Rationality in Academic Disciplines
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Source: Bahá'í Library Online (bahai-library.com), curated by Jonah Winters. Used by permission of the curator. Original citation: K. P. Mohanan, Rationality in Academic Disciplines, bahai-library.com.
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Rationality in Academic Disciplines

K.P.Mohanan

Abstract

Following Fleck and Kuhn, the academia in the twenty first century have
come to recognize the value of acknowledging and understanding the
diversity of "epistemic cultures”, that is, the thought styles of
communities engaged in the production of knowledge. For an academic
community to construct public knowledge through teamwork, there are
two important pre-requisites. First, the members of the community must
have a shared language that presupposes approximately the same pairings
of concepts and words. Second, they must have a shared epistemic value
system on the basis of which they make collective decisions on what is
credible and what is not, and choose between competing candidates for
excellence in knowledge. A subset of such criteria for critical thinking
also allows us to engage in rational argumentation within the community.

If we define ’’dialogue" as a two-way conversation between two parties, it
follows that contemporaneity is a necessary condition for all dialogue: we
cannot have any dialogue with ancient cultures or civilizations of the past.
If dialogue involves rational argumentation across epistemic cultures, it is
equally important that their epistemic value systems have a set of shared
commitments as well. In my paper, I will make an attempt to outline such
a shared set of commitments that provide the basis for dialogue across
academic cultures, ranging from history and philosophy to biology and
physics, and various sub-communities within a discipline.

1. Unity in the Diversity of Academic Inquiry

The word rational means “agreeable to reason,” or “reasonable,” and
irrational means “contrary to reason” or “unreasonable.” Rational inquiry
would therefore be inquiry that is founded on a commitment to the value
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of reason.

Now, what appears reasonable to one person or community may not
appear reasonable to another. As a result, what is judged to be highly
credible or of high quality by one individual may be judged to be not
credible or of poor quality by another. In many instances, disagreements
on what is reasonable and what is credible arise from differences in the
prior knowledge and value systems that we tend to take for granted.

Any evaluation of quality in any domain involves a set of commitments to
a value system on the basis of which we perform the evaluation. When we
judge a person to be more beautiful or graceful than another, an action to
be morally good or bad, a pumpkin pie to be the most delicious we have
had, a person to be a better tennis player than another, or a teacher to be
outstanding, we draw upon an implicit or explicit system of criteria for
evaluation. The pursuit of academic excellence is not different from these
activities in that academic judgments also involve a set of commitments to
what constitutes good or reliable academic knowledge, on the basis of
which we judge academic work to be poor, good, or excellent. Every time
academics grade a student essay, evaluate a doctoral thesis, argue with
one another on the relative merits of competing theories, or think through
a research problem, they draw upon an academic value system.

In a number of domains, the criteria upon which our evaluation is based
vary across individuals, causing their judgments to diverge. Thus, the
garlic pickle that one person judges to be the tastiest in the world may be
judged as foul tasting by another for whom garlic is unpleasant. Likewise,
disagreements on the relative beauty or grace of two models may not be
resolvable because one person may be attracted by the sultry looks that
another person reacts negatively to. The situation is no different in
academic work. A research paper judged to be excellent by one journal
reviewer may be judged to be unpublishable by another, and a student
essay that receives a C from one professor may receive an A+ from
another.

In spite of these individual differences, the value systems of the members
of a community have a set of shared characteristics, and most individuals
in a community imbibe and conform to this socially shared system of
values. Hence, we find relative uniformity within a culture, but variability
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across cultures. Plump women used to be regarded as beautiful in Western
cultures during a certain period, and they still are in some current cultures,
but are surely not so in modem western cultures. This is a general pattern
that cuts across individuals in a given culture. Likewise, premarital sex is
judged to be immoral in some communities but morally neutral in others.
A singer unanimously judged to be the best in the community of South
Indian classical music may sound harsh to the European ear. Likewise, a
theoretical framework that is judged to be a major breakthrough in some
academic circles may be judged to be mediocre in others.

Differences in academic value systems constitute one of the central
components of the differences that come under the rubric of paradigms or
“discourses”. That scientific research is predicated on a set of largely
implicit axiomatic commitments was probably first pointed out in 1935 by
Ludwik Fleck in Genesis and Development o f a Scientific Fact. Fleck,
referred to these commitments as thought-styles. His insight was
popularized by Kuhn in 1962 in The Structure o f Scientific Revolutions
which raised the problem of incommensurability across scientific
communities with different value systems and different terminologies.
Kuhn used the term “paradigm” instead of “thought-style” to refer to the
commitments that drive scientific research. The notion of paradigms has
been subsequently generalized to academic work in general, and has given
rise to research on the epistemic cultures of academics. In the post­
modern language, the epistemological differences among academic
communities have come to be designated as alternative “discourses” of
different “epistemic cultures.”

