Is Justification Scientifically Impossible?

Abstract

/S URIOUS man has a terror of blind (b belief. Finding his heart comxJd mitted to a nation or a god or a painting, he sets busily about to convince his mind as well, and by some light, however hazy, to illuminate his conviction and proclaim its public and private propriety. Others, already sharing his commitment, may warmly welcome the light and profess that their ways of believing are thus also justified to God and man. Some few men may even be persuaded to change their beliefs. These illuminations are variously described as justifications, explanations, or rationalizations. Very often they claim to be foundations upon which beliefs, attitudes, or actions are said to rest. They pose as answers to such questions as Why do you believe as you do? What right have you to adopt such an attitude? or How do you defend your course of action? Yet, even as we buttress our beliefs, we set about with at least equal urgency to undermine the fortifications so carefully or carelessly erected. We pride ourselves on a skeptical sophistication which refuses to be taken in by mere rationalizations, to be persuaded by mere ideologies, to be satisfied with mere derivations. And each of us dogmatically retains a strange confidence that it is possible to poison all wells but our own. Erroneously believing that psychologists like Freud or economists like Marx or sociologists like Mannheim and Pareto have demonstrated the futility, if not the impossibility, of rational justifications of political belief, men are led to despair, and we find them uttering queer sorts of talk about of faith in democracy,1 and the like. Convinced beyond further doubt that the motives behind most or all of our acts contain extra-rational components, men extravagantly conclude that no rationale of a belief is possible. The easy confidence of the eighteenth century has given way to the uneasy conscience of the twentieth, and we find ourselves in an Age of Unreason. So convinced are we of the inappropriateness of appeals to reason that we stand prepared rationally to demonstrate the absurdity of every appeal to reason in justification of belief! From an Olympian point of view, this paradox might be indulged; from a practical point of view, it is dangerous. From any rational point of view, it is an absurd and unnecessary selfstultification. We do not need to deny any known fact of science, or to resist any plausible interpretation of any fact, in order to accord serious attention to the possibility of rational justification of political belief.2 Before analyzing the claims of the debunkers, something must be said about the role of rational justification of belief. We must not in general claim for such a justification, even if we could find a plausible one, any compelling psychological force. The eighteenth century is dead. To show that a given