I’m participating in the Heterodox Academy meeting in NYC on June 23-25, and its theme is “Truth, Power, and Responsibility.” The program for the entire meeting is here.
I’m on a rather daunting plenary panel on the 25th (below). The description:
The Duties and Responsibilities of Scholars | Wednesday, June 25 at 12:30-1:50pmWhat does it mean to be a scholar today—and who gets to decide? In an era marked by rising polarization, increasing public scrutiny of higher education, and shifting institutional expectations, the role of the scholar is more contested than ever. This plenary session brings together leading thinkers from across the academic spectrum to examine whether there are universal norms of scholarship that transcend disciplines, and what obligations scholars have not just to their fields, but to academia at large. This panel, featuring Jerry Coyne (University of Chicago), Jennifer Frey (University of Tulsa), Louis Menand (Harvard University), and John McWhorter (Columbia University), and moderated by Colleen Eren (William Paterson University), will explore where today’s academics derive their sense of duty, how those understandings are evolving, and what responsibilities come with the title of professor.
I suppose I could just let the bigwigs do all the talking, but I do want to make a contribution. To do that, I’ve been reading quite a bit about academic freedom and free speech. I’ve discovered that they are two separate things, and that, if achieving truth is one’s aim, academic freedom is at least as important as free speech. In These are nascent ideas, so feel free to comment on them below.
First, let’s look briefly at free speech, which most scholars define this way:
Freedom of speech (according to America’s First Amendment): the prohibition of the government to suppress speech in public square. (There are of course exceptions, like harassment, false advertising, defamation, or creating imminent and predictable violence.)
There are three parts of the courts’ interpretation of First Amendment free speech:
a. There can be no content discrimination [A content-based law discriminates against speech based on the substance of what is communicated].
b. There are no true or false opinions for the purpose of the First Amendment. That is, everybody is entitled to their own opinion in all matters, both political and epistemic. This means that the ideas are given equal political consideration, but this doesn’t mean that all opinions are equally valid.
c. The state cannot compel you to speak. (This is outlined in Robert Posts’s engaging speech).
There are two reasons for a rational democracy to adopt freedom of speech. First, because a democracy is really government based on public opinion, as it’s ultimately based on votes. And, as we have learned, voters can sometimes have false or even harmful ideas. Second—and this is the philosophical underpinning of all freedom of speech laws—the freedom is supposed to create a “marketplace of ideas”, whose clash through public discussion and expression is supposed to be an essential route to finding TRUTH. But does it? My view is no: the truth is ultimately determined through academic freedom, which I construe broadly to encompass quasi-scientific investigation using evidence, but investigation not necessarily done by academics. I’ll discuss this in part 2 of the post, which I may or may not put up today.
The “marketplace of ideas” trope is based largely on the pronouncements of two men: John Stuart Mill and Oliver Wendell Holmes. I’ll give some of their quotes below about the value of the marketplace of ideas:
John Stuart Mill from on “On Liberty”
“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion… Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them…he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.”
“The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”
. . . . There is the greatest difference between presuming an opinion to be true, because, with every opportunity for contesting it, it has not been refuted, and assuming its truth for the purpose of not permitting its refutation. Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion, is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth for purposes of action; and on no other terms can a being with human faculties have any rational assurance of being right.
The beliefs which we have most warrant for, have no safeguard to rest on, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded. If the challenge is not accepted, or is accepted and the attempt fails, we are far enough from certainty still; but we have done the best that the existing state of human reason admits of; we have neglected nothing that could give the truth a chance of reaching us: if the lists are kept open, we may hope that if there be a better truth, it will be found when the human mind is capable of receiving it; and in the meantime we may rely on having attained such approach to truth, as is possible in our own day. This is the amount of certainty attainable by a fallible being, and this the sole way of attaining it.
However unwillingly a person who has a strong opinion may admit the possibility that his opinion may be false, he ought to be moved by the consideration that however true it may be, if it is not fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed, it will be held as a dead dogma, not a living truth.