Now, despite the obvious differences across cultures, there are also certain
broad characteristics that are shared by the value systems of different
communities, and properties that are repeatedly found in cultures across
space and time. Thus, even though some cultures approve female genital
mutilation and others consider it barbarous, all human cultures seem to
agree that causing suffering and death to fellow humans intentionally and
without a compelling moral justification is morally bad. Likewise,
qualities like compassion, love, generosity, courage, self-lessness, and
truthfulness are typically regarded as morally desirable across human
cultures, while qualities like cruelty, hatred, greed, selfishness, cowardice,
conceit, deceit, and dishonesty are regarded as morally undesirable.
Similar patterns emerge in the judgments of beauty as well. In spite of
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individual and cultural differences in what is regarded as beautiful, there
are certain broad tendencies that are shared across individuals and cultures
such that given extreme cases, even individuals with widely divergent
cultural backgrounds agree on which of two people compared is more
beautiful than the other.

The common values shared across cultures in ethics and aesthetics point
to the possibility of similar cross-cultural patterns in academic values as
well. Now, it is fairly obvious that divergences in academic value systems
can lead to extremely frustrating situations in academic interactions, and
hinder productive collaborations. In debates on beauty, we can agree to
disagree and hold on to our personal judgments, and disagreements
between judges in beauty contests can be resolved through some form of
voting. Most academics would agree that this solution cannot be extended
to the problem of academic quality, where quality is not a matter of
popularity. A solution to this problem would be for each of us to articulate
as explicitly as possible our commitments in academic inquiry, then to
identify those commitments shared across individuals or communities,
and resolve our differences through negotiation on the basis of the shared
commitments.

One way of exploring the value system shared across academic
communities ranging from physics to philosophy would be to assume that
academic inquiry is a form of rational inquiry, and look for the general
characteristics of rational inquiry in a wide spectrum of academic
disciplines. In other words, in order to facilitate conversation and healthy
debate across epistemic cultures (research paradigms, alternative
discourses), it is crucial that we understand our own commitments and see
what we have in common with others.

What follows is an initial attempt to identify these shared commitments to
facilitate conversations across academic cultures. We may think of it as a
manifesto of rational inquiry, the axioms of which are fairly obvious to
any academic. I doubt very much if practicing academics would disagree
on the desirability of these postulates in principle, but once explicitly
formulated we can see that many research programmes do not actually
practice what they might agree to in principle.
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2. Foundations of Rational Inquiry

Consistency and coherence
The foundational principle of rationality is the prohibition of logical
contradictions, explicitly formulated by Greek philosopher Aristotle. We
cannot simultaneously believe that the earth is flat and the earth is not flat,
or that Zeno broke the jar and Zeno didn’t break the jar. Believing in such
contradictory statements would amount to irrationality. The prohibition
against logical inconsistency (mutual contradiction) may be explicitly
stated as:

A.      Logical Consistency: The totality of statements that we believe to be
true (what we regard as knowledge) must not
contain logical contradictions.

The prohibition of logical inconsistency is a first step towards rationality.
If we give up (A), we cannot engage in rational argumentation, as it is the
foundation of rational inquiry in every discipline, ranging from
mathematics and physics to history and literary theory.

Related to logical consistency is the somewhat elusive intuition of
coherence that is not easy to articulate explicitly except as the property of
cohering, i.e., sticking together in a unified manner. Coherence involves
connectedness, both conceptual and logical. Compare, for instance the list
under (i) with that in (ii):

(i) Gravity, Force, Acceleration, Velocity, Time, Space
(ii) Gravity, Feminism, AIDS, Calculus, Trillion, Schizophrenia

The list in (i) forms a set of conceptually connected items, while that in
(ii) is a random set. To take another example, consider paragraph (iii) with
that in (iv):

(iii)   All gleeps are dovineš. All dovineš have six legs. Blimpsey is a
glump. All glumps have one leg less than a gleep.
(iv)    All gleeps are dovineš. All gleeps have six legs. Blimpsey is a
glunk. All glunks have one leg less than a dovine.
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The statements in (iii) are logically connected. By putting them together,
we can deduce the consequence that Blimpsey has five legs. In contrast,
the statements in (iv) do not form a coherent set.

