Public Reason and Public Policy: the Need for Epistemic Realism in Political Argument
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the concept of public reason, the regime of principles and rules under which political argument in a liberal-democratic society should be conducted. It examines the two most prominent accounts of public reason: John Rawls’, which derives rules of public reason from a presumed duty of mutual respect, and Jurgen Habermas’, which begins with the premise that communication is a necessary condition for knowledge. It then answers subjectivist objections to public reason, and concludes that public reason is ultimately defined and upheld by a shared commitment to epistemic realism: the understanding that we inhabit a shared world made up of mind-independent objects that can be known by all members of that shared world. The paper then examines the Canadian citizenry’s willingness and capacity to engage in public reason and the government’s ability to facilitate it, and concludes that in the absence of political will or a pre-existing culture of public reason, the burden of promoting and sustaining it will fall to organized and motivated sub-sectors of civil society. Keywords: Public Reason, Public Policy, Rawls, Habermas, Political Knowledge, Civil Society
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.030 | 0.040 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.078 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.028 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".