Political epistemology is a newly flourishing area of philosophy, but there is no comprehensive overview to this burgeoning field. This chapter maps out the terrain of political epistemology, highlights some of the key questions and topics of this field, draws connections across seemingly disparate areas of work, and briefly situates this field within its historical and contemporary contexts.

This dissertation puts American philosophers and social reformers, Jane Addams (1860-1935) and John Dewey (1859-1952), in conversation with contemporary social and political philosopher, Iris Marion Young (1949-2006), to argue that an account of deliberative equality must make conceptual space to name the problem of ‘communicatively structured deliberative inequality’. I argue that in order for participatory democracy theory to imagine and construct genuinely inclusive deliberative spaces, it must be grounded in a relational ontology and pragmatist feminist social epistemology. The literature has (...) largely developed deliberative inequality in terms of access (e.g., participation costs) and ‘impoverished capacities’ for political participation (e.g., political-process illiteracy; public debate skills). This literature has failed to appreciate the communicative dimensions of deliberative inequality. Individuals who occupy historically stigmatized social groups may participate at a communicatively structured disadvantage in participatory forums not because of their own impoverished capacities, but because of the identity-prejudiced stereotypes of their interlocutors. Chapter 1 situates Young’s communicative democracy in contemporary deliberative democracy literature and shows the inadequacies of liberal individualism, assumed by much of traditional deliberative theory, for naming and addressing the problem of communicatively structured deliberative inequality. Chapter 2 draws on literature in feminist and resistance epistemologies as well as the social identity approach within contemporary social psychology theory to flesh out the problem of communicatively structured deliberative inequality. Here, I provide a relational ontology of prejudice and examine it’s impact on one’s epistemic and deliberative standing. Chapter 3 draws on the work of Addams and Dewey to develop a relational ontology of political agency as well as the pragmatist feminist epistemology of communicative democracy. Addams and Dewey, like Young, saw exclusion as a serious social and political problem, and they looked to democratic norms and practices as a resource for social justice. Thus, Chapter 4 looks to Addams and Dewey’s writings and Addams’s leadership at Hull House as a resource for communicative democracy, and more particularly, for addressing deliberative inequality and imagining and constructing inclusive deliberative spaces in light of the problem of communicatively structured deliberative inequality. (shrink)

There are various ways to reach a group decision on a factual yes–no question. One way is to vote and decide what the majority votes for. This procedure receives some epistemological support from the Condorcet Jury Theorem. Alternatively, the group members may prefer to deliberate and will eventually reach a decision that everybody endorses—a consensus. While the latter procedure has the advantage that it makes everybody happy, it has the disadvantage that it is difficult to implement, especially for larger groups. (...) Besides, the resulting consensus may be far away from the truth. And so we ask: Is deliberation truth-conducive in the sense that majority voting is? To address this question, we construct a highly idealized model of a particular deliberation process, inspired by the movie Twelve Angry Men, and show that the answer is ‘yes’. Deliberation procedures can be truth-conducive just as the voting procedure is. We then explore, again on the basis of our model and using agent-based simulations, under which conditions it is better epistemically to deliberate than to vote. Our analysis shows that there are contexts in which deliberation is epistemically preferable and we will provide reasons for why this is so. (shrink)

La tesis central de este trabajo es que la tradicional tensión entre substancia y procedimiento socava las estabilidad de la justificación de la concepción liberal más extendida de la legitimidad (la Democracia Deliberativa). Dicha concepciones enfrentan problemas serios a la hora de articular de manera consistente dos dimensiones que parecen ir naturalmente asociadas a la idea de legitimidad: la dimensión procedimental, vinculada a la equidad del procedimiento, y la dimensión epistémica, asociada a la corrección de los resultados. En este trabajo (...) sostengo que a) esa tensión surge de la adopción de una concepción epistemológica social de tipo "veritativo-consecuencialista; b) es posible manejar dicha tensión mediante el remplazo de la epistemología subyacente por una concepción epistemológica social de tipo procedimentalista de orientación pragmatista y c) dicha operación orienta el diseño institucional en una dirección experimentalista. (shrink)