We will have more to say about coherence later, but for now we can state
an important criterion on rational knowledge as follows:

B.   Coherence:       The totality of statements that we believe to be true
must be maximally coherent, i.e., must fit together
in the best possible way.

While (A) makes an absolute prohibition of logical inconsistency, (B)
calls for the maximization of coherence.

For a set of statements to be coherent, they should be free from logical
inconsistency, but mere logical consistency is not sufficient for coherence:
a random set of unrelated entities which have nothing to do with one
another may still be free from logical inconsistency. Hence, even though
coherence is a pre-requisite for consistency, the two requirements are not
the same.

Justification

Another fundamental requirement of rational inquiry is that of
justification, stated as C:

C.   Justification:   The statements that we believe or claim to be true
must be justified on basis of appropriate grounds
and/or reasoning.

In mathematics, a theorem is justified by demonstrating that it follows
from the axioms of the theory. Thus, theorems are justified on the basis of
pure reasoning. In physics, a theory is justified by demonstrating that it
provides the best explanation for a range of puzzling observations. In
ethical philosophy, a conclusion is justified by demonstrating that it
follows from our fundamental ethical commitments. An analysis of a
poem is justified by showing that it provides an insightful interpretation of
the poem that fits with our response to the poem.
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As in the case of (A) and (B), criterion (C) is also part of all modes of
academic inquiry. What constitute appropriate grounds may not be
identical in all disciplines, but the commitment to justification cuts across
all forms of rational inquiry.

3. Statements about the world

Fit with experience
As stated above, knowledge claims in the formal sciences of mathematics
and logic are justified by showing that they follow from the axioms of the
theory. Whether the axioms are true or not is irrelevant. Depending upon
which axioms we assume, we get different results. Likewise, ethical
judgments are justified on the basis of the ethical axioms that we are
committed to. Why is it morally undesirable to kill kittens? Because we
are committed to the moral axiom that it is immoral to cause death or
suffering to living creatures, and killing kittens is causing death. This
justification is not valid if we do not subscribe to the prohibition against
causing death and suffering to living creatures.

This state of affairs does not hold for disciplines like history,
anthropology, literary criticism, psychology, geography, biology, and
physics, where knowledge claims are justified by showing that they fit
with our experience of the world. By “experience” we refer to a wide
.spectrum of input ranging from sensory experience (length), non-sensory
experience (pain), data, text, documents, sources, measurements, witness
testimonies, and so on. Such statements include theories, frameworks,
models, analyses/interpretations, generalizations/correlations, and singular
statements. Some of the statements of substantive knowledge are
statements of direct experience (e.g., My brother is taller than my sister;
there were tears in my aunt’s eyes yesterday; there was a flash of lightning
two hours ago, followed by a peal of thunder) while others are
conclusions drawn from experience (e.g., Men are taller than women; my
aunt was sad yesterday; lightning and thunder are caused by the flow of
electricity from rain clouds).

We may state as follows a condition on statements about the world:
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D.   Fit with experience: Statements that we believe to be true of the
world must fit with our experience of the world.

Given (D) it follows that our experience of the world forms the grounds
for the justification of what we believe to be true about the world. We can
therefore formulate a more specific version of the condition on
justification in (C) to hold on statements about the world. In this version,
(C), the appropriate grounds and reasoning are our experience of the
world:

C \ Justification:    The statements that we believe or claim to be true
about the world must be justified on the basis of our
experience of the world, together with reasoning
where necessary.

Testimonies
What happens when we are not in a position to have direct experience?
For instance, let us suppose an acquaintance has borrowed a large sum of
money from me, and has repeatedly failed to return it when promised. If
he called me and said that he came to my office and didn't find me there, I
would not be inclined to believe him. Suppose, however, that three of my
colleagues saw him knocking on my door, and then leaving, and told me
so, thereby corroborating his statement. Even though I did not actually see
him, it is now perfectly rational to subscribe to the belief that he did come
to my office when I was away. Such a belief would be based on
testimonies, not on direct experience.

If we are not in a position to have direct experience, the next best option is
to accept the testimonies of those who have. We may therefore expand C’
asC ” :

C” . Justification:   The statements that we believe or claim to be true
about the world must be justified on the basis of our
experience of the world, and/or testimonies of others
on their experience, together with reasoning where
necessary.