I have long touted Mill’s tract as of supreme importance in justifying freedom of speech in a democracy. And I still think that, but I no longer agree that the clash of ideas among the public promotes or guarantees emergence of the truth. Something more is needed, and that something, as we’ll see, is evidence. Note that evidence is not mentioned by Mill.
From Oliver Wendell Holmes as quoted in the Annenberg Classroom:
In his dissent from the majority opinion in Abrams v. United States (upholding the Espionage Act convictions of a group of antiwar activists), U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes coins his famous “marketplace of ideas” phrase to explain the value of freedom of speech.
“[W]hen men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas – that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.”
And from an article in Wikipedia: [In] the dissenting opinion by Supreme Court Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in United States v. Schwimmer. Holmes wrote that “if there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other, it is the principle of free thought—not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.’
Note that he doesn’t mention freedom of speech, but freedom of thought. Freedom of thought is not protected under the First Amendment:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
But does the clash of ideas in the public square produce truth (defined roughly as “something that conforms to fact or reality”) or knowledge (defined as “justified true belief”)? Again, the clash of ideas is necessary in a democracy so that the public can consider all sides of an issue before making decisions on who runs the government. We can argue later about whether certain non-elected parts of the government, like the Supreme Court, operate according to the First Amendment. They certainly don’t, as there is compelled speech—lawyers forced to answer questions—and not all ideas are considered equal.
Well, surely the clash of ideas is necessary to produce truth, but it’s not sufficient. Let’s take some examples.
One that immediately comes to mind is the clash between creationism and evolution. Everyone is entitled, via free speech, to espouse publicly one or another view in the public square (but not in the classroom). This is the vaunted clash of ideas. But did this clash produce truth per se? No, what eventually allowed evolution to overcome creationism is evidence, and that evidence doesn’t come from opinions, but from epistemic considerations. What empirical evidence do we have on the side of evolution (ahem, Why Evolution is True), and what evidence on the side of a supernatural hand in creationism? The evidence comes from scholars (or nonscholars employing scientific methods) gathering evidence under the principle of academic freedom: studying, thinking, and publishing what they want, using norms of scholarship and without outside interference. The finding of “truth” depends not only on a clash of ideas, but on the adducing of evidence by the opposing sides, along with the presumption that the public is rational and thoughtful enough to evaluate that evidence. (It apparently isn’t as judging by the most recent Gallup poll, which shows that 71% of Americans think that God had some had in evolution.)
Second, consider whether everyone is entitled to free government-provided health care, as in the UK and many other countries. Here we have an ongoing clash of ideas, which so far has resulted in an answer of “no” in America, though that could change. Which “truth” has resulted from this clash? Does the UK have the truth, or the US? The “truth” is that perhaps one of these is better for society than the other, but the clash of ideas itself won’t settle the issue, and even so there would be unresolvable disagreement about what “better” means. What we need is what we don’t have: a comparative experiment (or data) showing the effects of each choice in each society, AND a public that has a widely shared idea of what a “better society” means.
The second question in fact involves not just facts but values: what kind of society do we want? And while those values might be informed by a clash of ideas, they are based largely on unchangeable personal preferences. Often the clash of ideas rests heavily on morality, and, as I believe, there is no absolute morality and no “moral truth” (let’s put Biblical morality to the side here, since it’s not even clear that there is such a thing). Rather, morality is based on personal preferences, and in many cases (viz., the trolley problem), there is no truth: one simply adheres to one preference over another.
Here’s a third example: should society allow abortion? If some people have views on abortion that hinge on empirical facts, like whether a fetus has a heartbeat, can feel pain, or be viable if removed from the mother, then yes, those views can be informed by empirical investigation, also called “science”.
