Comments on ‘Black Box Arguments’

Abstract

I consider Sally Jackson’s analysis of ‘‘black box arguments,’’ on the most abstract level, as a valuable contribution to an ongoing discussion on a very important issue: how to find a rational and critical way between the two extremes of, on the one hand, uncompromising dogmatism and, on the other, endless scepticism in our deliberations. Philosophers of science and argumentation theorists alike have persistently been trying to properly diagnose and solve this difficulty central to their disciplines. Latour (1987), in his endeavour to find a solution to this problem, proposed the concept of a black box: Science cannot be constantly ‘in the making,’ for it has to move forward and produce results. Therefore, those of the tentative conclusions of an open, transparent box of ‘science in action’ which are based on reliable methods and compelling evidence cease to be controversial and become widely accepted through a consensus of a community of scientists. In this way, a contested hypothesis turns into an accepted result, which serves as a black box device—its inner workings are no longer open to scrutiny, and the only thing we can do is to ‘input’ questions and obtain authoritative ‘output’ answers. Jackson employs Latour’s concept in a different institutionalised context of argumentation than a purely scientific dispute, namely, in a ‘policy discussion in which scientific evidence plays a leading role.’ It is this very context that clearly reveals a dilemma of authority dependence discussed by Willard (1990, p. 18): on the one hand, ‘deference to authority is presumptively rational’ since it is simply impossible for policy-makers to check everything on their own; on the other hand, ‘to invoke authority is to abort debate’ since a free and open argumentation is supplanted by an overpowering black box. As Jackson rightly emphasises, arguers in the context of a policy discussion are limited in their deliberations in many respects. Not only do they lack the necessary expertise to thoroughly examine some