Reason is a great naturalizer, and public reason naturalizes much that seems arbitrary in politics. Once we are persuaded of the reasonableness of an argument or action, it becomes the most natural thing in the world to accept it: of course, this is how things are; of course this is how things should be. To make the contingency of reason visible, then, we must look as if through the eyes of visitors from other worlds, much like pre-colonial ethnographers who decoded the locally contingent and culturally specific assumptions that held together the complete, self-reinforcing logics of alien belief systems.

sheila jasanoff

Jasanoff, S. (2012). Science and public reason. Routledge.