Ovaj je zbornik nastao kao rezultat istraživanja provedenog unutar istoimenoga znanstveno-istraživačkoga projekta na kojemu su urednici istovremeno bili i glavni istraživači, a ostali autori članovi istraživačke skupine. Kao svjedoci različitih vrsta otklona od prevladavajućeg, uobičajenoga, normalnoga, pozitivnog ili ponašanja koje se karakterizira kao asocijalno, zapitali smo se – što postojeće čini normom, treba li odstupanje od norme nužno smatrati devijacijom i kakvi su poželjni društveni odgovori na odstupanja od normi. Često se smatra ispravnim upravo ono što je prevladavajuće, a ono (...) što predstavlja otklon označava se kao devijacija u negativnome značenju onoga što nije ispravno, nije posve ispravno, ili čak onoga što treba sankcionirati. Naš je početni stav bio da ono što prevladava ne smije biti neupitna norma, kao što ni ono što je otklon nije po automatizmu devijacija. Međutim, ne smatramo ni da prevladavajuću normu, samom tom činjenicom što je prevladavajuća, nužno treba kritizirati te da je svaki otklon po sebi poželjan. Cilj našeg istraživanja bio je istražiti različite oblike deficita i devijacijau u domeni formiranja vjerovanja individualnih, grupnih, kolektivnih i institucijskih epistemičkih aktera (socijalna epistemologija) i u domeni društvenog i institucijskoga djelovanja (filozofija politike i filozofija psihijatrije). Nastavno na to, pokušali smo identificirati vrijednosti postojećih normi, koliko odgovaraju poželjnim vrijednostima te koji su poželjni društveni odgovori na otklone od normi. (shrink)

The crucial problem in the philosophy of psychiatry is to determine under which conditions certain behaviors, mental states, and personality traits should be regarded as symptoms of mental illnesses. Participants in the debate can be placed on a continuum of positions. On the one side of the continuum, there are naturalists who maintain that the concept of mental illness can be explained by relying on the conceptual apparatus of the natural sciences, such as biology and neuroscience. On the other side (...) of the continuum, there are normativists who maintain that the appropriate characterization of the concept of mental illness cannot avoid reference to epistemic, moral and other social values. Although, this article is primarily an introduction to the debate, we stress the importance of the normativist positions. (shrink)

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) are online tools designed to help citizens decide how to vote. They typically offer their users a representation of what is at stake in an election by matching user preferences on issues with those of parties or candidates. While the use of VAAs has boomed in recent years in both established and new democracies, this new phenomenon in the electoral landscape has received little attention from political theorists. The current academic debate is focused on epistemic aspects (...) of the question how a VAA can adequately represent electoral politics. We argue that conceptual and normative presuppositions at play in the background of the tool are at least as important. Even a well-developed VAA does not simply reflect what is at stake in the election by neutrally passing along information. Rather, it structures political information in a way that is informed by the developers’ presuppositions. Yet, these presuppositions remain hidden if we interpret the tool as a mirror that offers the user a reflection of him/herself situated within the political landscape. VAAs should therefore be understood as electoral dioramas, staged according to a contestable picture of politics. (shrink)

By examining evidence from India, where quotas for women in local government were introduced in 1993, this article argues that institutional reform can disturb hegemonic discourses sufficiently to open a window of opportunity where deliberative democratic norms take root and where, in addition to the politics of recognition, the politics of redistribution also operates.

Recently, the increasing interest in responsible leadership (RL) has produced a research field rich in theoretical and conceptual potential, with diverse research foci, theoretical foundations, and methodological approaches. While these developments have demarcated the field from other leadership-oriented disciplines, they have equally courted fragmentation and ambiguity in terms of the field’s positioning within the greater body of leadership studies. To map the theoretical, methodological, and empirical state of the art of the RL field, we outline recent developments and delineate important (...) research gaps and directions for future theory development and empirical research. We emphasize the transition of RL research from micro-level perspectives with normative roots to research spanning multiple levels of analysis, vis-à-vis both antecedents and outcomes. We discuss the implications of our mapping, highlighting the necessity of not only conceptualizing RL across multiple levels of analysis, but also to actively focus on interactions among RL antecedents and outcomes across these levels. Through these, we aim to contribute to the field by strengthening its conceptual foundations and anchoring it more clearly within leadership studies overall. (shrink)

O artigo procura mostrar em que sentido a democracia deliberativa proposta pela teoria discursiva de Jürgen Habermas dá conta do problema dos reducionismos econômicos e juridificantes da mundialização ou globalização, entendida como uma colonização técnico-sistêmica do mundo da vida. Recorrendo a sua concepção de um ethos democrático transnacional embasado na soberania popular, a teoria habermasiana logra resgatar o caráter normativo da mundialização através da irredutibilidade de valores humanos como a liberdade, a dignidade e os direitos humanos, inerentes às mais diferentes (...) e incompatíveis autocompreensões de mundos da vida. (shrink)

