Epistemic Democracy Without Truth: The Deweyan Approach

Epistemic Democracy

The limits of epistemic democracy

The so-called doctrinal paradox reveals that a jury that decides by majority on the truth of a set of propositions, may come to a conclusion that is at odds with a legal doctrine to which they all subscribe. The doctrinal paradox, and its subesequent generalization by List and Pettit (2003), reveal the logical difficulties of epistemic democracy. This paper presents several generalizations of t...

Epistemic Democracy with Defensible Premises12

The contemporary theory of epistemic democracy often draws on the Condorcet Jury Theorem to formally justify the ‘wisdom of crowds’. But this theorem is inapplicable in its current form, since one of its premises — voter independence — is notoriously violated. This premise carries responsibility for the theorem’s misleading conclusion that ‘large crowds are infallible’. We prove a more useful j...

Epistemic Democracy: Generalizing the Condorcet Jury Theorem*

Classical debates, recently rejoined, rage over the question of whether we want our political outcomes to be right or whether we want them to be fair. Democracy can be (and has been) justified in either way, or both at once. For epistemic democrats, the aim of democracy is to "track the truth." 1 For them, democracy is more desirable than alternative forms of decision-making because, and insofa...

The Division of Epistemic Labor in Democracy

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 a...