Persuasion and Intellectual Autonomy

McKenna, Robin (2021) Persuasion and Intellectual Autonomy. In: Epistemic Autonomy. Routledge, pp. 113-131. ISBN 9780367433345

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Summary

In her 2011 paper “Democracy, Public Policy, and Lay Assessments of Scientific Testimony” Elizabeth Anderson identifies a tension between the requirements of responsible public policy making and democratic legitimacy. The tension, put briefly, is that responsible public policy making should be based on the best available scientific research, but for it to be democratically legitimate there must also be broad public acceptance of whatever policies are put in place. In this chapter, I discuss this tension, with a strong focus on the issue of climate change. My aims are twofold. First, I argue that the tension is harder to resolve than Anderson supposes because some ways of securing acceptance for science-based policies will themselves be democratically illegitimate. Second, I take a closer look at the role intellectual autonomy plays in the tension. Many think that what I call “science marketing” methods for securing broad(er) acceptance of scientific claims are illegitimate because they infringe on our intellectual autonomy. I argue that it is less clear that this is true than many suppose. This is because, put roughly, judicious use of targeted science marketing methods need not stop us from developing the ability to think about scientific issues for ourselves. In fact, they may even aid us in developing this ability. While this doesn’t quite resolve the tension identified by Anderson, it does some of the necessary groundwork for resolving it. Beckman thinks political marketing interferes with autonomous deliberation and intellectual autonomy precisely because it involves a combination of deception, misinformation, framing, omission of crucial information, agenda-setting, priming, selective provision of information, and distortion of facts. The “political marketer” employs methods designed to set political agendas, to frame issues in advantageous ways, to construct and reinforce desired political attitudes and create desired habits of political information processing. While genuine open-mindedness requires more than behaving in an open-minded way, it might be argued that behaving in an open-minded way can help the peoples become genuinely open-minded. Beckman equates the claim that political marketing interferes with the autonomous deliberation with the claim that it interferes with the intellectual autonomy. Intellectual autonomy may be a good thing, but so is having true beliefs, and – especially given the empirical work on the human psychology.

Item Type:	Chapter
Uncontrolled Keywords:	4407 Policy and Administration, 4408 Political Science, 50 Philosophy and Religious Studies, 44 Human Society
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	23 Oct 2020 09:21
Last Modified:	25 May 2025 14:35
DOI:	10.4324/9781003003465-9
Related Websites:	Publisher
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3104921