But there are many who favor an absolute prohibition of abortion because they consider it murder, murder of a potentially viable human being. Such people feel they are right, but morally right. Other people, like me, favor almost unrestricted abortion up to birth, simply because I believe that a society in which women have that choice is a better society than one in which abortion is forbidden or given time limits. But is the “truth” here? There is no truth: there is only people deciding what is morally permissible. Yes, we have a clash of ideas, and yes, it’s resolved in various ways in various states, but the resolution is a political one: a consensus of opinion and not a determination of “truth.” Again, I don’t see how that clash itself leads to the “truth”. It can lead to a political decision, but since this is largely an issue of preference, there is no truth to be had, no “conforming to what is reality.”
I maintain that most of the clashes of ideas we see in society deal with political or moral issues, hinging on preferences that cannot be adjudicated by argument alone. Some can be adjudicated by empirical investigation, but that is a minority.
In the end, while I believe that a clash of ideas is essential in a democracy simply to have a working democracy, the clash alone does not guarantee homing in on truths about the universe, and in many cases it can’t. In the cases where it can, the clash involves differing opinions about empirical issues. And it is the resolution of those issues by empirical data that will guide us toward the truth. Absent empirical evidence, which can result only from academic freedom (construed widely as the freedom to think, teach, and research), a mere clash of ideas cannot guide us to the truth.
Free speech does not create truth in the manner of a chemical reaction. It is hard to argue that free speech creates truth because, although the truth may be out there, there are many personal barriers to finding and accepting truth. What we can be sure of, though, is that lack of freedom of speech means that truth is at the mercy of politics, since politicians would determine what is acceptable.
Of course I am saying that free speech is important and necessary for a democracy, my point was that it–as embodied in the clash of ideas–is not sufficient to find the truth, though that was said by Holmes, Mill, and others to be the main virtue of free speech.
Academic freedom cannot exist without free speech.
Yes, I thought I had made that clear when I said that free speech was necessary but not sufficient for finding the truth. Therefore, if academic freedom is necessary for finding the truth, so is freedom of speech.
I see your point. After all, it seems to me that for any approximation of “truth”, we must have some kind of evidence. How else can we make sense of conflicting notions?
That will be a very interesting plenary discussion.
(edited to remove redundancy)
“….c. The state cannot compel you to speak. (This is outlined in Robert Posts’s engaging speech).”
This is a very important and oft overlooked aspect of free speech.
For example, imagine being accosted on say a college campus by an enthusiastic supporter of reparations for black people. You are asked your opinion of reparations. You don’t feel knowledgeable enough about the subject…it seems like a good idea but perhaps there are some unintended negative consequences that you are not aware of.
So you say “I’m sorry, but I’m undecided on this issue…”
“WHAAAAT! If you are not for reparations, you are AGAINST IT!”
I have always seen this “not for therefore against” logic (a favorite tactic of extremists on the right and the left) as a form of bullying, and now I can also see it as a form of suppression of free speech…i.e. my right not to speak on an issue.
What a great point. I’ve had people pull that on me in the past and felt at a loss. Thank you.
Necessary, but insufficient.
“In science, truth always wins.”
-Max Perutz
Vega Science Trust. Interview with Max Perutz: Discoverer of the structure
of haemoglobin
Available at http://www.vega.org.uk/series/facetoface/perutz/;
accessed December 13, 2004.
“Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.”
-Blaise Pascal
Pensées
sec. SECTION XIV: APPENDIX: POLEMICAL FRAGMENTS, no. 864
17th c., posthumous
(1670 2nd. ed.)
Free eBook!
Lastly, the academy must be guarded from the seductive trap of esotericism :
Science, Politics, and Gnosticism
Eric Voegelin
1968, 1997
Regenery Press, Chicago;
Washington D.C.
“We All Live on Campus Now”
-Andrew Sullivan
I agree that free speech is only one half of the equation and that it requires evidence to adjudicate the various positions to find the path toward truth. That’s an important insight.
