What would Socrates do about science?

Lessons about politicization from the book Open Socrates

It’s been a tragic time for public health officials in the wake of a shooting at the CDC by a gunman who was convinced that the COVID mRNA vaccines caused him harm and that it was covered up by the government. In terms of processing this, I can’t do any better than this pitch-perfect piece and video by Katelyn Jetelina, Megan Ranney, and Kristen Panthagani.

The incident just underlines how broken our ability to communicate about science has become. While plenty of people have and will continue to litigate the past and assign blame, a lot of folks have begun talking more proactively about how to change. This recent piece by Jess Steier on what happened when she talked and listened with RFK followers is a great example.

By coincidence, I met during this time Agnes Callard who is a philosopher at the University of Chicago. She has been the subject of big profiles in the New Yorker and the Guardian. Callard has been making a forceful case that most lives are unexamined and only getting more so.

Callard’s recent book, Open Socrates, makes “the case for a philosophical life.” She begins the book by saying that a true Socratic analysis of life would require that most of the questions we ask ourselves about meaning and purpose are “untimely” because we’ve usually already started doing whatever it is that we’re questioning.

Callard goes to great lengths to differentiate Socratic argument from debate. In true Socratic argument, the goal of an argument with a questioning interlocutor is solely to determine the truth. Therefore, it is just as useful to be proven wrong as it is to prove the questioner wrong and vice versa. By contrast, a debate is an interaction that has a winner and a loser, and this interaction is by definition not a pursuit of the truth, because the truth can “lose.” In a Socratic argument, only the truth can win.

Those of us who say we are looking for the truth therefore have to learn to be happy when we are proven wrong. My inbox would suggest this is rarely the case.

In a chapter on politics, which Socrates claimed to be excellent at doing, Callard says that Socrates would say about politicization that it is “the displacement of a disagreement from the context of argumentation into a zero-sum context where if one party wins, the other loses. It converts a question - which of two positions is correct - into a competition between the interests of the two parties.” Socrates’ definition of politicization therefore has nothing to do with political parties. It has to do with the movement of a quest for truth to a pursuit of persuasion. In a world where so many people are accusing people they disagree with as politicizing the topic of interest, Socrates would say anyone who has made a question of truth into a contest has politicized that question.

Socrates even contemplated the extent to which this point would cross over into medicine. In a Socratic dialogue with the orator, Georgias, the orator says about medicine:

Many a time I’ve gone with my brother or with other doctors to call on some sick person who refuses to take his medicine or allow the doctor to perform surgery or cauterization on him. And when the doctor failed to persuade him, I succeeded, by means of no other craft than oratory. And I maintain too that if an orator and a doctor came to any city anywhere you like and had to compete in speaking in the assembly or some other gathering over which of them should be appointed doctor, the doctor wouldn’t make any showing at all, but the one who had the ability to speak would be appointed, if he so wished. And if he were to compete with any other craftsman whatever, the orator more than anyone else would persuade them that they should appoint him, for there isn’t anything that the orator couldn’t speak more persuasively about to a gathering than could any other craftsman whatever. That’s how great the accomplishment of this craft is, and the sort of accomplishment it is!

Thus, the idea that an expert in medicine could be overwhelmed by a persuasive orator was around in 380 B.C.

“How do you persuade someone of what neither of you knows?” Callard asks. “You give them the experience of knowing, without the reality.” Namely, you flatter them. Socrates says that if orators are skilled at flattery, they are not free. “Someone constrained to flatter his audience is not at liberty to speak the truth,” says Callard. “Someone bent on persuasion has to tell people what, in some sense, they want to hear.”

Science has been failing to realize the Socratic ideal for about as long as it has existed. The quest for recognition, the battles to prove one’s own theory correct, the inability to acknowledge when findings need to be corrected or retracted - these are as old as science itself. None of these features reflect parties who are happy to be proven wrong. Science is done by competitive humans who have a natural human inclination to win. The elusiveness of true Socratic argument and not debate predates mRNA vaccines by centuries.

The good news is that if was can achieve Socratic argument, the truth can never lose. If we want the truth to always win, we have to figure out how to follow this ideal. It’s easier said than done. Both parties in any current debate probably think they are the ones who are earnestly seeking the truth, and Socrates would say that if you believe that, you’ve now entered into a contest with the other party as to who is doing the actual job of seeking the truth which has taken you out of a Socratic argument and back into a debate.

These are high ideals, perhaps hopelessly out of reach. But Agnes’ book made me think about things I hadn’t thought about before, so I’m grateful.

In the meantime, let’s follow Katelyn, Megan, and Kristen’s advice and look after each other in this challenging time for us all. Here’s the audio and video of their discussion:

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