The commitment to C” rules out from rational knowledge beliefs based
on dogma (It is true because X says so), conformity (It is true because
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everyone else thinks it is true), appeal to mortal authority (It is true
because my teacher says so), and appeal to divine authority (It is true
because my scriptures say so). Such appeals are excluded from academic
inquiry, though not, say, from theology and various systems of classical
medicine.

Deductive justification
For several centuries, in the Western tradition ranging from Plato to
Descartes, Euclidean geometry was looked upon as a model for all human
knowledge. Until the end of the nineteenth century, the postulates of
mathematical systems were regarded as a priori truths about the world.
Since the theorems are “proved” (that is, arrived at from the premises
through valid deductive logic), if mathematical axioms are a priori truths
about the world, it follows that mathematical theorems are also truths
about the world. This picture of the relation between mathematics and the
world was shattered by the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries based
on axioms different from those of Euclid. The result was the recognition
of a fundamental difference between formal knowledge of the kind
provided by mathematics and logic (if such and such statements are true,
then such and such other statements are also true), and the knowledge of
the world provided by disciplines as diverse as physics, biology,
anthropology, history, philosophy of science, and literary criticism (such
and such statements are true of the world).

Theorems in the formal sciences (mathematics and logic) are justified on
the basis of pure reasoning, without the need to point to experience. In
contrast, observational statements are justified by appealing to a direct
match with experience.1 The justification of theoretical hypotheses in
empirical sciences involves the appeal to both experience and reasoning.
The centrality of evidence and reasoning articulated in (D) is what
distinguishes rational knowledge from other forms of knowledge, such as
mysticism, intuition, tradition, and commonsense.

Mathematics requires the most stringent form of justification, namely,
proof or deductive justification. Thus, a conjecture in mathematics

1 As pointed out earlier, statements about the world (e.g., sugar is sweet; everything
attracts everything else with a force directly proportional to the product o f their masses and
indirectly proportional to the square distance between them; mangoes are sweeter than
lemons) are justified in terms o f our experience o f the world.
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becomes a theorem when we find a proof. In contrast, theories in natural
sciences cannot be proved to be true: they can only be justified through
non-deductive forms of reasoning.

Equating justification with deductive justification, philosopher Descartes
proposed the program of deducing all knowledge from the self-evident
axiom “I think.” in such a way that every proposition in the body of
knowledge was beyond the least shadow of doubt. Subsequently,
philosopher Hume pointed out that the Cartesian program was impossible,
because generalizations based on observations are justified in terms of
inductive, not deductive reasoning, and hence are not deductively
justified. Scientific theories are justified in terms of speculative-deductive
reasoning, not deductive reasoning, and hence the Cartesian program is
impossible for science as well. Finally, extending the Cartesian thought
experiment to the famous brain-in-the vat conundrum, Harvard
philosopher Hilary Putnam showed that no individual can deductively
demonstrate even the single observation that (s)he has a body, since there
is no way of ruling out the possibility that (s)he is simply a brain in the vat
of an alien scientist feeding various inputs to the brain to create the
illusion that it has a body and is interacting with people.2 In sum, whether
in terms of a single observation, a generalization based on a set of
observations, or an explanation for a set of generalization, the Cartesian
program of deductive justification that demands certainty without the
shadow of doubt is impossible. Hence, it is imperative that the concept of
justification be interpreted in a broad sense going beyond justification in
terms of classical deductive reasoning.

Degrees o f objectivity
Neither experience (including sensory experience) nor testimonies of
others is guaranteed to be an error-free source of knowledge. We have all
seen rainbows in the sky, but we also know that there is no such “thing”
as the rainbow, that it is an illusion created by the bending of light rays
passing through droplets of water. That we see a star at location X in the
sky does not necessarily allow us to conclude that there is a star at
location X in the sky: perhaps our sensory experience of the star is the
result of light rays from a star that died a few decades ago.

2 H. Putnam, “The brain in the vat conundrum,” Reason, Truth, and History.
Rationality in Academic Disciplines                   97

Compare the following examples:

I saw a book on the table in front of me.
There was a book on the table.

I saw a rod half immersed in water in front of me,
bent at the point of immersion.
There was a rod half immersed in water, bent at the
point of immersion.

We consider the conclusion in the first example as justified. The
conclusion in the second example, however, we treat as a mistake because
we have evidence from other sources to believe that the sensory
experience reported here is an illusion. In other words, experience,
sensory or otherwise, can be misleading in the sense that it can lead us to
incorrect observations on the world.