At the top of your piece, you say that “academic freedom is at least as important as free speech.” I think that this claim needs to be supported more fully. If the pathway toward truth is freedom of speech coupled with adjudication with evidence, it doesn’t follow that academic freedom needs to lie along that pathway. Academic freedom may foster adjudication with evidence, but it doesn’t seem to be required. Can you strengthen that connection and formulate a stronger argument?
Well, tell me another way to determine that ivermectin does not cure covid besides the research produced by academic freedom. Free speech won’t do it.
I completely agree that free speech won’t do it alone. One needs to adjudicate competing claims with evidence, as you say. But, the need to adjudicate claims with evidence does not imply the need for academic freedom (which you seem to imply at the start). I think you need to support the additional claim that academic freedom is necessary for adjudicating claims with evidence.
In a corporate lab, for instance, researchers may make divergent claims about a certain outcome—say a chemical reaction. The lab doesn’t have conventional academic freedom, but it does adjudicate completing claims with evidence in order to divine the correct interpretation (truth). So, it seems that academic freedom may not be required, so long as there is some mechanism by which completing claims can be adjudicated with evidence.
I do support academic freedom—and it can be effective in enabling the pursuit of truth (by adjudicating competing claims with evidence)—but I don’t think your argument demonstrates that it’s essential. Might be better to argue that academic freedom institutionalizes what has proved to be—and continues to be—an effective mechanism for pursuing truth.
The researchers in corporate labs were trained as Ph.Ds or scientists using academic freedom, and yes, they use the scientific method, which cannot be employed without the freedom to think and do what you feel is right. I don’t understand your implicit contention that the truth will be reached faster even if there are restrictions on what you can think and do. The scientific method is in fact based on academic freedom; it’s an essential though not often-mentioned part of the toolkit of science.
I really don’t want to argue further that freedom of thought is essential to find out the truth about things. If you think it’s not, well, then we will have to disagree.
Actually, I think we’re talking past each other a bit. Under your broadened definition of academic freedom—“to encompass quasi-scientific investigation using evidence, but investigation not necessarily done by academics”—we’re on the same page.
Defining “free speech” in terms of the First Amendment, and thus narrowly in terms of government censorship, is a very American thing to do.
Mill emphasized that the mob can be just as censorious, and that for proper free speech the social costs more generally must not deter people from expressing and discussing ideas (consider a majority-Muslim country that had a secular constitution and legal free speech, but in practice anyone criticising Islam gets lynched by a mob — that is not a nation with “free speech”).
I might disagree with you; this could happen in America if you march into a Jewish neighborhood with a Nazi flag. Free speech is prohibited ONLY if your speech is either harassment or liable to cause imminent and predictable violence. The freedom guarantees freedom from government represssion, not freedom from idiots attacking you for what you said.
Besides, I’m an American.
Examples in America would be people like Charles Murray, Colin Wright, Bo Wineguard and Amy Wax. Formally they have “free speech”, but in practice the costs of expressing their opinions is very high, and can include the loss of any chance of pursuing an academic career. So one could say that American doesn’t fully have free speech on some topics.
Nor does the UK, of course. In principle a newspaper could publish a satirical cartoon criticising Islam and depicting Mohammed. In practice no mainstream newspaper has done this since the original Satanic Verses affair.
They have free speech according to the First Amendment, and some of those people have sued. Free speech does not mean that you must be free of all unpleasant consequences of your speech.
Now I agree that the UK does NOT have free speech. Their system is hypocritical.
I might disagree with you; this could happen in America if you march into a Jewish neighborhood with a Nazi flag. Free speech is prohibited ONLY if your speech is either harassment or liable to cause imminent and predictable violence. The freedom guarantees freedom from government represssion, not freedom from idiots attacking you for what you said.
Besides, I’m an American.
I can’t help but put the following questions up – of all things, it’d have to be on abortion – but these two ideas just occurred to me :
• What is the proof that every abortion is not murder?
• Where does application of Rawls’ veil of ignorance to abortion lead? Or how do we know it does not apply?