Focusing on how recent protests centered on global economic and environmental injustices can contribute to furthering deliberative politics and realizing deliberative democracy, Francis Dupuis- D � ri examines the important and historical tension between force and persuasion. However, casting protest as legitimate in the framework of deliberative politics and as serving deliberative democracy obscures its own value in endeavors to achieve social, economic, and environmental justice. Being sympathetic to Dupuis- D � ri � s work, I wish to make several, (...) interrelated conceptual and practical clarifications in order to bring back to the fore the fundamental importance of protest, in terms of contributions not to deliberative politics and deliberative democracy but to public discourse. (shrink)

Every time we act in an effort to attain our epistemic goals, we express our epistemic agency. The present study argues that a proper understanding of the actions and goals relevant to expressions of such agency can be used to make ameliorative recommendations about how the ways in which we actually express our agency can be brought in line with how we should express our agency. More specifically, it is argued that the actions relevant to such expressions should be identified (...) with the variety of actions characteristic of inquiry; that contrary to what has been maintained by recent pluralists about epistemic value, the only goal relevant to inquiry is that of forming true belief; and that our dual tendency for bias and overconfidence gives us reason to implement epistemically paternalistic practices that constrain our freedom to exercise agency in substantial ways. In other words, when it comes to our freedom to express epistemic agency, more is not always better. In fact, less is often so much more. (shrink)

Recent proposals for computer-assisted argumentation have drawn on dialectical models of argumentation. When used to assist public policy planning, such systems also raise questions of political legitimacy. Drawing on deliberative democratic theory, we elaborate normative criteria for deliberative legitimacy and illustrate their use for assessing two argumentation systems. Full assessment of such systems requires experiments in which system designers draw on expertise from the social sciences and enter into the policy deliberation itself at the level of participants.

Contemporary liberal democracy employs a conception of legitimacy according to which political decisions and institutions must be at least in principle justifiable to all citizens. This conception of legitimacy is difficult to satisfy when citizens are deeply divided at the level of fundamental moral, religious, and philosophical commitments. Many have followed the later Rawls in holding that where a reasonable pluralism of such commitments persists, political justification must eschew appeal to any controversial moral, religious, or philosophical premises. In this way, (...) the Rawlsian account of public political justification involves a politics of omission, where citizens are expected to bracket off their most fundamental commitments and seek justifications that draw only from uncontroversial premises. This politics of omission is necessary, Rawls argues, for political stability. But there is good social epistemic evidence for the view that the politics of omission encourages insularity among like-minded groups, and that this insularity in turn generates extremism. So omission is likely to lead to instability, not stability. (shrink)

The central contention of theories of deliberative democracy is that deliberative arrangements should encourage the support of interests that are general to all. Democratic theorists have also suggested that the natural environment will be a likely beneficiary following public deliberation, given the inherent rationality in supporting interests that will lead to the long-term survival of the planet. This paper addresses the question of general environmental interests through two case studies in Australian local government and argues there are at least three (...) factors that affect the ability of notionally deliberative arrangements to deliver outcomes that appear favourable to the natural environment. (shrink)

This paper argues that the public can do more than legitimate government; it can provide public knowledge for sound public policy. Critics of democracy worry that the public has too little objectivity and impartiality to know what is best. These critics have a point: taken one by one, people have little knowledge of the whole. For this reason, citizens need to escape the cloisters of kith and kin and enter a world of unlike others. They need to be open to (...) other perspectives and concerns. They need to deliberate with others in public. In other words, an inchoate plurality of people needs to become public in order to develop a more comprehensive picture of the whole and to define ‘where the shoe pinches’. Democracy requires that the multitude deliberate publicly in order to create public knowledge by which sound public policy can be formed. Key Words: deliberation • democracy • John Dewey • Jürgen Habermas • legitimacy • particularity • perspectives • rational deliberative • proceduralism. (shrink)

While a large social-choice-theoretic literature discusses the aggregation of individual judgments into collective ones, there is much less formal work on the transformation of judgments in group communication. I develop a model of judgment transformation and prove a baseline impossibility theorem: Any judgment transformation function satisfying some initially plausible conditions is the identity function, under which no opinion change occurs. I identify escape routes from this impossibility and argue that the kind of group communication envisaged by deliberative democats must be (...) "holistic": It must focus on webs of connected propositions, not on one proposition at a time, which echoes the Duhem-Quine "holism thesis" on scientific theory testing. My approach provides a map of the logical space in which different possible group communication processes are located. (shrink)