Because we are aware of this pitfall, we look for additional evidence to
corroborate or correct our initial conclusions based on sensory
experience. Let us suppose that we see a jar on a stand on the table. We
legitimately conclude that there is a solid object (a jar) on a stand on the
table on the basis of visual sensory experience. We now feel the jar with
our fingers, and the tactile sensory experience corroborates our earlier
conclusion that there is a solid object on the stand in front of us. Now,
suppose our fingers had passed right through the jar, without meeting with
resistance. We would then have concluded the opposite, namely, that there
is no solid object on the stand in front of us, and that the earlier
conclusion based on visual sensory experience was false. The new
conclusion would have been that there is a hologram of ajar in front of us,
not a real jar.

Let us take another example. Suppose you walk into a room, and see two
suitcases on the floor. You try to lift them, and you find that you can lift
suiticase A with some effort, but suitcase B is impossible to lift. You will
conclude that suiticase B is much heavier than suitcase A. Given the
information that you have, your conclusion, based on the sensation of
strain on your muscles when you try to pull something, is quite justifiable.
However, suppose you now open the two suitcases, and find that suitcase
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A is full of books while suitcase B is empty. You will doubt your earlier
conclusion, and wonder why you were unable to lift suitcase B. On futher
examination, you notice that suitcase B is screwed to the floor. On the
basis of this additional information through the visual channel, you will
now conclude that your earlier conclusion was false, and that suitcase A is
heavier than suitcase B. The sensation of strain on your muscles need not
always be a consequence of the weight of an object, though it is often so.

Let us go back to our earlier example of the visual sensory experience of a
jar on a stand, which could be a real jar or a hologram. Suppose we try to
pick up what we visually interpreted as the jar. Our fingers touch
something solid and heavy, and we pick it up. On the basis of tactile-
kmesthetic experience, we will conclude that our internal visual
experience of the jar is not an illusion, but is triggered by the “objective”
reality of a jar out there in the real world. The sense of objectivity in this
case is the result of the eye, the skin, and the muscles pointing to the same
conclusion. To put it differently, what the eye says is corroborated by
what the skin and muscles say.

A characteristic that increases the credibility of a claim about the world is
its being justified by evidence from many independent sources:

E.     Independent corroboration: A conclusion justified by the
convergence of evidence from independent
sources of evidence              (= independently
corroborated by different sources of evidence) has
greater credibility. The greater the convergence of
evidence, the greater the credibility of a statement
about the world.
*

Suppose someone tells us that a close friend of ours has been speaking ill
of us to our associates. We will probably dismiss it as a rumour. However,
if several people tell us the same thing independently of one another, we
will probably change our mind and begin to think that the report may have
some truth in it. Corroboration triggers conviction.

If we hear a voice from inside a room, we are justified in believing that
there is someone inside the room. If we now open the door and see
someone inside the room, the belief based on our auditory experience is
Rationality in Academic Disciplines

corroborated by our visual experience. If, on the other hand, we do not see
anyone inside, we tend to look for recorded speech as the source of the
auditory experience. The claim that the accused is guilty of murder,
argued on the basis of evidence from an eyewitness (who saw the accused
covered in blood on the night of the murder) is made more credible if
corroborated by finger prints of the accused on the murder weapon.

Corroboration is a form of coherence, the way different statements fit
together. Hence, we may take the requirement of increased corroboration
as a special case of the requirement of increased coherence as applied to
our knowledge of the world.

We may now define objectivity as independent corroboratability. Let us
suppose that Jen Flagerty wakes up in the morning one day, and recalls
the sense of a stranger being near her bed at night. She would probably
dismiss it a dream, an extreme case of subjective experience. However, if
her sister wakes up and reports the same feeling of a stranger being inside
the room at night, Jen would conclude that her initial feeling was not so
subjective at all, because it is corroborated by her sister’s impression. If
she now sees that her window is forced open, and her jewelry is missing,
the sense of objectivity would be further heightened. What started out as a
purely subjective experience now has become objective reality.

From the purely subjective to totally objective is a continuum. We may
say that there is nothing that we can prove to be totally objective.
However, the greater the degree of independent corroboratability, the
greater the degree of objectivity. Given that increased corroboration is a
special case of the requirement of coherence, it follows that objectivity is
a special case of coherence.