Each side in the abortion debate can give its own proof of its position, following perfectly logical reasoning.
The difference between them is not in the logic but in the input assumptions — eg, what does one mean by ‘murder’, etc.
With different interpretations of that meaning, you get two opposing sides, each arguing rationally from their initial assumptions, each willing to offer ‘proof’.
Maybe your question is really how do we convince people of one interpretation over another?
I see – but there are no less than three positions on abortion.
Insofar as abortion equates with murder because a soul unique to humans has entered during, shortly after, or sometime after, conception then that claim is anchored in an ontological claim of the sort that is amenable to evaluation on a best fit with the current overall available evidence basis. Without the role of a soul unique to humans it becomes more difficult to justify the different standards being applied to a still unviable, dependent, human fetus versus independent, thinking, breathing, interacting, animals.
And this includes a values question — Not only is it necessary to somehow agree/adjudicate about the available evidence, but the whole notion of the value of evidence itself is disputed, versus feelings, personal revelations, intuitions (“gut feel”), sacred truths (religious, ideological), etc.
Speaking for California, [Penal Code 187] defines murder as “the unlawful killing of a human being, or a fetus, with malice aforethought”, with the exception of abortions consented to by the mother of the fetus, where an abortion is necessary to preserve the mother’s life, or when the abortion complied with the Therapeutic Abortion Act. While malice may be expressed in the form of a ‘deliberate intention to take away the life of a fellow creature’, it may be implied when there is no ‘considerable provoca…
In Canada, back when we still had an abortion law, no abortion was murder, because a fetus didn’t, still doesn’t, become a (murderable) human being until after it had (has) been fully born alive. The criminal offence was procuring or committing an abortion. No need to invoke souls or metaphysics about when life begins. Abortion, while not homicide, was still illegal and carried a long prison term.
This made it easy for Canada’s Supreme Court. When it discovered lo and behold a Constitutional right to abortion, it didn’t put itself in the position of legalizing murder or trying to decide when life began. Because a fetus wasn’t (isn’t) a human being, striking down the abortion law didn’t affect the rights and laws that applied to human beings.
I’m not so sure that “the clash of ideas is necessary to produce truth” (although I may have read this more broadly than you intended). I suggest that the following statement is true: “If you put your hand into a fire it will hurt” (or, if you prefer, “fire burns”). I don’t perceive any clashing of ideas on this subject (either currently or historically).
But it is only “true” once you’ve done it. IOW, it’s only true after you’ve got evidence and know it to be true. It isn’t obviously true, as anyone who has a child can attest.
Indeed; I was going to make that comment before I saw yours.
I agree that you make an often-overlooked point. Freedom of academic enquiry (and both the permission and the obligation to publish) is necessary to get at the truth, or at least distill it to a question of competing values that aren’t empirical truth claims. I suspect abortion will always be of this nature. Climate change need not be: both sides make testable predictions. Time literally will tell.
Freedom of speech is best regarded as a guarantee that the government can’t suppress opposition to its policies and boost its re-election prospects by smashing the printing presses and jailing the opposition speakers.
“Well, surely the clash of ideas is necessary to produce truth, but it’s not sufficient.” It requires “the adducing of evidence by the opposing sides, along with the presumption that the public is rational and thoughtful enough to evaluate that evidence. It apparently isn’t . . .”
I agree. The question is what to do about this in a pluralist democracy. The plenary panel announcement notes that “. . . the role of the scholar is more contested than ever.” I’ll offer that one reason why this is so is that scholars have been (or are perceived by many to have been) seduced by one possible answer to the problem of the public’s intellectual shortcomings: rule by experts, among whom they count themselves. And as you also note, many of the issues that divide us are essentially about values—matters upon which specialized expertise contributes little or nothing.
