A prevalent political narrative is that we are facing an epistemological crisis, where many citizens no longer care about truth and facts. Yet the view that we are living in a post-truth era relies on some implicit questionable empirical and normative assumptions. The post-truth rhetoric converts epistemic issues into motivational issues, treating people with whom we disagree as if they no longer believe in or care about truth. This narrative is also dubious on epistemic, moral, and political grounds. It is (...) epistemically dubious in being largely insensitive to the problem of complexity in politics; it is morally dubious because “post-truth” is often a derogatory label for individuals or groups that are deemed stupid, irrational, or morally compromised; and it is a politically toxic neologism because it purports to use the language of ‘truth’ as a weapon against power, yet these truth-claims are often themselves attempts to exert power over others by delegitimizing their perspectives. While it may seem as if truth and democracy are on especially bad terms lately, politics and truth have long had a vexed relationship, and moral panics about the value of truthfulness in politics are as old as politics itself. (shrink)

This paper takes stock of a recent but growing movement within the field of deliberative democracy, which normatively argues for the epistemic dimension of democratic authority and positively defends the truth-tracking properties of democratic procedures. Authors within that movement call themselves epistemic democrats, hence the recognition by many of an ‘epistemic turn’ in democratic theory. The paper argues that this turn is a desirable direction in which the field ought to evolve, taking it beyond the ‘fact of disagreement’ that had (...) previously blocked the conceptual road to acknowledging more than intrinsic properties to democratic decision procedures. The paper shows how two authors in particular – Joshua Cohen and David Estlund – have successfully lifted the Rawlsian requirement of epistemic abstinence and defends epistemic democrats and the implications of the epistemic turn in democratic theory against various misconceptions. (shrink)

ABSTRACTNormative political epistemologists, such as epistemic democrats, study whether political decision makers can, in principle, be expected to know what they need to know if they are to make wise public policy. Empirical political epistemologists study the content and sources of real-world political actors' knowledge and interpretations of knowledge. In recent years, empirical political epistemologists have taken up the study of the ideas of political actors other than voters, such as bureaucrats and politicians. Normative political epistemologists could follow this lead (...) if they were to focus on the technocratic orientation of nearly all political actors in the West: that is, on their desire to solve social and economic problems. Since most technocratic policy is made by political elites, the reliability of elites' knowledge of the causes of and cures for social and economic problems is a natural topic for normative political epistemology. (shrink)

This paper contributes to growing debates over the decision-making ability of democracy by considering the epistemic value of deliberative democracy. It focuses on the benefits democratic deliberation can derive from its diversity, and the extent to which these benefits can be realised with respect to the complexities of political problems. The paper first calls attention to the issue of complexity through a critique of Hélène Landemore and the Diversity Trumps Ability Theorem. This approach underestimates complexity due to its reliance on (...) an ‘oracle assumption’ and this is shown to highlight more general difficulties for applying the benefits of diversity to the realities of political problems. The paper then develops a new model of deliberation—based on an relationship between cognitive diversity and diminishing returns to cognitive type—which does not involve an oracle assumption and can therefore support the epistemic value of deliberative democracy even for complex problems. The benefits of diversity are also argued to be better realised though sortition than either democratic elections or epistocracy, pointing to the value of deliberation between randomly selected citizens. Finally, and contrary to past work, the new account suggests that diversity cannot alone establish the superiority of democratic deliberation over all non-democratic alternatives, and that it is insufficient to mount a purely epistemic argument for deliberative democracy. The paper therefore furthers our understanding of the epistemic value of deliberative democracy by clarifying when and to what extent diversity is a benefit to political problem solving. (shrink)

On August 30, 2013, the American Political Science Association sponsored a roundtable on political epistemology as part of its annual meetings. Co-chairing the roundtable were Jeffrey Friedman, Department of Government, University of Texas at Austin; and Hélène Landemore, Department of Political Science, Yale University. The other participants were Scott Althaus, Department of Political Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Mark Bevir, Department of Political Science, University of California at Berkeley; Rogers Smith, Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania; and Susan (...) Stokes, Department of Political Science, Yale University. We thank the participants for permission to republish their remarks, which they subsequently edited for clarity. (shrink)

This article offers a comprehensive review of the major theoretical issues and findings of the epistemic approaches to deliberative democracy. Section 2 surveys the norms and ideals of deliberative democracy in relation to deliberation's ability to “track the truth.” Section 3 examines the conditions under which deliberative mini‐publics can “track the truth.” Section 4 discusses how “truth‐tracking” deliberative democracy is possible through the division of epistemic labor in a deliberative system.

ABSTRACTIn “The Politics of Getting It Right,” Russell Muirhead has contended in this journal that democracy is valuable because of its procedural legitimacy rather than because of the epistemic values of “getting things right.” However, pure procedural theories of legitimacy fail. Thus, if democracy is legitimate, it will have to be due partly to its epistemic advantages. There are two ways of thinking about these advantages. One approach, associated most prominently with David Estlund and Hélène Landemore, equates the epistemic advantages (...) of democracy with its ability to approximate a procedure-independent standard of correctness. The other, associated with Fabienne Peter, explicitly rejects that standard. Peter’s view, however, is incapable of answering challenges against pure procedural theories of legitimacy. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe idea that the crowd could ever be intelligent is a counterintuitive one. Our modern, Western faith in experts and bureaucracies is rooted in the notion that political competence is the purview of the select few. Here, as in my book Democratic Reason, I defend the opposite view: that the diverse many are often smarter than a group of select elites because of the different cognitive tools, perspectives, heuristics, and knowledge they bring to political problem solving and prediction. In this (...) essay I defend my epistemic argument against proceduralist democrats; the value of model thinking against empiricists; the bracketing of fundamental value diversity against critics who see such diversity as an essential feature of politics; the intelligence of the masses in the face of voter ignorance and systematic biases; and the normative priority of democracy over market mechanisms. I also consider challenges to my use of Hong and Page's formal results, the epistemically proper selection method for representatives, and the role of deliberation in problem solving. I finally chart three avenues for further research. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAs Min argues, any defense of democracy must include an epistemic element. But this does not mean that the will of the majority always tends to be right. It means only that we cannot identify in advance a minority that is likelier to get it right than everyone else. This fact is consistent with the possibility, even the likelihood, that the majority will more often be wrong than right. Those who find themselves in the minority should not be cowed into (...) submission by the overall epistemic advantage of democracy: in any given case, a dissenter from the majority view may be right. Likewise, institutions such as parties are crucial in allowing minorities—and majorities—to persevere. Not only parties, but practices of dissent and opposition more broadly, are inseparable from the epistemic case for democracy. (shrink)