Yet another special case of independent corroboration is replicability, an
important consideration in scientific experiments. If John Briggs sees
flying horses at midnight every day, chances are that he and others are
likely to treat it as an instance of hallucination. However, if several others
independently see flying horses at midnight, i.e., if his observation is
replicated by others, we are unlikely to attribute it to collective
hallucination. Instead, we might think of the possibility that someone has
invented a flying machine that looks like a horse. Replicability of
experimental results is conventionally required in scientific inquiry:
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“I meditated for four months in the mountains, and at the end of my
meditation, it was revealed to me that Einstein’s theory of relativity is
false. Therefore I am justified in believing that Einstein’s theory of
relativity is false.”
“Last night, an angel told me in my dreams that Hitler was not
responsible for the killing of Jews. Therefore I am justified in
believing that Hitler was innocent.”

These forms of justification are inadmissible in a form of inquiry that
subscribes to (C” ).

Many mystical modes explicitly reject (A)-(C” ) as not only inadequate
but misleading.3

4. The Rational Mindset

Uncertainty o f knowledge
In the preceding discussion, we had many examples of mistaken
conclusions, whether based on experience or testimonies. Now, if there is
one characteristic that distinguishes the spirit of twentieth (and twenty
first) century science from that of the past, it is an awareness of the
fallibility and uncertainty of human knowledge, and the resulting need for
systematic questioning. The human mind has a natural desire for total
certainty, and a tendency to accept as certain what on closer examination
reveals itself to be less than totally certain. It is important therefore to be
constantly watchful. Let us state this recognition as follows.

F.       Fallibility and uncertainty: Human knowledge is fallible and
uncertain.

3 1 am not rejecting the mystical mode o f inquiry, or saying that the rational mode is
superior to the mystical mode. Nor that it is impossible to provide a rational argument
against the mystic’s position, or a rational argument to show that the rational mode is
superior to the mystical mode: any rational argument presupposes a commitment to the
value o f rationality which the mystic rejects, so we cannot rationally argue for rationality
without the vicious cycle o f presupposing what we wish to argue for.
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G.      Requirement o f questioning: Hence, statements that we believe or
claim to be true must be subjected to systematic
questioning.

This awareness lies at the heart of not only history and anthropology, but
also physics and biology.

If we wish, we may refer to (F) and (G) as the “postmodern” condition,
but it might be useful to remember that it had its origins in early twentieth
century science, long before the postmodern discourses discovered the
condition. As Richard Feynman puts it:

“The scientist has a lot of experience with ignorance and doubt and
uncertainty, and this experience is of very great importance, I think.
When a scientist doesn’t know the answer to a problem, he is
ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain.
And when he is pretty dam sure of what the result is going to be, he is
still in some doubt. We have found it of paramount importance that in
order to progress we must recognize our ignorance and leave room for
doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying
degrees of certainty — some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none
absolutely certain. Now, we scientists are used to this, and we take it
for granted that it is perfectly consistent to be unsure, that it is
possible to live and not know. But I don’t know if everyone realizes
this is true. Our freedom to doubt was borne out of a struggle against
authority in the early days of science. It was a very deep and long
struggle: permit us to question-to doubt—to not be sure. I think that it
is important that we do not forget this struggle and thus lose what we
have gained. Herein lies a responsibility to society.”4

Commitment to minimizing uncertainty and error
Having pointed out the importance of uncertainty and the need for
questioning, we should also take into consideration what Feynman says
about degrees of uncertainty. Though our knowledge is fallible and
uncertain, it is not completely unreliable or false either, and not all
statements are equal with regard to the degree of certainty. Our third
commitment, therefore, is to that of increasing the credibility of what we

Richard Feynman, “What do you care what other people think? ” p. 245.
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take as knowledge:

H.     Systematicity and rigour: We should do the best we can to increase
the reliability of human knowledge by being as
systematic and as rigorous as possible, minimizing
the possibility of errors, reducing the degree of
uncertainty and increasing accuracy.

The commitment to (H) distinguishes natural sciences from some of the
postmodernist approaches in the humanities and the social sciences. It
drives us to the use of precise measurements in situations where it is
meaningful (e.g. measurement of length and weight, but not beauty and
happiness), and the use of rigorous mathematical modelling where
appropriate and feasible (e.g. in the physical sciences but not when
making ethical decisions). We resort to systematic experimental strategies
with controlled variables (e.g. in studying the movement of electrons and
the effects of brain impairments in rats) but are satisfied with less rigorous
means where experimentation is not feasible (e.g. the movement of
planets and the effects of brain impairment in humans). The degree of
rigour and systematicity in rational inquiry varies across domains, but
what is important is the commitment to maximize rigour and systematicity
wherever possible and useful.

