Knowing Democracy – A Pragmatist Account of the Epistemic Dimension in Democratic Politics [1st ed.] 9783030532574, 9783030532581

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xvii
Introduction: How to Justify Democracy’s Trust in the Political Judgments of Ordinary People (Michael I. Räber)....Pages 1-21
Front Matter ....Pages 23-23
Democracy, Epistemology and Deweyan Pragmatism (Michael I. Räber)....Pages 25-54
A Pragmatist Theory of Judgment (Michael I. Räber)....Pages 55-84
Political Judgments and Political Inquiry: Arendt and Dewey (Michael I. Räber)....Pages 85-102
Judgments, Juries and the Political Sphere (Michael I. Räber)....Pages 103-126
Dewey’s Epistemic Argument for Democracy Reconsidered (Michael I. Räber)....Pages 127-147
Front Matter ....Pages 149-149
The Epistemic Value of Diversity in Democratic Publics (Michael I. Räber)....Pages 151-166
Diversity, Democratic Systems and Epistemic Quality (Michael I. Räber)....Pages 169-188
Which Types of Knower Should Democracies Include and Why? (Michael I. Räber)....Pages 189-207
Back Matter ....Pages 209-211

Citation preview

Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations

Michael I. Räber

Knowing Democracy – A Pragmatist Account of the Epistemic Dimension in Democratic Politics

Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations Volume 14

Series Editors David M. Rasmussen, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA, USA Alessandro Ferrara, Dipartimento di Storia, University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’,  Rome, Italy Editorial Board Abdullah An-Na’im, Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law, Emory University, Atlanta, USA Bruce Ackerman, Sterling Professor of Law, Yale University,  New Haven, CT, USA Robert Audi, O’Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame,  Notre Dame, IN, USA Seyla Benhabib, Eugene Meyer Professor for Political Science and Philosophy, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA Samuel Freeman, Avalon Professor in the Humanities, University of Pennsylvania,  Philadelphia, PA, USA Jürgen Habermas, Professor Emeritus, Goethe-University, Frankfurt am Main,  Frankfurt, Bayern, Germany Axel Honneth, Goethe-University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany and Columbia University, New York, USA, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Germany Erin Kelly, Professor of Philosophy, Tufts University, Medford, MA, USA Charles Larmore, W. Duncan MacMillan Family Professor in the Humanities, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA Frank Michelman, Professor Emeritus, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA Tong Shijun, Professor of Philosophy, East China Normal University,  Shanghai, China Charles Taylor, Professor Emeritus, McGill University, Montreal, Montreal, QC, Canada Michael Walzer, Professor Emeritus, Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton,  Princeton, NJ, USA

The purpose of Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations is to publish high quality volumes that reflect original research pursued at the juncture of philosophy and politics. Over the past 20 years new important areas of inquiry at the crossroads of philosophy and politics have undergone impressive developments or have emerged anew. Among these, new approaches to human rights, transitional justice, religion and politics and especially the challenges of a post-secular society, global justice, public reason, global constitutionalism, multiple democracies, political liberalism and deliberative democracy can be included. Philosophy and Politics Critical Explorations addresses each and any of these interrelated yet distinct fields as valuable manuscripts and proposal become available, with the aim of both being the forum where single breakthrough studies in one specific subject can be published and at the same time the areas of overlap and the intersecting themes across the various areas can be composed in the coherent image of a highly dynamic disciplinary continent. Some of the studies published are bold theoretical explorations of one specific theme, and thus primarily addressed to specialists, whereas others are suitable for a broader readership and possibly for wide adoption in graduate courses. The series includes monographs focusing on a specific topic, as well as collections of articles covering a theme or collections of articles by one author. Contributions to this series come from scholars on every continent and from a variety of scholarly orientations. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/13508

Michael I. Räber

Knowing Democracy – A Pragmatist Account of the Epistemic Dimension in Democratic Politics

Michael I. Räber Department of Political Science University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) Los Angeles, CA, USA

ISSN 2352-8370     ISSN 2352-8389 (electronic) Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations ISBN 978-3-030-53257-4    ISBN 978-3-030-53258-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53258-1 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Nicole, Emilie, and Tilda

Series Abbreviations for The Collected Works of John Dewey1

EW MW LW

The Early Works (1882–1898) The Middle Works (1899–1924) The Later Works (1925–1953)

1  Citations of John Dewey’s works are to the thirty-seven volume critical edition published by Southern Illinois University Press under the editorship of Jo Ann Boydston. Citations give series abbreviation, followed by volume number and page number.

