Critical Review Volume 19 Issue 1.doc - Entitled to an Opinion

Critical Review, Volume 19, Issue 1, January 2007 Jeffrey Friedman
Ignorance as a Starting Point: From Modest Epistemology to Realistic
Political Theory Introduction
The volume number is a lagging indicator,1 but Critical Review was founded
20 years ago. As we enter our third decade, I am pleased to report that
Routledge, storied publisher of the two most important influences on
Critical Review - Austrian philosopher Karl Popper and Austrian economist
F. A. Hayek - will now be marketing the journal, affording scholars and
students around the world searchable electronic access to two decades of
"content." This seems, then, to be an appropriate time for a stocktaking of
that content, one that might also serve as an introduction to the journal
for new readers.
When I started Critical Review I was animated, in part, by a dim
recognition that Hayek and Popper shared more than Viennese origins. While
Popper was a social democrat and Hayek was a classical liberal, both of
them were profound theorists of the causes and consequences of human
ignorance of a complex world.
Popper's own starting point was our ignorance of the natural world, and the
resulting errors in our scientific theories. But as Hayek recognized,
ignorance is an even more appropriate starting point when it comes to the
study of human behavior. For one thing, human behavior is (sometimes)
governed by human minds, and the human mind's attempts to understand the
world - whether natural or social - are relatively unpredictable (e.g.,
Hayek 1952; Popper [1957] 1991). On top of that, Hayek argued, the social
scientist must allow for endless variations in personal knowledge - and in
people's interpretations of what they think they know.
Hayek emphasized interpersonal differences in knowledge and interpretation
because those are what he saw in economic life: different consumers with
knowledge of what they think they each need; entrepreneurs with varying
"local" knowledge of what they think will suit consumers' felt needs.
Hayek's perspective, especially when married to a Popperian emphasis on the
conjectural nature of knowledge, sculpts a Homo economicus - and a Homo
politicus, I think - that have little in common with the orthodox
neoclassical model of the all-knowing, isolated rational chooser.
If knowledge is interpersonally variable then we must allow, at the very
least, for interpersonal forms of ignorance, too: one person may not know
what another knows. And if the world is complicated enough, or simply vast
enough, that people can be ignorant of some of its aspects, surely it is
complex enough or vast enough that they can also be mistaken about parts of
it. If knowledge is conjectural, however, experimentation (both scientific
and economic) may discover truths that correct people's mistakes. Thus,
markets and science may be imperfect processes of ignorance alleviation
through error correction. Finally, if experiments are tests of
interpretations, then people may not only be knowledgeable, ignorant, or
mistaken about discrete facts or "data," but about theories of how facts
cause and affect each other - and, therefore, about how best to draw
conceptual lines around "the" facts; and about which facts are important to
know.
As for Homo economicus's social isolation: theories and interpretations
originate in human minds, but most people are relatively passive consumers
of theories and interpretations developed by other people. My adoption of
someone else's theory, while perhaps a random matter of which theories I
happen to encounter and find initially persuasive, is, on the other hand,
not completely unpredictable (at least if I am a member of a group to which
the law of large numbers can be applied). The heuristics that I use to
assess persuasiveness must either be genetically wired or culturally
imbibed. And my theoretical views must be constrained not only by the
heuristics that I use to assess persuasiveness, but by the fact that I live
in a specific place and time, where some theories are readily available to
me and others - having been forgotten, unpublicized, discredited, or not
yet invented - are not. It would seem, then, that a logical culmination of
the Hayek-Popper view is to place great weight on the importance, the
potential mistakenness, and the interpersonal transmission of theories:
i.e., on culture. The vagaries of culture add yet another layer of
complexity to social science, above and beyond the complexity facing the
natural scientist.
Naturally and culturally acquired ideas and interpretations, each of them
as fallible as the people who - starting out ignorant - need to acquire
them if they are to try to understand a complex world: this is standard
post-Renaissance epistemology. Yet even as the humanities have left
conventional epistemology behind, confusing epistemic sophistication with
"postmodern" skepticism,2 the social sciences have gone in the opposite
direction, essentially reviving Plato by assuming, implicitly (few would be
so foolish as to believe it explicitly), that people have godlike knowledge
of everything they need to know - having forgotten, as it were, only what
it is "rational" for them to ignore. The Cartesian cogito is no triumph for
these rational-choice masters of the universe, who not only know that they
exist, but who know all the other things that are useful to know, excluding
only the "information" whose benefits (they somehow know) would not justify
the costs of learning it.