In the debates about free speech and academic freedom—broadly interpreted—we often lose sight of tolerance, but, I will suggest, a politically-instituted pursuit of truth without tolerance will become tyrannical. Self-government will always be messy, solutions will rarely be optimal, inefficiencies will abound. But it is in the embrace of political equality, in the idea that no man or woman by right of birth, intelligence, or expertise, has the right to rule over another that we find the best chance to live together in a relative-if-strained peace. The backlash against the post-New Deal administrative state is of a piece with the backlash against scholars: each group is perceived by a large segment of the public as wanting to devise and implement the rules by which the rest of us must live—and as that rule-making process metastasizes, it eludes democratic accountability. The increasingly public linkage between academia, the administrative state, and the Democratic party—combined with a broader contempt exemplified by Clinton’s “deplorables” language—suggests that these groups have abandoned any disinterested pursuit of truth or advancement of the public good in terms of anything other than how they define it. The road back to academic freedom, widespread public support, and access to the public purse will require not only a delinking from activist party politics but also an open embrace of diverse views and tolerance within academia itself. Equally important will be the willingness of our credentialed elite publicly to acknowledge their mistakes.
I very big ask, IMO.
In a market place, or simpler, in an open competition, the “winner” today usually cedes to the newer and better winner of tomorrow. The constant need for competitions may be an admission of truth being inevitably a process, and/or worse even, have context dependencies that make it wander about. In America, the notion of individualism seems to also play a sizeable role in wanting a vibrant marketplace, warts and all. Asian societies, for instance, don’t seem to have the same level of reverence for these types of continuous competitions. So I think that societal levels of individualism and conformity should be sized up against one another to see which model performs better and under what circumstances.
We also seem to have chronic bind spots regarding market failures; they tend to be considered as frictional glitches rather than evidence of structural problems. Monopolies, monopsonies, oligopolies, oligopsonies, widespread corruption, etc. The “invisible hand” of markets is not (contrary to opinion) the hand of God or Fate.
“The invisible hand is not the Hand of God. Smithian economics is not theology” (George Friedman, https://www.realclearworld.com/2025/04/17/adam_smith_economics_finance_and_geopolitics_1104715.html ).
It is good they’re cutting participants a break on pricing as the New York Marriott at the Brooklyn Bridge retails at 6-700 smackeroos a night! In Brooklyn no less – but the hotel looks excellent and the views outstanding.
Do call if you want your pizza bought for you while being ear bashed by a gen-u-ine NYC loudmouth. 🙂 Oh. Or Katz’s Deli – which isn’t far though I hear it isn’t what it was.
I’m sure H.A. will put the conference online eventually so we’ll get to see. I very much enjoyed the free speech conference at Stanford last year.
D.A.
NYC
When do oft-repeated demonstrations, justified by the nearly sacrosanct principle of protected (political) speech (which I happen to agree with) and the supposed miracle of the “Marketplace of Ideas” cross the line into a virtual monopoly on that Marketplace of Ideas and become intimidation, harassment, and calculated social engineering?
Right now in 2025, we have public squares – which are supposed to belong to all of us, which includes the vast majority of people who are not inclined to public political display – dominated by the ugliest of ideas. Mass murder, Jew hatred, terrorism, ethnic cleansing are being normalized by ignorant activists who are being manipulated and funded by religious Jihadist extremists.
People can literally publish their thoughts in millions of venues, pay for billboards, write their government representatives, host podcasts, get on YouTube for the costs of a cellphone. They do not need, it seems to me, access to our city streets and campuses as repeatedly as they please.
Exactly how often are our public streets and university campuses obligated to allow unavoidable vile messaging? Is it not time to discuss the rights of the vast majority of people who want to have a peaceful environment which is not dictated by the political biases of public officials or intimidated University administrators hamstrung by a seemingly blind allegiance to free speech anywhere and at any time?
I understand that time and place restrictions supposedly exist. But they are capricious or absent in the streets of Europe or on college campuses. They are regulated by an elite few. When are we going to talk about the rights of the tax-paying majority who don’t want to be intimidated or coerced?
