In my first post of this series of two I maintained that First-Amendment-style freedom of speech, or something close to it, is necessary for the functioning of a democracy. But free speech is also touted not just as a prerequisite for having democracy, but a necessity for producing the “clash of ideas” that will give rise to the truth. My contention in the first post is that while free speech is politically vital, it cannot by itself lead to finding the truth. For that you need what I call “expanded academic freedom”: the right of individuals (usually academics or scholars) to think, write, and speak whatever they want. For this second endeavor is, unlike free speech, the one that allows people to look at the universe and see what is empirically true. (As I said earlier, the “truth” in my view, and that of the OED, is “something that conforms to fact or reality”, and knowledge, defined as “justified true belief”, is simply widely accepted truth.)
These are the two linchpins for finding and disseminating truth. Academic freedom guarantees the right to investigate reality and find out what is (provisionally) true, while freedom of speech guarantees the right to promulgate what you’ve found out. They work together to find the truth and (also important) make it publicly visible and publicly acknowledged: that is, they work together to produce knowledge.
I have construed academic freedom broadly and not limited it to academics. However, even on campus, academic freedom, just like freedom of speech, has its limits. It is not true that I can teach creationism in an evolution class, or rail about Trump in a class about British history. Academic freedom allows you to stay within the parameters of accepted knowledge and discourse within a field and, if you’re broaching new and heterodox ideas, they must be relevant to the class topic. If you violate this repeatedly, you’re likely to lose your academic job, and can have tenure revoked.
Similarly, academics are free to research anything they want, but that is no guarantee that their research will meet the standards of their field. If I was hired as a geneticist but spend my time studying the behavior of crickets, and not doing a good job of it, then yes, I could be disciplined or let go. You are free to do what you want within the parameters of your job, but that doesn’t guarantee career success.
(I won’t go into the the issue here of whether there is free speech in the classroom, though there clearly isn’t: again, professors can say what they want in class, but will be deep-sixed if it’s not relevant to the subject being taught. And classes also have is compelled speech: students are compelled to answer questions verbally or on exams, and are not free to give any answer they want.)
The separation of free speech and academic freedom is not a clean one. For example, a professor might say something in a didactic capacity that some students might consider harassment, like the professor at Hamline College who got into trouble for showing a picture of Muahmmad as a person, which offended some students. (The prof, who left, was ultimately vindicated.) However, there is a difference between freedom of speech adjudicated by the government, and freedom of thought, research, and teaching that is regulated by a professor’s field of work or department.
While freedom of speech assures professors at public universities of the right to promulgate their ideas, it is academic freedom, not freedom of speech, that allows them the latitude to study what they want and teach not only the gist of a subject, but promote a students’ ability to think. It is academic freedom—the freedom of inquiry—that has:
- Made the American university system a huge draw for students and researchers throughout the world (the US has 80% of the world’s top 50 universities).
- Led to 71% of all Nobel Prizes awarded having gone to Americans (29% of immigrants to America). 55% of the total are in science.
- Prompted many revolutionary discoveries, including polio and other vaccines, gene editing technology, MRI, lasers, and GPS. (note that academic freedom obtains in many other countries, where it’s also promoted discoveries, including the structure of DNA and, in part CRISPR editing).
- Led to the preeminence of American industry in creating scientific innovations, including microchip technology, vaccines for mumps, rubella, chickenpox, pneumonia, meningitis, hepatitis B, and hepatitis A, and various drugs.
While industry doesn’t have “academic freedom” in the sense that universities do, remember that most of the researchers in industry who create these innovations were trained in universities and absorbed their research ethos. But of course companies don’t have freedom of speech in the way that universities do; for example, they have the right to keep the technique behind their discoveries confidential for a time without publishing all the details.
You’ll notice that I have stayed away from humanities fields like literature, art, music, philosophy and law. Why? Because, in my view, while these fields may produce interpretations or analyses of things like novels and paintings, they do not yield empirical truths. Literature, music, and painting, for example, are not “ways of knowing” but “ways of feeling or thinking”. (I discuss this in Chapter 4 of Faith Versus Fact).
