Truth and trust in democratic epistemology

Abstract

Recent arguments for an epistemic conception of democracy have moved away from arguing that democracy possesses epistemic power by virtue of effectively aggregating the preferences or opinions of participants and toward the claim that these powers flow from deliberation, viewed as a constitutive element of democracy. This chapter reviews a version of this perspective, drawing on sources in pragmatist political philosophy, and tries to develop it, focusing on frequently overlooked issues of trustworthiness and the place of testimony in democratic theory. In Sect. 6.2, I briefly review the claim that the epistemic power of democracy derives from processes of deliberation and experiment, not merely from judgement aggregation, and go on to outline a pragmatist account of this, drawing on recent work in this area. In Sect. 6.3, I develop this account by introducing the notion of democratic testimony: a key epistemological problem in the process of democratic deliberation is that of credibility or trustworthiness; this is not a problem to be eliminated, but only one whose possible pernicious consequences must to be checked. In Sect. 6.4, I argue that the pragmatist conception of democratic epistemology outlined in Sect. 6.2 successfully captures what is distinctive about this problem. In Sect. 6.5, however, I go on to outline a residual problem for this approach to the epistemic character of democracy, and to offer some tentative solutions. © 2009 Springer Netherlands.