An epistemic theory of democracy, I assume, is meant to provide on answer to the question of why democracy is desirable. It does so by trying to show how the democratic process can have epistemic value. I begin by describing a couple of examples of epistemic theories in the literature and bringing out what they presuppose. I then examine a particular type of theory, worked out most thoroughly by Joshua Cohen, which seems to imply that democracy has epistemic value. The (...) key idea in this theory is that its conception of political right is itself a democratic conception – roughly, what is right is constituted by a consensus among ideal democratic agents. If democratic procedures are modeled on this conception of right, the theory proposes, the fact that we follow these procedures in decision-making will give us reason to believe that the outcomes are themselves right. I do not reject the democratic conception of the right, but I argue that the theory breaks down when we try to extend its conclusions to real-world democratic procedures. While it invites interesting speculation about possible reforms, it gives us little reason to accept the outcomes of actual democratic politics. (shrink)

How can democratic governments be relied upon to achieve adequate political knowledge when they turn over their authority to those of no epistemic distinction whatsoever? This deep and longstanding concern is one that any proponent of epistemic conceptions of democracy must take seriously. While Condorcetian responses have recently attracted substantial interest, they are largely undermined by a fundamental neglect of agenda-setting. I argue that the apparent intractability of the problem of epistemic adequacy in democracy stems in large part from a (...) failure to appreciate the social character of political knowledge. A social point of view brings into focus a number of vital factors that bear on our understanding of democratic epistemology and our assessment of its prospects: the essential role of inclusive deliberation, the public's agenda-setting function, institutional provisions for policy feedback, the independence of expert communities, and the knowledge-pooling powers of markets. (shrink)

Suppose that the members of a group each hold a rational set of judgments on some interconnected questions, and imagine that the group itself has to form a collective, rational set of judgments on those questions. How should it go about dealing with this task? We argue that the question raised is subject to a difficulty that has recently been noticed in discussion of the doctrinal paradox in jurisprudence. And we show that there is a general impossibility theorem that that (...) difficulty illustrates. Our paper describes this impossibility result and provides an exploration of its significance. The result naturally invites comparison with Kenneth Arrow's famous theorem (Arrow, 1963 and 1984; Sen, 1970) and we elaborate that comparison in a companion paper (List and Pettit, 2002). The paper is in four sections. The first section documents the need for various groups to aggregate its members' judgments; the second presents the discursive paradox; the third gives an informal statement of the more general impossibility result; the formal proof is presented in an appendix. The fourth section, finally, discusses some escape routes from that impossibility. (shrink)

Focusing on how recent protests centered on global economic and environmental injustices can contribute to furthering deliberative politics and realizing deliberative democracy, Francis Dupuis-Déri examines the important and historical tension between force and persuasion. However, casting protest as legitimate in the framework of deliberative politics and as serving deliberative democracy obscures its own value in endeavors to achieve social, economic, and environmental justice. Being sympathetic to Dupuis-Déri’s work, I wish to make several, interrelated conceptual and practical clarifications in order to (...) bring back to the fore the fundamental importance of protest, in terms of contributions not to deliberative politics and deliberative democracy but to public discourse.À partir d’une analyse de la manière dont les actions directes s’opposent aux injustices économiques et environnementales et peuvent contribuer à faire avancer et à réaliser la politique délibérative, Francis Dupuis-Déri examine la tension historique et importante entre la force brute et le pouvoir de persuasion. Cependant, le fait de chercher à légitimer la protestation dans le cadre de la politique délibérative et comme un moyen pour les fins d’une démocratie délibérative obscurcit la valeur propre des protestations pour réaliser la justice sociale, économique et environnementale. Étant sympathique aux travaux de Dupuis-Déri, je tiens à faire plusieurs clarifications conceptuelles et pratiques en vue de ramener à l’avant-scène l’importance fondamentale des protestations, en terme de contributions non pas à la démocratie délibérative, mais au discours public. (shrink)

I show how a notion of the political as emerging reality which does not derive from any other logic — as a phenomenon devoid of foundations, of predetermined elements — features in Habermas’s theory of society. There is certainly nothing obvious about such a claim, insofar as the political is conceived, across his entire oeuvre, in relation to the public sphere, which is presented as a social space in which the functions and properties he attributes to language in general are (...) made explicit and catalysed. It appears the public sphere coincides with the constitutive rules of universal pragmatics. More generally, the motif of the public sphere is bound up with topics which all curb the political “mode” — i.e., the validity attributed to political statements (1), the weight given, in myriad ways, to morality in the public sphere (2), and the concern to preserve science and complexity no matter what (3). I examine each one in turn, in order to demonstrate how, precisely, through the limits imposed on them, they enable us to grasp the specificity of the public sphere as political instance and, from this basis, identify a place for the political in Jürgen Habermas’s theory. (shrink)