This of course does not mean that such fields are without worth or merit; every reader here knows of my admiration for much of the humanities, particularly literature, art, and philosophy. It is simply that it’s not clear what we mean in such fields by the “pursuit of truth”. What, for example is the “truth” in a Jackson Pollack painting or in Joyce’s Ulysses? What is the (empirical) truth in John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice? The latter gives us a provocative way to look at and construct morality, but of course there are a gazillion other suggestions about how to do that. Which one is the “true” path to morality?
Granted, fields like sociology and economics do traffic in truth, but truth that can be ascertained only by using the scientific method construed broadly, which I see as confluent with academic freedom. It is the toolkit of science, which developed under academic freedom, that allows us to reach real truths, and that toolkit includes implements like falsifiability, quantitative methods, pervasive doubt and criticality (a feature of academic freedom itself), replication and quality control, parsimony, collectivity, double-blind testing, and peer review. These are laid out in Chapter 2 of Faith Versus Fact. And in that book I also define “science construed broadly” as any endeavor that uses some of these tools to ascertain what’s true. So, for example, plumbers, car mechanics, and others who solve empirical problems using a version of the scientific method can be considered practicing “science construed broadly”. Steve Gould realized this in his essay Genesis vs. Geology, recounting his testimony in the creationism trial of McLean v. Arkansas:
As I prepared to leave Little Rock last December, I went to my hotel room to gather my belongings and found a man sitting backward on my commode, pulling it apart with a plumber’s wrench. He explained to me that a leak in the room below had caused part of the ceiling to collapse and he was seeking the source of the water. My commode, located just above, was the obvious candidate, but his hypothesis had failed, for my equipment was working perfectly. The plumber then proceeded to give me a fascinating disquisition on how a professional traces the pathways of water through hotel pipes and walls. The account was perfectly logical and mechanistic: it can come only from here, here, or there, flow this way or that way, and end up there, there, or here. I then asked him what he thought of the trial across the street, and he confessed his staunch creationism, including his firm belief in the miracle of Noah’s flood.As a professional, this man never doubted that water has a physical source and a mechanically constrained path of motion — and that he could use the principles of his trade to identify causes. It would be a poor (and unemployed) plumber indeed who suspected that the laws of engineering had been suspended whenever a puddle and cracked plaster bewildered him. Why should we approach the physical history of our earth any differently?
I see I’ve digressed a bit, so let me summarize. What is this sweating professor trying to say? (And remember, this is simply a first draft of some nascent ideas.) My claim is that freedom of speech does not by itself lead to truth via the much-vaunted “clash of ideas”. That clash is necessary to find the truth, but not sufficient. Atop it one must place academic freedom: the freedom of scholars to teach, think, and research what they want.
I also claim that much of the humanities, whatever they claims, is not capable of finding truth, since it doesn’t turn on empirical facts but on critical analyses, competing theories, and competing interpretations. That doesn’t make humanities lesser than science—unless scholars in fields like art, music, and literature claim that they are practicing “another way of knowing.” Some disciplines, notably philosophy are good at of pointing out errors of thinking and guiding rational thinking, but again (in my view) do not and cannot find truths about the universe in which we dwell.
Finally, academic freedom is separate but still intertwined with freedom of speech, but they differ in important ways. The practice of academic freedom does not assume that all ideas are equal or all people are equal in merit: academia is hierarchical and meritocratic, while the First Amendment assumes that all views when expressed are equal and nobody gets an extra say because of their merit. Freedom of speech promotes the emergence of competing truths, while academic freedom emphasizes the ascertainment of the “truest” of these competitors.
Agreed. (I could stop here but my lack of free will intervenes.) The pathway toward truth requires both the (1) free generation of alternative ideas (via free speech) and a (2) methodology that enables adjudication among those ideas—academic freedom (construed broadly) being such a method. This is a valuable insight.
Why am I not surprised that this formula so closely parallels how natural selection works? Freely generated ideas (mutations) provide the variation upon which those ideas are validated or rejected (i.e., selected via the principle of academic freedom), leading to the adaptations that we observe in the kingdom of life (truths).
