The value of being Intellectually Modest in public policy: taking a...

Epistemology is a branch in philosophy that deals with such questions of knowledge as:
- What are the limitations of our knowledge?
- What is the proper way to understand the world?
- What is the nature of our knowledge?

The epistemologically or intellectually modest person is someone who is aware that he knows just how little he knows. It was well expressed by Socrates when he (paradoxically) said:

“All I know is that I know nothing”.

I believe that this attitude is extremely important to hold in the sphere of the social sciences (sociology, politics, economics etc). A political philosophy that holds this attitude is Libertarianism.

Libertarianism and epistemological modesty
What has attracted me most to libertarianism is that libertarians in general seem to hold an epistemologically modest attitude.

Friedrich von Hayek has for example warned us in ‘The Pretense of Knowledge’ (1974) of believing that we know more than we actually do. That when policy makers believe that they are wise enough to understand the world to the extent that they can plan society, their policies to improve the social order are doing more harm than good.

According to Hayek, every individual knows just a fraction of what is collectively known. In other words, knowledge is decentralized. What leads to the best welfare of a person is best known by that individual, so we should let him make his own decisions on how to plan his life.

Why epistemological modesty is important
If we are not epistemologically modest and falsely believe that we understand the social forces and how they should be directed to improve the social order, we may create unintended consequences.

One example of unintended consequences is the governments’ meddling with Libya’s internal affairs. Many politicians believed that they understood the social forces in Libya, and that they could simply oust Gaddafi to make way for democracy and political freedom. The consequence is that this once relatively peaceful country has been turned into a warzone with no positive perspectives in sight. The NATO-led war campaign in 2011 has perished many people’s lives, has created many wounded, has ignited a refugee crisis of millions of people who are trying to find refuge in other countries, and has led to circumstances under which ISIS could take control of huge parts of Libya. Terrorism in the area has become more widespread. Those who believed that they could intervene with Libya’s internal affairs in order to make it a better place have been proven dead wrong!

An epistemologically modest person begins with his own awareness of his ignorance from where he grows his wisdom. He is therefore less likely to act as a ‘social engineer’ and to cause unintended consequences. The social engineer should be careful that his next policies to end the unintended consequences, which were created by his previous policies in the first place, would create more unintended consequences. It could be the beginning of an ugly downward spiraling out-of-control policy-making disaster.

In case of policy-making, policies should be designed in such a way that they take account of our ignorance. The policy-maker that takes our ignorance into account is the piecemeal engineer.

The piecemeal engineer
Karl Popper makes an interesting case for the piecemeal engineer in The Poverty of Historicism (1936). The piecemeal engineer tries to achieve improvements to the social order through small adjustments and re-adjustments. Making small adjustments allow the piecemeal engineer to identify the effects of his adjustments so that results expected can be compared with the results achieved. Part of the piecemeal engineering process is that errors are not avoided, but rather documented and learned from. This makes the piecemeal engineering process highly compatible with what Popper calls ‘critical rationalism’, an intellectual attitude that all theories should be rationally criticized and subjected to tests as our intellect is extremely fallible. The intellectual, according to Popper, should hence train himself to criticize theories instead of desiring to prove them.