Philip Pettit ,Aude Bandini | : La démocratie signifie d’abord et avant toute chose l’idée d’un contrôle populaire, et ce par l’ensemble des moyens possibles. Ces moyens donnent lieu à la légitimité. Mais ces contrôles populaires, du moins tels qu’ils sont entendus dans de nombreuses discussions, ne donnent pas lieu à la légitimité espérée. Les théories de la démocratie ne partagent pas une même conception des choses à ce sujet, ce qui donne lieu à une pluralité d’approches. Dans cet article, (...) l’auteur soutient que la réponse la plus intéressante à cette question implique une réinterprétation de la notion de contrôle populaire. | : Democracy means popular control, by almost all accounts. And by almost all accounts democracy entails legitimacy. But popular control, at least as that is understood in many discussions, does not entail legitimacy. So something has got to give. Democratic theories divide on what this is, so that the question prompts a taxonomy of approaches. The most appealing answer, so the paper suggests, involves a reinterpretation of the notion of popular control. (shrink)

We briefly review Condorcet's and Young's epistemic interpretations of preference aggregation rules as maximum likelihood estimators. We then develop a general framework for interpreting epistemic social choice rules as maximum likelihood estimators, maximum a posteriori estimators, or expected utility maximizers. We illustrate this framework with several examples. Finally, we critique this program.Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage (...) Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.A STATISTICAL APPROACH TO EPISTEMIC DEMOCRACYVolume 9, Issue 2Marcus PivatoDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2012.4Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. A STATISTICAL APPROACH TO EPISTEMIC DEMOCRACYVolume 9, Issue 2Marcus PivatoDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2012.4Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. A STATISTICAL APPROACH TO EPISTEMIC DEMOCRACYVolume 9, Issue 2Marcus PivatoDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2012.4Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

Deliberative democracy, it is claimed, is essential for the legitimisation of public policy and law. It is built upon an assumption that citizens will be capable of constructing and defending reasons for their moral and political beliefs. However, critics of deliberative democracy suggest that citizens’ emotions are not properly considered in this process and, if left unconsidered, present a serious problem for this political framework. In response to this, deliberative theorists have increasingly begun to incorporate the emotions into their accounts. (...) However, these accounts have tended to focus only upon the inclusion of emotions in the external-collective exchange of reason between citizens. Little work has been done on how the individual will actually cope with emotions internally within their own minds. There has been no consideration of the capacities that citizens will need to perceive, understand and regulate emotions as they formulate reasons both by themselves and with others. Moreover, there has been little consideration of how these capacities might be educated in children so that emotionally competent deliberative citizens can be created. In this paper, emotional intelligence is presented as an essential capacity that can fulfil this role for the deliberative citizen and deliberative democracy more generally. The ‘deliberative school’ is suggested as a potential site for this transformation that can progress from generation to generation, cultivating citizens that are increasingly better equipped to handle emotionally-laden deliberative engagement. (shrink)

The article advances an understanding of responsible leadership in global business and offers an agenda for future research in this field. Our conceptualization of responsible leadership draws on deliberative practices and discursive conflict resolution, combining the macro-view of the business firm as a political actor with the micro-view of leadership. We discuss the concept in relation to existing research in leadership. Further, we propose a new model of responsible leadership that shows how such an understanding of leadership can address the (...) challenges of globalization. We thereby propose positive outcomes of responsible leadership across levels of analysis. The model offers research opportunities for responsible leadership in global business. (shrink)

(2001). Associo‐deliberative democracy and qualitative participation. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy: Vol. 4, Associative Democracy: The Real Third Way, pp. 71-84. doi: 10.1080/13698230108403338.

This article examines the relationship of pragmatism to the theory of deliberative democracy. It elaborates a dilemma in the latter theory, between its deliberative or epistemic and democratic or inclusive components, and distinguishes responses to this dilemma that are internal to the conception of deliberation employed from those that are external. The article goes on to identify two models of pragmatism and critically examines how well each one deals with the tension identified in deliberative democracy.

One of the most significant obstacles to inquiry and deliberation is citizenship education. There are few mechanisms for the development of citizens’ democratic character within most societies, and greater opportunities need to be made to ensure our democracies are epistemically justifiable. The character and quality of citizens’ interactions are a crucial aspect for any democracy; their engagement make a significant difference between a deliberative society and an electoral oligarchy. I contend that through demarchic procedures, citizens are subject to collective learning (...) process in virtue of being part of communal decision-making and in so doing can develop their capacities for deliberation with practice over time. Demarchic bodies can be utilised as communities of inquiry. By viewing democracy as both a learning process and a decision-making mechanism, the quality of deliberation and participation can improve over time as well. (shrink)

