Roundtable on Epistemic Democracy and Its Critics

Public Reason (Forthcoming)

If political decision-making aims at getting a particular result, like identifying just laws or policies that truly promote the common good, then political institutions can also be evaluated in terms of how often they achieve these results. Epistemic defenses of democracy argue that democracies have the upper hand when it comes to truth, identifying the laws and policies that are truly just or conducive to the common good. A number of epistemic democrats claim that democracies have this beneficial connection to truth because of the type of deliberative environment created by democratic political institutions. Democratic political cultures make it easier to exchange and give reasons, ultimately improving the justification that citizens have for their political beliefs. With this improved justification comes a better chance at truth, or so the story goes. In this paper, I show that attempts to forge a connection between justification and truth in epistemology have encountered numerous difficulties, making the case that this causes trouble for deliberative epistemic defenses of democracy as well. If there is no well-defined connection between truth and justification, then increasing the justification that citizens have for their beliefs may not also increase the likelihood that those beliefs are true, revealing a serious flaw in charting a connection between political justification and political truth.

Recent accounts of epistemic democracy aim to show that in some qualified sense, democratic institutions have a tendency to produce reasonable outcomes. Epistemic democrats aim to offer such accounts without presupposing any narrow, controversial view of what the outcomes of democratic procedures should be, much as a good justification of a particular scientific research design does not presuppose the hypothesis that the research aims to test. The article considers whether this aim is achievable. It asks, in particular, whether accounts of epistemic democracy can be reconciled with the commonly held view that disagreement about which laws and policies should be enacted is a fundamental, permanent feature of democratic politics and imposes constraints on how we justify democratic procedures.

forthcoming in N. J. Pedersen, P. Graham, M. Fricker, D. Henderson, and J. Wyatt (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Social Epistemology, Routledge.

Episteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology, 2008

Samantha Besson and José Luis Martí (eds) Deliberative Democracy and Its Discontents (Ashgate), 2006

Deliberative democracy, whatever it exactly means, has become one of the most promising ideals in democratic theory, even when, as one could expect, there is not a single, privileged account of such ideal. Instead, we can say that several views have been developed under a common umbrella, being thus deliberative democracy what James Bohman qualifies as "a family of views according to which the public deliberation of free and equal citizens is the core of legitimate political decision making and self-government" (Bohman, 1998, 401). The epistemic conception (EC) of DD emphasizes particularly one of the reasons that justify the whole ideal, a justification in terms of the epistemic worth of the decisions made by democratic deliberative procedures, and so determines some of the views under such a family (Cohen

Critical Review, 2017

Contrary to what some critics of epistemic democracy claim, the association between democracy and truth does not necessarily make the former inhospitable to conflict, contestation, and pluralism. With the help of John Stuart Mill and William James, truth can be interpreted so as to make it compatible with a democratic politics that appreciates conflict and dissent. In some (but not all) circumstances, truth claims are politically relevant and should become the object of democratic deliberation. When political debate works as a site of knowledge (re)production, truth claims are unavoidable in politics. When this fortuitous circumstance obtains, conceiving of democracy in epistemic terms is a valid theoretical enterprise.

Philosophy Compass, 2023

Many political philosophers have held that democracy has epistemic benefits. Most commonly, this case is made by arguing that democracies are better able to track the truth than other political arrangements. Truth, however, is not the only epistemic good that is politically valuable. A number of other epistemic goods - goods including evidence, intellectual virtue, epistemic justice, and empathetic understanding - can also have political value, and in ways that go beyond the value of truth. In this paper, I will survey those who have argued that democracy can be valuable because of these other epistemic benefits, considering (1) the ways in which these epistemic goods can be of political value and (2) the challenges that democracies face in producing them.

Anali Hrvatskog politiloškog društva, 2016

Thomas Christiano claims that one of the fundamental challenges democracy is faced with is the appropriate division of epistemic labor between citizens and experts. In this article I try to present and analyze Christiano's solution from the perspective of social epistemology while utilizing the concepts and tools provided by this discipline. Despite fundamentally agreeing with his position, I attempt to propose a certain addition which might enrich this solution with additional epistemic and political responsibility. In the first part, I briefly elaborate on the relevance of social epistemology in discussions regarding the epistemic justification of deliberative democracy. In the second part, I contextualize Christiano's view within discourses regarding social epistemology and identify his approach as reliability democracy due to his belief that truth-sensitive decision-making processes are ensured through the usage of reliable mechanisms (which allow for expertise to generate the epistemically best decisions possible). In the third part I attempt to provide arguments that support further elaboration of Christiano's proposals in the direction of ensuring additional epistemic and democratic quality of decisions.

Revista Panorama , 2013

Deliberative democracy is a normative ideal of democracy. This model is a proposal for the regeneration of the legitimacy of our institutions, but also a mechanism for decision making. It is based on two different dimensions: a procedural dimension where the model demands the inclusion and an equal capacity to influence the final decision of all those affected (Cohen, 1989; Bohman, 1996; Habermas, 1992 ...) and a substantive dimension where the political decisions are made through a collective procedure of argumentation and public discussion. If these conditions are recognized, the decisions will be more rational and better decisions. This paper has two aims. First I will present the key elements of this epistemic conception of political legitimacy. Second I will show the challenges it faces. On a one hand, the counterfactual of many of its postulates and on the other, the obvious problems of bias consensualist of this model.