Truth, Justice, and the Formation of Publics: University Leadership of Democratic Deliberations about Social Problems

• In Event: Equity-Oriented Public Knowledge Formation: Lessons From Dewey Toward Social and Institutional Transformation

Abstract

While Dewey’s political philosophy and conception of inquiry as a social and democratic process of solving actual problems provide helpful starting points for scholars engaged in equity-oriented collaborative research, numerous theoretical and practical difficulties remain. This essay focuses its investigation on issues related to truth and justice in the formation of publics, and situates the results in the context of a major research program initiative of a leading multi-campus public university. Dewey’s philosophical legacy remains a potent force in reimagining and recreating scholarly inquiry located at the nexus with public deliberation on the crises confronting states and the nation in relation to the economy, education, employment, environment, health, housing, and nutrition.

Dewey argued that truth was neither singular nor absolute, and he regarded it most fundamentally as the social virtue of truthfulness rather than as an epistemic or logical relation to reality. Thus, the “opposite of truth is not error, but lying, the willful misleading of others”. Though Dewey viewed this truth as congruent with the scientific method and the positions warranted by it, a less capacious conception of truth has long shaped universities, which have hewed to narrow notions, ones built on disinterested objectivity and neutrality in the public sphere. Moreover, few would claim truth, under any construal, as a primary characteristic of political debate and public discourse about social problems. Rather, these domains suffer from a profusion of claims deliberately distorted by vested interests committed to power, not truth. Even relatively recent theory on how deliberative democracy legitimizes decisions has focused primarily on reason and procedures in the public sphere, and has been less embracing of epistemic criteria and more full-bodied human communicative capacities.

A related constellation of issues arises in regard to issues of justice. Dewey asserted the need to radicalize liberalism and substantively restructure economic institutions to secure a just democracy, and, more recently, Rawls argued the necessity of a preferential consideration of the needs of the poor and least advantaged for a democratic society to be fair. Yet these philosophic positions are far from accepted among either political elites or everyday people, and universities often expressly forbid public ‘advocacy’ by its researchers. Further, the demands of justice are susceptible to widely variant interpretations in specific cases, and these contested views are articulated with powerful ideological positions that struggle for dominance in every available discursive space. The publics formed through these struggles for truth and justice are dynamic and only loosely cohered communities formed through a range of communicative action, and as such are held together only in “shifting and unstable relationships”. A key question is how equity-oriented collaborative research can establish public learning processes through which “aims, beliefs, aspirations, knowledge – a common understanding…” can ground responses to the crises of the present age.

This essay demarcates the theoretical conundrums of such work, and explicates the practical challenges of establishing sanctioned spaces for this form of social justice research.

Authors

• Ronald David Glass, University of California - Santa Cruz

• Samara S. Foster, University of California - Santa Cruz