In this article we will suggest that the traditional account of the freedom of expression needs revision. The emergence of Internet media has shown that the traditional ideal of a plurality of voices does not in itself lead to fruitful public spheres. Inspired by Foucault’s interpretation of the Greek concept parrhesia we suggest that the plurality of voices should be supplemented with an ideal of courageous truth-telling. We will furthermore argue that the notion of courage has two dimensions that should (...) be taken into account. On the one hand a Derridean reading of courage brings out a disruptive and aporetic feature of courage. On the other hand, courage also needs to be articulated through some kind of goal, which in a public setting calls for a deliberative dimension. We conclude by suggesting that public spheres with courageous truth-telling will facilitate societies in which strong voices and opinions are continuously challenged by less strong voices. (shrink)

This article proposes a way of connecting two levels at which scholars have studied discursive practices from a normative perspective: on the one hand, local transactions-face-to-face arguments or dialogues-and broadly dispersed public debates on the other. To help focus my analysis, I select two representatives of work at these two levels: the pragmadialectical model of critical discussion and Habermas's discourse theory of politicallegal deliberation. The two models confront complementary challenges that arise from gaps between their prescriptions and contexts of actual (...) discourse. In response, I propose a theory of argument cogency that distinguishes three kinds of merit: content, transactional, and public. Normative links between the two levels arise through the ways argument contents spread across multiple transactions in a social space whose structure and composition favor collective reasonableness. (shrink)

(2001). Problems and prospects of associative democracy: Cohen and Rogers revisited. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy: Vol. 4, Associative Democracy: The Real Third Way, pp. 31-70.

In a recent article, Iris Marion Young raises several challenges to deliberative democracy on behalf of political activists. In this paper, the author defends a version of deliberative democracy against the activist challenges raised by Young and devises challenges to activism on behalf of the deliberative democrat. Key Words: activism • deliberative democracy • Discourse • Ideology • public sphere • I. M. Young.

The aim of this paper is to propose a model for understanding the relation between substance and procedure in discourse ethics and deliberative democracy capable of answering the common charge that they involve an ‘empty formalism’. The expressive-elaboration model introduced here answers this concern by arguing that the deliberative practical rationality presupposed by discourse ethics and deliberative democracy involves the creation of a practical medium in which certain general basic ideas of solidarity, equality and freedom are expressed and elaborated in (...) the context of widespread moral disagreement. In the course of this paper I propose an elucidation of these ideas and argue for the thesis that they are internally related to the endorsement of deliberative practical rationality. The three basic substantive ideas contribute to the determination of the existence, the form, the topics and intended outcomes, and the effects of the practice of public deliberation. This amounts to an elucidatory defense of deliberative practical rationality by explicating its substantive significance or point. Key Words: critical theory • deliberative democracy • discourse ethics • equality • freedom • Jürgen Habermas • practical reason • John Rawls • solidarity • substance and procedure. (shrink)

How does public discussion contribute to the reasonableness with which power is exercised in a democracy? Contemporary answers to this question (such as formulated by Rawls or Habermas), are often based upon two interconnected preconceptions. These are, 1. the idea that the value of public discussion lies primarily in the fact that citizens can reach a reasonable consensus through argumentation and discussion and, 2. the belief that the exercise of power is legitimate only if it is determined by a reasonable (...) consensus among citizens. In this sense, 'reasonable consensus among citizens' eliminates, under ideal conditions, the 'autonomy' of the exercise of power. However, these ideals of democracy appear to conflict with certain aspects of democratic society; aspects, moreover, which we tend to value quite highly. I therefore advance an alternative account of the reasonableness of power in democratic societies; one which acknowledges both the characteristically unlimited scope of public discussion in democratic society and the fact that such discussion rarely or perhaps even never ends in a general consensus. In order to elucidate the democratic character of society we must explain the relationship between discussion and power in such a way that we understand both the need for discussion and the necessity of an autonomous exercise of power. (shrink)

According to an influential objection, which Martha Nussbaum has powerfully restated, expressing anger in democratic public discourse is counterproductive from the standpoint of justice. To resist this challenge, this article articulates a crucial yet underappreciated sense in which angry discourse is epistemically productive. Drawing on recent developments in the philosophy of emotion, which emphasize the distinctive phenomenology of emotion, I argue that conveying anger to one’s listeners is epistemically valuable in two respects: first, it can direct listeners’ attention to elusive (...) morally relevant features of the situation; second, it enables them to register injustices that their existing evaluative categories are not yet suited to capturing. Thus, when employed skillfully, angry speech promotes a greater understanding of existing injustices. This epistemic role is indispensable in highly divided societies, where the injustices endured by some groups are often invisible to, or misunderstood by, other... (shrink)