Descartes, by contrast, thought that all claims to knowledge should be
questioned, because naturally and culturally perceived truths can be
illusory. Descartes led to Hume, thence to Kant and Popper. Kant and Popper
led to Hayek (Gray 1984; Clouatre 1987). Not surprisingly, then, Popper and
Hayek were both keenly interested in ignorance and error, and in biological
and scientific (and, in Hayek's case, economic) evolutionary processes by
which ignorance can be overcome, errors corrected, and knowledge acquired.3
In hindsight, the papers published in our early volumes seem to have
succeeded rather well in asking about the implications of the Popper-Hayek
presumption of ignorance.4 Good answers, however, were not immediately
forthcoming. It turned out that grasping the implications of ignorance
required a great deal of ground clearing (an effort that continues).5 And
as the ground cleared, it became apparent that something was missing: a
bridge between, on the one hand, Popper's ignorance-centric philosophy of
science and Hayek's ignorance-centric economics; and, on the other hand,
politics. Political Ignorance and Modern Democracy
We found the bridge, logically enough, in political science, where "public
ignorance" had long been the premier finding in the study of public
opinion. A robust literature, tracing its lineage to Philip E. Converse's
"The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics" - which Critical Review
brought back into print last year (Converse [1964] 2006) - quietly kept
alive subversive questions about the political competence of the public
that had been asked by Walter Lippmann ([1922] 1949) and by Joseph
Schumpeter (1950) - yet another Austrian economist.
The main lines of public-opinion research were first reviewed in these
pages in 1998, and have been explored since then by a growing number of
eminent researchers.6 In the past decade, Critical Review has also
published much work by younger scholars7 who share a desire to explore the
causes, consequences, and normative implications of public ignorance by
building upon, but going beyond, the established lines of research. The
current issue continues both of these trends, with pointed discussions of
recent developments in the literature by distinguished public-opinion
scholars Robert S. Erikson and Benjamin I. Page; and with inaugural
publications by Sebastian Benthall, Stephen Miller, and Christopher
Wisniewski, along with a debate over Samuel DeCanio's own inaugural
publications, which appeared herein previously. This issue of the journal
is therefore a good benchmark of the progress we have made, and of at least
the "known unknowns" that remain to be explored.
Miller shows that "liberal" and "conservative" members of the general
public share strikingly similar suspicions about employers, businesses, and
profits - affirming that, as Converse pointed out, political observers may
attribute a spurious logic to public opinion by projecting onto the public
ideological differences that are the province of a highly politicized few.
Page and Erikson, on the other hand, argue that public opinion is more
logical, if not ideological, than it may seem.
Wisniewski's paper challenges the ability of academic "cultural studies" to
grasp the realities of political culture; his argument is contested by
noted cultural-studies scholar Mark Fenster. And lest anyone interpret
Conversean research to commend the rule of experts, Benthall, reviewing
Philip E. Tetlock's devastating research into (the absence of) social-
scientific expertise (Tetlock 2005), points out that mere inertia, in the
form of computer extrapolations of present conditions, predicts the future
better than does even the most open-minded group of "experts" (cf. Taleb
2005). In another article, however, economist Bryan Caplan disputes whether
Tetlock's findings are as devastating as they appear. The question of so-
called experts' expertise is fast becoming a favorite in these pages.
Future issues will feature debates on social-psychology literature that,
inter alia, seems to confirm that experts succumb to a "spiral of
conviction." such that they compensate, with dogmatism, for their
relatively high levels of knowledge (Friedman 2006a, x-xiv and Appendix). The Reign of Elites
The Wisniewski-Fenster debate, like that between DeCanio and Daniel
Carpenter, Benjamin Ginsberg, and Martin Shefter, suggests that vast
research frontiers can be opened by treating ignorance as a starting point
in the study of politics. The