I’d add a third, potentially overlapping step:
1) Freedom of expression, to generate and share ideas.
2) Academic freedom to explore new ideas.
3) The “scientific method construed broadly”, to use PCC’s highly quotable phrase, to test ideas against reality.
These three together are both necessary and sufficient to give rise to (provisional) truth.
These three together are both necessary and sufficient to give rise to (provisional) empirical truth.
The view that empirical truths are the only truly true truths has been and is still being strongly contested. And note that there appear to be no empirical methods for adjudicating which views of truth are, uh, true; a follower of solus empirismus currently has no empirical justification for that position.
It is certainly the case that our empirical truths are very useful indeed, and so are generally very well thought of. But empiricism is a relative newcomer in the long history of academic enquiry, and IMO should not assert its hegemony as the justification for academic freedom.
How would you know if something is true in the real world without empirical evidence?
What other types of “truth” are you referring to and what practical use do they have?
The one on my mind at the moment is intuitive aesthetic judgements which have practical implications. For example, “that code looks ugly”, even in the absence of any identified problems; then further checking finds a subtle bug.
Another example is proofreading some text, when no errors are found but there is a persistent “nagging” feeling that I’ve missed something. ISTM it’s almost always right.
A plausibly-related everyday example is having something “on the tip of your tongue”, feeling very strongly that (e.g.) there is a more appropriate word for what I’m trying to say but having no clue what that word is. And then finding such a word soon after.
Obviously these are not a controlled experiments, and there could easily be sampling biases and selective memory. But I have sufficient confidence in these particular intuitions that on the occasions when they don’t work out, I notice.
There are also some other, more complex domains with sufficiently reliable intuitions that I usually follow them.
HTH.
Barbara,
But in each of your examples you’ve used an empirical result to validate the intuition.
We’re pretty much in agreement, but I’d make a clear distinction between teaching, on the one hand, and scholarship and research.
Certainly in STEM subjects, particularly at the undergraduate level, there is a general understanding of what a module should contain. Thus if my department allocates me a class on quantum mechanics, I owe it to the students (and to fellow academics who will then build on that module, and to future employers of those students, etc) to teach the accepted basics of mainstream quantum mechanics (not, say, some pet alternative theory that I could explore when I’m not teaching).
Hence, to me, full “academic freedom” applies to scholarship and research, but what is taught in undergraduate modules should be more constrained.
I was just reading this good article by a professor in the Harvard Crimson:
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/1/8/lewis-reaping-what-we-taught/
In my career as a mathematician teaching mostly methods of mathematical physics, I only once had a student complaint of inappropriate speech in class.
I was trying to clarify the real meaning of the uncertainty principle. I told students that verbal explanations of QM written for laymen are often somewhat misleading. They often speak in terms of “measurement”. E.g. if I observe the position of a particle I must use other particles to interact with it which messes up the momentum. But that makes it sound as though the uncertainty principle is a limitation on what we can know of a particle rather than a correct description of the reality of the particle.
To make the point I said it this way: “Suppose, for the sake of argument, that there exists an all knowing God. If so, then God could not tell you the simultaneous position and momentum of an electron. Instead God would tell you that you ask a meaningless question and that you are fundamentally confused about what an electron actually is.”
A student complained to a dean that I had inappropriately pushed religious ideas in a class about mathematical physics. Fortunately the dean thought the student’s complaint was stupid. My goodness, I don’t even believe in the hypothetical omniscient God. I just thought it was a clear way to explain an issue of physics.
In my very limited understanding, the issue of quantum uncertainty being a matter of limited knowledge (epistemic) versus of really real reality (ontological) is still a live issue in the interpretation of QM.
(Personally I find nonlocal-hidden-variable interpretations attractive; but that of course is an aesthetic preference not an empirical one.)
I caution you DON’T think that hidden variable theories dispel the mystery and make sense of anything. Wolfgang Pauli dismissed Bohm’s original hidden variable theory as “unnecessary metaphysics”. I rather agree with Pauli.
