Authority and vindication

Arguments from authority have a bad reputation among philosophers. Appeals to common sense or public opinion, or to the claims of state or church, or to other supposed authorities, are widely seen as inconclusive and question-begging. Philosophers hope to break free from these authorities and to appeal to reason. But there is an uncomfortable sting in the tail of this bold rejection of authority, since little will be gained unless we can say something convincing about the authority of reasoning itself.

But can this be done? Nobody has tried more vigorously than Immanuel Kant to show that and why reasoning is authoritative. Yet his ambition may seem doomed. Surely any attempt to vindicate standards or principles of reason must fail, because nothing can count as a vindication or justification, unless it is itself reasoned. Yet if it is reasoned, it will presuppose and so cannot vindicate principles or standards of reason. But if it is not reasoned, it will fail to vindicate principles or standards of reason. It seems that any attempt to show that or why reasoning has authority leaves us in an uncomfortable place.

There are well-known ways of seeking to avoid, or at least to postpone, this discomfort. We might claim that reason is a God-given inner light that is, as Descartes had put the matter, ‘complete and entire in each one of us’, or perhaps embrace a naturalistic version of the same thought. However, many will not see such approaches as vindicating reason, or showing why it has authority. Alternatively we might give up, and conclude that what passes for reasoning is inconclusive, and in the end provides only jumped-up arguments from authority, that claim a bogus status.

But if principles or standards of reason cannot be vindicated, and if they lack authority, much may fall apart. Attempts to give reasons for truth claims or moral judgements, for claims about the justice or fairness of political or other institutional arrangements, or for interpretations of texts or situations, may all prove inadequate or inconclusive. So it seems that despite misgivings about the prospects of any critique or vindication of reason, it is worth paying close attention to Kant's attempts to resolve these problems, by following his account of the ways in which the authority of reason can be constructed.