Exchanging Reasons

Corresponding in good faith

Communication is a social process, interactions between people, sharing information for some purposes. So purposes serve people, for their status and existing relationships: Issuing instructions, asking permission, persuasive argument and knowledge seeking. But also reinforcing norms and passing the time of day; nonsense and speculation. So communication both serves the purpose and clarifies the purpose, whether identifying norms or establishing status, listening and responding. Further, communication is not conclusive but an interaction in time, which may be extended by others and as events evolve.

Good faith is to respect the norms of the interaction, but those are more respected for norms of authority and no consequence. Where there is no authority or it is contested, pathology is extensively described, in part to challenge people to respond in good faith, but also to refuse to participate in bad faith interactions. Individuals might be talking past each other, or institutions deciding, announcing and defending their policy. They may claim to be acting in good faith but are not, yet sometimes good faith is not intended, whether in nonsensical or misleading claims, noble lies told for the pretension of a greater good, or simply a determination to ‘publish and be damned’. However, there remains a concern that argument can be rational or at least that matters of consequence are resolved by public reasoning with sound evidence.

A model of formal logic appeals to the proponents of rationality but it entirely neglects the social nature of communication. The social context of evidence means that it is incomplete as an argument, and where expertise conveys authority the evidence itself is redundant as the conclusion cannot be debated. So the communication is inherently of exchanges which serve to complete an argument, and not to respond leaves the social context for others and politicians are seen to talk their way out of criticism, despite their failings. In the case of the safety of nuclear power in the USA, not participating in public discussion meant that technical arguments were ignored and others prevail still.

For personal interactions of individuals on an equal basis, the ideal advanced is to be open, reciprocal and responsive. This means receiving questions and seeking to understand views but also providing information sought to resolve them. But what might work for individuals in a dynamic social encounter is more difficult in asynchronous and remote situations. The purpose of the parties may be quite distinct and legitimate in the social context, but neither may be able to resolve the argument completely. Moreover, the purposes can be hard to identify through exchanges and so these serve incrementally to add to the communication, having an intermediate end.

Participants, better thus named than people, can aim for mutual intelligibility to support an intermediate end of being better informed of each other’s positions but more importantly the arguments made. For the evidence intended as supporting these, trust may be essential to taking that on but can be supported by making it assessable. This facilitates the open, reciprocal dynamic by describing the contextualisation, validity and derivation of the claim. It makes the boundaries of the claim, and therefore the intermediate end, much more apparent so much less needs to be deferred to trust.

Systems structure and organise our society, so interactions between people have norms, from shared language and customary practices to accepted assumptions and evidence standards. Transformations of services therefore are much more than new technology, as the Post Office showed us, as language and practice are mapped across but assumptions and standards may not. Individuals struggle to raise concerns which are misinterpreted as dissent and instead practices emerge to work around the frailties of systems and edge cases. So individuals manage their relations by forming parts of problems and progressing incrementally, ‘muddling through’ not seeing the big picture.

Normatively inappropriate dissent would the active description of interacting in bad faith, but is difficult to characterise consistently, never mind define. It is a luxury of scientists without many interactions, whether for inscrutability or dullness, to expect all engagement to be serious. Medical practice suffers from false promises that are criminalised in the UK, even beyond extensive requirements on regulation, and ‘snake oil’ is used as an analogy for modern promises about AI. While it is straightforward to say that epistemic value must be added it is much harder to see when challenging a fundamental assumption is doing so, especially for someone for whom it is axiomatic.

The pathology of not responding at all develops to more invidious patterns of undercutting to discredit the originator, instead of engaging. While funding and other associations with interests may impugn motives, they do not determine them, and it is bizarre to suggest that when necessarily payment sustains livelihoods and corporate interests have a legitimate fiduciary duty. If no one at all is prepared to bear the costs of time for people to do things they are not being done, but they can also defend their motivation for making payments. Bad faith sustains a failure to engage with the substance, but many are wary about obfuscation associated with ‘merchants of doubt’.

So good faith extends to a pattern of exchanging reasons but the pattern of public statements distributed by academic periodical and other public figures in the mass media easily resembles talking past each other. The pathologies of individual dialogue are seen in elite discourse which is claiming an expert status without defending its relevance to the issue or individual statements made on that basis. The exchange of reasons requires a commitment to them and to elaborate them further but without any limit. And here it is sufficient to criticise the questions asked as not engaging with evidence already provided, even as that reverts to challenging the norm.

Exchanging reasons is therefore located in a forum and learned societies have a tradition of self-organising such expert discussion while professions accredit those whose views should be respected by other professionals. But this in itself undermines the inclusive feature of democracy which legitimises the integration of conclusions into wider public understanding, for practical implementation. Making the reasons intelligible to those who have some stake in the matter, particularly the justification for the assumptions used and sensitivity to alternative formulations, can be much more difficult than in the expert forum.