Collective verification and authentication
Human beings have the natural tendency to conform to the beliefs of their
community. Given this tendency, it is not surprising to find that there is
considerable overlap between the private knowledge of an individual and
the public knowledge of the community. However, there are three
important ways in which the two can be different, namely:

Some of the statements of a given individual’s knowledge may be
irrelevant for the purposes of public knowledge, (e.g. I happen to
know that there was a red car parked near the library at 11 am on
22 February 1999, but this piece of information has no relevance
for public knowledge.)
Some of the statements of a given individual’s private knowledge
may not have entered public knowledge, (e.g. I have discovered
something interesting about the Malayalam syntax, but I have not
written a paper about it and hence no one else knows about it.)
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An individual may disagree with the other members of the
community, and hold views that are not in conformity with the
community, (e.g. I happen to believe that the currently dominant
theory of Optimality Theory is mistaken in using ranking as the
formal device for conflict resolution, but I have not managed to
convince my research community yet.)

Given the distinction between private knowledge and public knowledge,
rational inquiry makes a set of demands on the statements that enter the
realm of public knowledge from the realm of private knowledge. Recall
that the justification of statements about the world involve appeal to
experience. In the formation of public knowledge, we demand that
experiential statements be collectively verifiable:

I.     Collective verifiability o f experience: The statements of experience
that we appeal to in our justification must be open
to independent verification. That is to say,
experiential statements must be such that when
exposed to the same trigger or situation, different
individuals in the community must not disagree on
whether the statement is true or false for that
trigger or situation.

This commitment rules out beliefs based on hallucinations and dreams
(non-replicable sensory perceptions), personal tastes (e.g. garlic tastes
foul) and mystical revelations (e.g. I know it is true because an angel
revealed it to me yesterday), but allows interpersonally corroborated
experience (e.g. we are justified in believing that boiling water falling on
our body causes physical pain, and the loss of a loved one causes grief).

A similar condition on independent authentication applies to reasoning as
well:

J.     Collective authentication o f reasoning: The reasoning that we
appeal to in our justification must be open to
independent authentication. That is to say, given a
chain of reasoning, different individuals in the
community must not disagree on whether it is
legitimate or not.
104          THE SINGAPORE BAHA’I STUDIES REVIEW

This commitment requires that the members of the community have an
explicit or implicit agreement on the rules of inference that connect the
premises to the conclusions, and the ground rules on the basis of which
we decide whether a statement is true or false. The reasoning in
mathematical proofs, for instance, is restricted to deductive reasoning,
while the reasoning in empirical generalizations is inductive. The use of
these modes of reasoning is agreed upon in the respective communities.

5. Scientific Inquiry

The general principles of rationality stated above are common to all forms
of academic inquiry, ranging from philosophy and history to physics and
mathematics. In addition to the principles listed above, one may
acknowledge (L)-(N) as the central characteristics of theoretical research
in the natural sciences, extendable in principle to other domains as well:

K.     Sensory perception: What our sense organs tell us about the world
is credible. Statements about the world must be
justified in terms of replicable sensory experience.
L.     Explanation: Observations         must     be    accompanied     by
explanations of what we find puzzling in the
observations.
M.     Motivation:     Constructs in knowledge propositions must be
motivated i.e., shown to be useful for some
purpose, where purpose = description, explanation,
action, etc.). Theoretical constructs (i.e.,
classificatory or hypothetical constructs that are
postulated in explanations) must be motivated by
their usefulness in providing explanations.

The axiom in (K) is a special form of the axiom of the credibility of our
experience, which forms one of the two parts of (C” ).

In addition, scientific inquiry demands (N) and (O) of its theories:

N.     Correct predictions: Scientific theories must correctly predict the
observations.
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O.     Generality and simplicity: Scientific theories must be as simple
and general as possible.

We may think of the requirement of correct predictions (N) as a special
case of the requirement of fit with experience (D). Though inquiry in
humanities (e.g. history, literary theory) is subject to experience based
justification (C” ) and fit with experience (D), they are not subject to the
specialized conditions in (N)-(O).

