to become Oxford English Dictionary's 2016's word of the year. As we have seen, the word pejoratively refers to those who refuse to listen to reason and evidence but instead resort to emotion and prejudice. However, to a sociologist of knowledge this formulation itself sounds too self- serving to be true. After all, the people who tend to be demonized as ‘post-truth’ – from Brexiteers to Trumpists – have largely managed to outflank the experts at their own game, even if they have yet to succeed in dominating the entire field of play. Empirically speaking at least, this suggests that the experts are not as rational and evidence based as they themselves thought and the post-truthers are not as emotional and prejudiced as the experts have thought them to be.

My own way of dividing the ‘truthers’ and the ‘post-truthers’ is in terms of whether one plays by the rules of the current knowledge game, or one tries to change the rules of the game to one's advantage. Unlike the truthers, who play by the current rules, the post-truthers want to change the rules. They believe that what passes for truth is relative to the knowledge game one is playing, which means that depending on the game being played, certain parties are advantaged over others. Post-truth in this sense is a recognizably social constructivist position, and many of the arguments deployed to advance ‘alternative facts’ and ‘alternative science’ nowadays betray those origins. They are talking about worlds that could have been and still could be – the stuff of modal power.

The 2017 death of the original sociological promoter of ‘social construction’ by name, Peter Berger, co- author of the classic The Social Construction of Reality (Berger and Luckmann 1966), provided an opportunity for his detractors to link him to the post-truth mentality, as he had received financial support from the US tobacco lobby in the 1970s and ‘80s. Indeed, he portrayed the anti- smoking campaign as primarily a moral crusade in his contribution to the landmark pro- smoking volume, Smoking and Society (Tollison 1985).

The post-truth condition is not simply a product of our times but endemic to the history of Western thought, as originally expressed in the Platonic Dialogues. Moreover, post-truth is not a condition limited to politics but extends to science as well. Indeed, the post-truth condition enables us to see more clearly the complementarity of politics and science as spheres of thought and action. Each in its own way is involved in a struggle for ‘modal power’, namely, control over what is possible.

This book explores the field of play common to politics and science through such concepts as the ‘military- industrial will to knowledge’, ‘Protscience’ and ‘precipitatory governance’. What makes these concepts ‘post-truth’ is their refusal to take the rules of the epistemic game at face value. There is more to knowledge than the consensus of expert opinion, and even what the experts take as knowledge need not be interpreted as the experts would wish.

While some have decried recent post-truth campaigns that resulted in victory for Brexit and Trump as ‘anti- intellectual’ populism, they are better seen as the growth pains of a maturing democratic intelligence, to which the experts will need to adjust over time. The lines of intellectual descent that have characterized disciplinary knowledge formation in the academy might come to be seen as the last stand of a political economy based on rent- seeking, whereby credentials are seen more as arresting than facilitating the circulation of knowledge in society.

One need not pronounce on the specific fates of, say, Brexit or Trump to see that the post-truth condition is here to stay. The post-truth disrespect for established authority is ultimately offset by its conceptual openness to previously ignored people and their ideas. They are encouraged to come to the fore and prove themselves on this expanded field of play. In this respect the posttruth condition marks a triumph of democracy over elitism, albeit one that potentially tilts the balance towards ‘chaos’ over ‘order’.

Plato had realized that the only way to curb democracy's chaotic tendencies was to ensure that discussions about the rules of the game and one's position in the game are kept separate – what logicians have respectively called ‘first- order’ and ‘second- order’ questions.

In Search of a Common Ontology of Value

While they may not wish to put it quite this way, Boltanski and Thévenot's On Justification (2006 [1991]) marks a triumph for economic reasoning within sociology. Although the six polities, or ‘worlds of worth’, that they present derive value from quite different sources, each world is subject to the same general accounting principles, such that one can compare how the worlds allocate costs and benefits to sustain their respective conceptions of value. Indeed, the very possibility of critique appears to require this capacity. (I shall return to this point below.) The general principles behind the polities are simple but clever: each world presupposes a sense of ‘common humanity’ that is distributed across variously endowed individuals who are ordered according to the polity's guiding value. It follows that, for each person's common humanity to be realized, some sort of redistribution is required. The polity's defining activities revolve around this task, the ongoing achievement of which constitutes ‘justice’ for that polity. In this chapter, I plan to push this framework to the breaking point, challenging the integrity of the ‘Lockean individual’ that remains the normative locus of Boltanski's sense of ‘the human’. On the other side of this challenge, in the second half of this essay, is a sketch of how one may conceptualize the ‘world of worth’ in what I characterize as ‘the transhuman condition’.

Boltanski and Thévenot introduce the neat concept of ‘investment formula’ to capture how each world specifies, so to speak, the business of justice. Here they admit the influence of John Rawls's ‘difference principle’ (1971), which justifies persistent inequalities only if they serve to benefit disadvantaged members of the polity – say, either by increasing (social-democratic style) or decreasing (free-market style) taxes on the rich, in order to improve – directly or indirectly – the life conditions of the poor without necessarily ever making the poor rich (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006 [1991]: 15).