Participatory methods aim to address controversy over new technologies through public consultation. This paper first describes the emergence of participatory methods within the framework of technology assessment, then provides an overview of the landscape of participatory arrangements; and, finally, discusses participatory methods in relation to different democratic ideals. The article challenges the widespread assumption that participatory methods can function as normatively neutral tools, which can readily be employed in various social and political settings. Through a case study of consensus conferences (...) on GMOs in three European countries, the article investigates the interpretive processes that take place when participatory procedures are applied in new national political settings. (shrink)

In this paper I want to show that consumer concerns can be implemented in food chains by organizing ethical discussions of conflicting values that include them as participators. First, it is argued that there are several types of consumer concerns about food and agriculture that are multi-interpretable and often contradict each other or are at least difficult to reconcile without considerable loss. Second, these consumer concerns are inherently dynamic because they respond to difficult and complex societal and technological situations and (...) developments. For example, because of the rising concern with global warming, carbon dioxide absorption of crops is now attracting public attention, which means that new requirements are being proposed for the environmentally friendly production of crops. Third, there are different types of consumers, and their choices between conflicting values differ accordingly. Consumers use different weighing models and various types of information in making their food choices. Changing food chains more in accordance with consumer concerns should at least take into account the multi-interpretable, dynamic, and pluralist features of consumer concerns, for example, in traceability schemes. In discussing usual approaches such as codes, stakeholder analysis, and assurance schemes, I conclude that these traditional approaches can be helpful. However, in cases of dynamic, pluralistic, and uncertain developments, maintaining some pre-existing evaluating scheme or some clear cut normative hierarchy, such as codes or assurance schemes, can be disastrous in undermining new ethical desirable initiatives. Instead of considering ethical standards and targets as fixed, which is done with codes and schemes, it is more fruitful to emphasize the structure of the processes in which ethical weighing of relevant consumer concerns get shaped. The concept of “Ethical Room for Maneuver” (ERM) is constructed to specify the ethical desirable conditions under which identification and weighing of paramount values and their dilemmas can be processed. The main aims of the ERM are making room in all the links of the food chain for regulating and implementing the relevant consumer concerns by (1) balancing and negotiating, (2) supporting information systems that are relevant and communicative for various consumer groups and (3) organizing consumer involvement in the links of the food chain. The social and political context of agriculture and food production, particularly in Europe, gives ample opportunity for implementing several types of Ethical Rooms for Maneuver. Finally, I discuss several types of Ethical Rooms for Manoeuvre in the food chains that can be communicated by means of specific traceability schemes to less involved stakeholders with the potential consequence that the stakeholders will be motivated to be more involved. (shrink)

Governments and other groups interested in the views of citizens require the means to present justifications of proposed actions, and the means to solicit public opinion concerning these justifications. Although Internet technologies provide the means for such dialogues, system designers usually face a choice between allowing unstructured dialogues, through, for example, bulletin boards, or requiring citizens to acquire a knowledge of some argumentation schema or theory, as in, for example, ZENO. Both of these options present usability problems. In this paper, (...) we describe an implemented system called PARMENIDES which allows structured argument over a proposed course of action, without requiring knowledge of the underlying argumentation theory. (shrink)

Three recently published reports show to what extent democracy is losing ground in a global context increasingly characterized by authoritarianism and populism. The argument this articles proposes is that the deplorable state of democracies around the world is due to the neglect of substantial characteristics and sources of democracy, which are above all trust and solidarity. Democracy has three different, but interrelated sources that are built upon each other according to a lexical order. A democracy is first based upon political (...) rights, there is in an inherent liberal component to democracy. Second, a democracy requires trust among citizens and individuals that only some form of common identity is going to produce. Third, democracy is based upon strong forms of equality that are brought about by solidarity. The article comes to following conclusions: First, as the experience of Islamophobia and racism in Europe and authoritarianism in the Arab world shows, the concepts of illiberal democracy or majoritarianism currently promoted by strongmen around the globe do not stand for proper democratic political systems. Second, in our plural societies, neither thick nationalism nor strong multiculturalism does support the development of the democratic spirit. Third, Republicanism in Rousseau’s tradition is right that inequalities are the main cause undermining full democracies. A democracy requires the solidarity of the welfare state. (shrink)