Also note that Bohm’s hidden variable theory and some other people’s hidden variable theories only make sense in the context of the nonrelativistic Shrodinger equation. Nobody has ever said how hidden variables could apply to quantum field theory.
“I told students that verbal explanations of QM written for laymen are often somewhat misleading. They often speak in terms of “measurement”. E.g. if I observe the position of a particle I must use other particles to interact with it which messes up the momentum.“
Even Heisenberg contributed to the confusion here.
Heisenberg’s microscope is a thought experiment proposed by Werner Heisenberg that has served as the nucleus of some commonly held ideas about quantum mechanics. In particular, it provides an argument for the uncertainty principle on the basis of the principles of classical optics.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heisenberg%27s_microscope
A small point on whether or not a student has their speech compelled in a strict sense of the word. A student has the freedom of speech to write anything they want in response to my test question. If it is completely off topic, however, they will fail the question (no matter how brilliant their exposition). They are compelled only in the sense that if they desire a passing or good grade, they must adhere to the relevant subject matter presented within the question. For example, a student could correctly answer a question on human evolution, and then append a statement that they think evolutionary theory is garbage and humans were divinely created 6000 years ago. I could not compel this student to have to swear that evolution is true to remain in class, or mark down their ‘evolutionary’ answer if it were correctly presented, simply because they reject it.
If there is a significant penalty for “wrong” speech then the speech is not “free”. That’s what the concept of “free speech” means! Otherwise, one could say that Soviet dissidents did indeed have “free speech”, it’s just that if they desired not to be sent to a gulag then they’d better not exercise it.
Students taking a course do not have “free speech” when engaged with the course, and nor should they.
Very much what I’ve done. They can believe whatever they want. But in answers to questions about evolution they are compelled to invoke the scientific consensus. The are free to add if they wish: “Secular scientists believe that … blah blah blah.”
A discussion of what academic freedom is will quickly morph to one of whether such freedom is under assault. Consider the social “sciences”: prone to interpretations every bit as subjective as the humanities, oftentimes hampered by politicized assumptions and ideological conformity, crippled by a replication crisis, yet still wanting to borrow the prestige of the older empirical sciences. If the public does not want to fund these paths of “investigating reality,” have the practitioners been deprived of academic freedom? I think not, as freedom to inquire is not an entitlement to support. But shut off the flow of federal dollars and then listen to people descry the assault on “freedom.”
Typo? Decry.
Ugh, yes. Thank you. How did you know I was from the Chicago area? That was supposed to be Da Cry!
You’re welcome. And I didn’t know; and in any case I’m not fluent in Chicagoan. What means “Da Cry”?
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” —Marx
Too many academics are more interested in changing the world than in understanding it.
Last paragraph: I would contend that the First Amendment does NOT imply that all ideas are equal (they obviously are not), but rather that nobody can be trusted to determine the relative merit of ideas in a fair or equitable manner, so we must protect the freedom of expression as though all ideas are equal. It is actually neutral on any question of relative merit. In the same sense, a defendant may be guilty of a crime, but we must ASSUME his innocence until the evidence proves otherwise.
I explained this in the first post of this series and what we meant by “equal”. That in fact is not my interpretation, but that of many scholars, including Robert Post’s video I linked to in piece #1. Perhaps I didn’t explain it well, but I suggest you watch at least the first part of his engaging lecture.
And doesn’t “neutral on any question of relative merit” really mean “equal”?
The rigorous testing of models about how the world works, and rejection of models that fail this testing, appears to be the hallmark of science. This seems to be what we really mean when we talk about “rigor” in science.
Sometimes, freedom of speech can unfortunately operate as a shield that people use to avoid testing. For example, say you challenge a person on a particular pet explanation, and rather than providing evidence they bristle and say something along the lines of “well, that’s my opinion and I’m entitled to that”. As if an opinion is identical to one’s right to vote, in that every opinion should be weighted equally epistemically.
Such a person clearly accepts free speech, but they have clearly not bought into the concept of testing their views of the world, and may even regard questioning of their opinions as “offensive”.
So I agree with Jerry….free speech is certainly not sufficient to arrive at truth.