6. Conflict resolution

What happens when inferences from axioms (A)-(O) result in conflicts
with one another? Take the axiom of the credibility of the sense organs.
Under normal circumstances, if we see a vase on a table in front of us, we
take it as true that there is a vase on the table, trusting the credibility of
what our eyes tell us. However, if we try to pick up the vase and our
hands pass through the vase, we conclude that the vase is an optical
illusion (a hologram), and there is no vase in front of us. Potentially, the
inferences that there is a vase and there is no vase in front of us violate the
condition on logical consistency, and hence at least one of the inferences
should be ruled out. In this particular case, we assign lower priority to our
eyes, and conclude that what our hands tell us is more credible.

Rationality demands that we assign highest priority to the prohibition of
logical contradictions, which itself is an axiomatic commitment.

P.     Priority o f consistency: Given a conflict between experience
(including (K)) on the one hand, and the
prohibition of logical contradictions on the other,
the latter has priority.

Given (K), it follows that we would trust what our eyes and hands tell us,
and conclude that there both is a vase and isn’t a vase in front of us.
However, given (P), such a conclusion is illegitimate. Given the conflict
between (K) and (P), the winner is (P). Hence we conclude that at least
one of the senses is not telling us the truth. Had we assigned higher
priority to (K) instead, we would have chosen to believe that there is a
106              THE SINGAPORE BAHÁT STUDIES REVIEW

vase in front of us and that there is no vase in front of us, violating the
prohibition of inconsistency.

To illustrate further the centrality of (P) in rationality, consider the
following axiomatic commitment in certain forms of theological inquiry.

Q.      Credibility o f the scriptures: What the scriptures tell us is credible.

As stated earlier, commitment to (Q) is excluded in academic disciplines,
and even forms of metaphysics, but it is found in many forms of
theological inquiry. What happens when scriptures contain logical
contradictions? Rationality demands that we take logical consistency to
have priority over (Q), and reject at least one of the two contradictory
propositions in the strictures. Alternatively, we may step outside the
bounds of rationality, and, assigning highest priority to (Q), embrace the
logical contradiction in the scriptures as truth.5 If so, (Q) can be replaced
by the stronger version in (R):

R.      Infallibility o f the scriptures: What the scriptures tell us is
infallible.

Having acknowledged the axiomatic commitment to (Q) as being
consistent with rationality (but not in academic disciplines) as long as the
prohibition of logical consistency is prior to (Q), we can now see how
science and fundamentalist theology diverge in their approach to
knowledge. What happens when there is a conflict between (A) to (P) on
the one hand, and (Q) on the other? A clear example is the conflict
between Evolutionary Theory in biology and the Creationist Theory based
on the literal interpretation of the Bible. If we take (R) to have priority
over the combination of (A) to (O), the prohibition of logical
contradictions demands that we reject the evolutionary theory. If, on the
other hand, we take (A) to (P) to have priority over (R), we have to reject
the creationist account. Are they both forms of rationality? Yes. Are they
both forms of academic rationality? No: academic inquiry demands that
we either reject (R) or at least take (A) to (Q) to have priority over (R).

5 As pointed out earlier, the position that rationality is limited and that we need to accept
logical contradictions to understand reality is found in certain forms o f mysticism as well.
Rationality in Academic Disciplines                     107

Our final example comes from a widely used axiom in everyday life:

S.     Credibility o f the knowledgeable: What credible people tell us is
credible.

As in the case of (R), appeal to the credibility of people is inadmissible in
academic argumentation, but is commonly used in argumentation in the
law court in accepting conclusions and informed opinions of specialists as
reliable evidence. Notice that there is a conflict between (S) on the one
hand, and the combination of (A) to (Q) on the other. The demands of (A)
to (Q) require us to check the evidence and argumentation on our own
before accepting a knowledge claim, but when we have no direct access to
the relevant evidence, or when the evidence is too specialized for us to
process, we relax (A)-(Q) and go by (S) in every day life. However, when
the results of (A) to (Q) conflict with those of (S), we go by the former.

W O RK S C ITED

Feynman, Richard, “What Do You Care What Other People Think?":
Further Adventures o f a Curious Character, Bantam Books, 1988.

Fleck, Ludwik, Genesis and Development o f a Scientific Fact, The
University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1979. Originally published in
German, Benno Schwabe Co., Basel, 1935.

Khun, S. Thomas, The Structure o f Scientific Revolutions, The
University of Chicago press, Chicago, 1962.

Putnam, H., “The brain in the vat conundrum,” Reason, Truth, and
History, Cambridge University Press, 1981.
-- Rationality in Academic Disciplines (Used by permission of the curator)