People tend to be biased and irrational about politics. Should this constrain what our normative theories of democracy can require? David Estlund argues that the answer is ‘no’. He contends that even if such facts show that the requirements of a normative theory are very unlikely to be met, this need not imply that the theory is unduly unrealistic. I argue that the application of Estlund’s argument to political irrationality depends on a false presupposition: mainly, that being rational about politics (...) is something people could easily do if they tried. Since the empirical evidence shows that being rational about politics is actually quite difficult, Estlund’s argument comes up short. Moreover, I argue that the argument cannot plausibly be extended to insulate normative theories of democracy from facts about political irrationality because of the need for constraints of realism to explain the crucial role that appeals to (reasonable) disagreement play within such theories. (shrink)

This paper suggests that pragmatism makes a distinctive contribution to the theory and practice of radical democracy. It investigates the relation ship between the renewal of interest in pragmatism and the recent attempts to develop radical democratic alternatives to political liberalism. With particular reference to the contemporary critical social theory of Habermas and Honneth, the paper outlines key dimensions of the civic republican, deliberative democratic and reflexive cooperative reconstructions of John Dewey's conception of democracy. These reconstructions are shown to have (...) explicated important pragmatist insights concerning public participation in civic associations, the discursive practices of deliberation, and the cooperative organization of the division of labour. However, it is argued that each of these reconstructions pre suppose some facet of the additional pragmatist understanding of the creativity of action and that the most distinctive contributions of pragmatism to radical democratic theory and practice derive from a notion of democracy as instituted and emergent meaning. (shrink)

Deliberative democracy is unrealistic, but so are rational-choice models of democracy. The elements of reality that rationalistic theories of democracy leave out are the very elements that deliberative democrats would need to subtract if their theory were to be applied to reality. The key problem is not, however, the altruistic orientation that deliberative democrats require; opinion researchers know that voters are already sociotropic, not self-interested. Rather, as Schumpeter saw, the problems lie in understanding politics, government, and economics under modern—and postmodern—conditions. (...) Modernity entails levels of complexity that stymie voters' attempts to be well informed about which political promises will actually solve social problems. Postmodernity adds to complexity an overabundance of fragmented information experienced impatiently and fleetingly by citizens who confuse entertainment with knowledge, and whose political demands are as unrealistic as their personal desire for a unique identity. These factors can be added, one by one, to the minimalist rational-choice model of politics, with each step leading us farther away from deliberative democracy. (shrink)

Various quantitative analyses have stressed the connection between lower socioeconomic status (SES) and low political participation. The general argument behind these studies was that since political participation is crucial for democracy, and since low SES compromises political participation, liberal democratic governments cannot afford such a compromise. This paper argues that presenting political participation as a democratic value, corresponding to a ‘positive’ right, places the implied argumentation of such studies in a potential conflict with classical liberalism and its contemporary ‘successors’, emphasizing (...) ‘negative’ rights alone. However, the tension can be reconciled by employing the political thought of John Locke, one of the forefathers of classical liberalism. Thus, the paper illuminates a strong bond in Locke’s thought between democratic political participation and liberal natural rights. In fact, I argue that it is precisely his advocacy of liberal rights that leads to a conception of political participation, converging with democratic theory and redistributive policies. (shrink)

In this paper I analyze the tension between realism and antirealism at the basis of Kantian constructivism. This tension generates a conflictive account of the source of the validity of social norms. On the one hand, the claim to moral objectivity characteristic of Kantian moral theories makes the validity of norms depend on realist assumptions concerning the existence of shared fundamental interests among all rational human beings. I illustrate this claim through a comparison of the approaches of Rawls, Habermas and (...) Scanlon. On the other hand, however, objections to moral realism motivate many Kantian constructivists to endorse the antirealist claim that reasonable agreement is the source of the validity of social norms. After analyzing the difficulties in the latter strategy, I try to show how a balance between the realist and antirealist elements of Kantian constructivism can be reached by drawing a sharper distinction between the justice and the legitimacy of social norms. (shrink)

Political egalitarianism is at the core of most normative conceptions of democratic legitimacy. It finds its minimal expression in the “one person one vote” formula. In the literature on deliberative democracy, political equality is typically interpreted in a more demanding sense, but different interpretations of what political equality requires can be identified. In this paper I shall argue that the attempt to specify political equality in deliberative democracy is affected by a dilemma. I shall illustrate the political egalitarian’s dilemma by (...) a hypothetical choice between two informational bases for political equality: Rawlsian primary goods and Amartya Sen’s capability approach. The political egalitarian’s dilemma reveals a clash between the requirement of ensuring equal possibilities to participate in the democratic process and the requirement of subjecting substantive judgments to deliberative evaluation. As such, the dilemma is a variant of the procedure vs. substance dilemma that is well-known in democratic theory. While it has sometimes been argued that deliberative democracy solves the tension between procedure and substance, the political egalitarian’s dilemma shows that this tension continues within deliberative democracy. (shrink)