I’m reminded of the quote (source escapes me); we are entitled to our own opinions but we are not entitled to our own facts. It surprises me sometimes when people seem unable to grasp that.
But how could a person be dis-entitled to his own (wrong) facts? I understand that the construction of the saying tries for parallelism as a nice rhetorical device, but the fact is that a person is entitled to his own facts. He is free to close his ears when you try to correct him, and free to use those wrong facts in his next utterance. That’s why arguing with closed-minded people is so frustrating. (“Come to bed, Dear. It’s 3 a.m.” “I can’t. Someone is wrong on the Internet.”)
The only exceptions come when the person submits his performance to grading for epistemological correctness, as when he enrols (voluntarily) in an academic course. Then he isn’t entitled to say something like, “infrared absorption by atmospheric carbon dioxide is saturated”, at least not in class for credit, because that just isn’t true.
Love the Randall Munroe quote! Back in the day, in my HS English classes, what I taught was, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, no matter how stupid.” No doubt the current HS administration would find fault, especially with the ‘his’.
We should add the concept of responsibilities along with entitlements.
As in “you are entitled to opinions, but you have a responsibility to subject them to testing.”
What percentage of the population (US) do you think would agree with this?
“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”
– Daniel Patrick Moynihan, based on an earlier quote by James R. Schlesinger
I recall having a discussion with a “social justice warrior” type some years ago. When I pointed out the evidence contradicting her position (I forget what we were discussing), her response was telling. She said “I don’t care if what you say is true or not, I believe what I want to believe”.
Yes, I have had this experience so often that I no longer engage in such discussion, except on this website.
Your characterisation of philosophy as a humanity is wrong. Philosophy is not the study of any human activity, or the natural world. It is a tool, like maths, but in this case a tool for examining truth, or claims to truth.
Sorry, but I took the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as the indicator of which disciplines were in the humanities, and, sure enough, they include philosophy, as do several other sites (see https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/scope-of-humanities).
I find it rather rude of you to say that I am flat-out wrong. And, at any rate, I am confident that philosophy does not itself produce truth, which, after all, was my point.
Civility, please. I am not the only person who disagrees with you.
FWIW (maybe nothing), one of the general graduation requirements for B.A. or B.S. degree in the catalogue under which I entered the College of William & Mary in the mid 60’s offered a choice of six semester hours of math OR six hours of philosophy. Now that was a liberal arts college!
Academic freedom and freedom of speech are both important, and debating which is “more” important seems contrived (but covered under both!).
I am concerned if a university has a lop-sided political, scientific, or educational view, and is unable to accommodate different views. There is a too-strong tendency to follow the herd.
Note that I said which was more important IN FINDING THE TRUTH, and I stand by what I said.
Interesting analysis ! Where would you place mathematics in this ?
Math does not claim to discover any empirical truths or even study reality. Yet I think mathematicians would object to being lumped in with humanities…
Mathematics can be both, at least in universities where there are serious mathematics/logic courses that are run jointly by science and philosophy departments and can be taken towards a BA or BS. It is more of a lumper than a splitter 🙂.
Isn’t math a kind of descriptive language, albeit a very rigorous one? If so, perhaps it could be considered loosely analogous to linguistics.
Seems like math can be used to describe reality and make predictions. Would seem to be difficult to get rockets into space and back without a few equations….
Certainly: math can help find what is real in the universe, but in my view, and that of many others, the “realities” of math are simply the results of applying a number of assumptions to reach a mathematical conclusion. Those conclusions do not describe empirical realities (note that there is a controversy about this). I discuss the “empirical reality” of math in Faith Versus Fact.
Thank you for the note Jerry!
I don’t know if you’re seen this article – “Veritas Betrayed: Wake Up, Stand Up; Harvard Has Lost the Primary Truth-Seeking Purpose of a University” – but it’s very good and perhaps relevant to your efforts. (The author, a longtime Harvard prof, is incidentally pretty scathing about Harvard)
Thank you for the link, Brooke. This story does explain the data. Was not previously aware of it.
An interesting piece – thanks!
Brave to mention both “microchip technology” and “vaccines” next to each other in the same sentence! 😉