Free speech is fine up to a point. Go too far and you get creationism in biology classes and “2+2=5” in math classes, asserted as fact. But that speech only gets the ideas out in the open. Truth will only emerge when those ideas are evaluated properly. That means using reasoned argument to filter out the stuff that’s anywhere between wrong and not even wrong. Truth can only be recognized when it survives that process.
The problem we have today is that postmodernism has apparently taken over, not just in the humanities but in math and science departments. That ideology rejects the very concept of objectivity and the use of reason. In this environment, it doesn’t matter what people say or what audience they have. Everyone’s ideas are “true for them” and filters are prohibited as [something]-ist. No one can learn anything in such an environment.
Evidence is really just more speech as is the accompanying claim regarding what counts as evidence. The key necessary ingredient is the evaluation of that evidence and the evaluation of ideas in general based on criteria for their rejection. With out that there is no knowledge and without agreement on the nature of that evaluation there can be no consensus.
This only covers things that can be resolved by a rational filtering process, though. As you note, clashes that are based on differences in values do not have a resolution. For most, we don’t need one, contrary to the aims of authoritarians on both Left and Right. For the few others, we just need to determine what the government will do for the time being.
I think Robert Post (in the speech he gave at Brown that Jerry provided the link to at the beginning of his post) did an excellent job of arguing that precise point in the context of college campuses and the need to regulate free speech there.
“What does it mean to be a scholar today—and who gets to decide?”
I’m late to this because I spent the day writing a grant proposal to a national funding agency that requires applicants to mouth platitudes about equity and inclusive practices that lead to diversity among trainees. The agency wants to give the money away, but they won’t give it to applicants who won’t say the line.
https://imgflip.com/i/9uo3ie
I could forego the grant but then my PhD student wouldn’t have any financial support. Getting grants and training grad students is a required part of my job. So this all becomes a kind of compelled speech. And the answer to the question is, “The grant agencies get to decide.”
Does freedom of speech mean I can publish online how to build a bomb? how to print a ghost gun? There’s no imminent threat, but still I hope: no.
Abby Hoffman’s Steal This Book contained detailed instructions on how to make a pipe bomb, so the answer is Yes. (And no, I didn’t steal the book. I knew Hoffman had already got paid by his publisher. I’d only be ripping off the retail bookseller who was a friend of my father’s.)
Anyone who needs to print a ghost gun already knows someone who can teach him hands on.
Your comment that evolution trumped creationism because of evidence, aside from being true, reminded me of – wait for it – the 19thC German philosopher Hegel. One of my favorite quotes of his is germane to your point: If something is abstract it must be untrue; philosophy is the enemy of the abstract; philosophy returns to the concrete. And evidence is concrete.
Without academic freedom there would be no universal reality truths. Without freedom of speech we would have no means on how to best progress with this knowledge. Ideas are not an island but more of a stream, waterfalls best avoided, ameliorated. As Jerry indicated, questions of morality may have something to say, or not. The idea of common humanity holding say, in women, ethnicity, trans, rights. How f**ked up can we get… Oh, behave!
Academic knowledge is not foolproof as we know, Newton’s gravity meets Einstein’s come to mind AND Einstein’s predicts it own failure! academic freedom at its best. Politics however is full of bad ideas, bad actors, criticism and weeding them out rely on FoS, the failure here to my mind, is the value we place on education but that’s another question.
We have universal truths that bury religion and there was a time religion would bury you and probably full of holes, what a weird saying… Galileo got off lightly.
Nevermind, I agree with our host, truth be told, we need both in unison.
I regard Free Speech as essential. Not as a way of determining ‘truth’ for all the limitations discussed. I consider it essential as a ‘tripwire’ or a ‘canary in a coal mine’.
If Free Speech is under threat then freedom of thought is under threat.
Agreed! The two are inextricably intertwined, for threats to one, historically, have been connected with threats to the other.