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“Truth in Politics and Truth about Politics”
By Xinzhi Zhao, Ph.D. Candidate in Political Theory
Xinzhi Zhao is a Ph.D. candidate in political theory. Her research areas include 17th– to 19th– century European moral, social, and political thought, the epistemic dimensions of political participation, and the roles of science in producing public knowledge. Her dissertation examines 18th-century accounts of scientific inquiry and moral psychology, from which she recovers theoretical resources that can enable intellectual elites to become conscious of their biases in social interpretations.
As a scholar in the history of political thought, I am interested in how historical texts can speak to contemporary concerns about two sets of issues in the intersection between epistemology and politics. The first set of issues, whose common theme I call “truth in politics,” concerns the possibilities for citizens to share a basic set of knowledge as “true” so that they can have a shared platform to debate and determine the public affairs of their community. The second set of issues, which I label as “truth about politics,” considers the reasonable grounds that allow political philosophers and social scientists to justify the trustworthiness of what they announce to be true about politics.
I explored the first set of issues in “PS463 Deception and Politics,” an advanced undergraduate seminar I designed and taught in Fall 2021. I started the seminar with a discussion on the problem of “post-truth,” i.e., the growing distrust among citizens in contemporary democracies about the possibility of agreeing on a basic set of facts and convictions by which they can make sense of the reality of their political community. To help students discover the intellectual resources by which they can identify the origins and potential solutions to “post-truth,” I introduced them to theoretical discussions on what constitutes truth in politics and what endangers it in three historical periods of Western political thought. I used the writings of Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Rousseau to represent the first period, when the ancient focus on transcendental truth gave way to the early modern concerns on beliefs and knowledge that can bring about stability and prosperity of a political community. I then turned to the second period, which I set between the Enlightenment era to the early 20th century and represented by the writings of Hume, Kant, Adam Smith, Marx, and Karl Mannheim. The early part of this period witnessed the birth of modern epistemology, which sees the experience of a coherent reality not as something directly given to individuals but as individuals’ mental products of processing sensory data through certain cognitive frameworks. Because many of these cognitive frameworks were shown to be developed in individuals’ interactions with their social environment, social thinkers in the later part of period recognized that individuals situated in different positions of the society would form diverse modes of experiencing and knowing the reality, which might give rise to conflicting world-views and incompatible ideologies. Therefore, how to enable communications between individuals from different social strata and how to prevent the ideologies of privileged social groups from dominating public opinions became the two questions that subsequent political theorists must seek to answer. In my survey of the last historical period, I led students to examine four solutions offered by Arendt, J.S. Mill, Habermas, and Charles Mills for building a set of sharable, consensual, and non-oppressive public knowledge in a pluralistic society characterized not only by diverse identities but also economic, racial, and gender inequalities. I concluded the seminar with three discussion sessions, in which students applied what they learned from historical texts to evaluate the possibilities of saving public knowledge from various contemporary threats, including intentional lying, institutionalized propaganda, and collective ideological illusions.
While I examined “truth in politics” through teaching, my dissertation seeks to address the second set of issues concerning the trustworthiness of the knowledge produced by intellectual elites about politics. Specifically, it examines how “impartiality,” one of the common grounds by which modern intellectuals justify the trustworthiness of their studies of politics, was originally understood and practiced by David Hume and Adam Smith, two 18th-century thinkers who were retrospectively recognized as first-generation social scientists. The dissertation makes three arguments: First, I argue that when Hume and Smith claimed “impartiality” as a merit of their political and social analyses, they did not understand it as objectivity in terms of “the view from nowhere.” Instead, they saw impartiality as a product of adopting a new scientific method of empirical observations and social interpretations. Second, I argue that although many 18th-century authors were ignorant of their own biases in the application of the scientific method, it is possible to reconstruct from Hume’s and Smith’s accounts of scientific inquiry and moral psychology a debiasing mechanism that allows scientific social inquirers to become self-conscious of their biases and motivates among them an everlasting effort to become less partial. Third, I suggest that while Hume and Smith did not envisage democratic politics, the debiasing mechanism reconstructed from their theories will work most effectively in a democratic society. Through this critical reconstruction of Hume’s and Smith’s theories, I hope to demonstrate how the 18th-century ideal of “impartiality” can motivate reflections and criticisms on biases in the contemporary production of knowledge about politics instead of covering up the existing prejudices among knowledge producers.