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Acknowledgments

Like most academic books, this one could not have been written without the tireless support and encouragement of a host of generous individuals and institutions. My deepest gratitude over these years of writing is to my wife and our children. Without them this book would never have been possible to write nor would it ever have come into existence. I also want to thank my parents Fritz and Annelis Räber for their affectionate care and generous support. Thanks to David M.  Rasmussen and Alessandro Ferrara, Co-editors of this Series, as well as to Neil Olivier, Springer’s Executive Editor and Manager of Humanities Group, for their encouragement and continued interest in my project. Throughout the preparation of the manuscript, I received persistent support from Diana Nijenhuijzen and Miranda Dijksman at Springer; my thanks for their competence and ongoing assistance for keeping things on track. Special thanks go to the two anonymous reviewers. Their solid advice and critical comments on the penultimate manuscript helped make the book better, even if I did not manage to consider all their recommendations. Parts of this book began as a University of Zurich PhD thesis, written under the guidance of Francis Cheneval, whom I would like to thank especially for his unwavering support and help on the way forward. At ETH Zurich, I was also lucky to profit from Michael Hampe’s expertise on philosophical pragmatism. My dissertation further benefited from additional insightful criticism by Mark Warren, Marco Steenbergen, and Markus Stepanians. My work then and ever since has been enriched by innumerable discussions with my colleagues at the Chair for Political Philosophy at the Ethics Centre at the University of Zurich, most notably (and yet certainly not only), Friedemann Bieber, Martin Beckstein, Alice El-Wakil, Micha Gläser, Christoph Laszlo, Jennifer Page, Juri Viehoff, and Jack Williams. They helped me think through matters of this book as it developed. I also owe a debt to other colleagues as well as to my students at the University of Zurich. Many draft chapters or parts thereof have furthermore profited from discussions I was fortunate to have with participants at various conferences and workshops, including the “Third European Pragmatism Conference” at the University of Helsinki; the “Deliberation after Consensus” event at the Centre franco-norvégien ix

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Acknowledgments

en sciences sociales et humaines, Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (FMSH) in Paris; the conference “From Interactions to Institutions: Pragmatism and Collective Experience” at the Ecole Normale Supérieure Paris; the Masterclass with Richard Bernstein at the Hochschule für Philosophie München; the conference “The Future of Pragmatism—Conversations with Matthew Festenstein” at the Universität St. Gallen; and presentations at workshops and colloquia at the Technische Universität München (Lisa Herzog and Just Serrano-Zamora), the Gecopol Research Seminar in Political Theory at the Université de Genève (Annabel Lever), the Annual Colloquium of the Center for Comparative and International Studies (CIS) University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, and sessions at the American Political Science Association and the XXIV. Kongress der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Philosophie in Berlin. Parts of this project were made possible by financial support from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF, awards no. 100015_138164/2 and no. P400PG_183834). These grants have enabled me to intensively study the subject matter of the book during two research stays. My research stay at Yale University with Ian Shapiro and Hélène Landemore led me to take a detailed look at the epistemic democracy debate. The final manuscript I was able to finish as a Visiting Researcher in the Department of Political Science at the University of California Los Angeles. I would like to thank in particular Davide Panagia for his warm hospitality and for providing an outstanding intellectually stimulating environment. I would also like to thank the faculty and staff at this great institution for making my time there both enjoyable and productive. Section 7.3 “Diversity and Democratic Self-Organization in Publics” of Chap. 7 is adapted from an article of mine cited in the notes and bibliography: “Political Representation from a Pragmatist Perspective: Aesthetic Democratic Representation,” Contemporary Pragmatism 16 (1): 84–103. The publishers’ permission to use excerpts from this article is gratefully acknowledged. I am deeply grateful to all the aforementioned persons and organizations. January 2020

Santa Monica

Contents

1 Introduction: How to Justify Democracy’s Trust in the Political Judgments of Ordinary People ��������������������������������������������������������������    1 1.1 Setting the Stage: The Problem of Judgment in Democracy������������    1 1.2 Epistemic Democracy and Aesthetic Judgment��������������������������������    4 1.3 Dewey’s Pragmatist Alternative��������������������������������������������������������   10 1.4 Plan of the Book��������������������������������������������������������������������������������   16 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   19 Part I A Pragmatist Theory of Democratic Political Judgment 2 Democracy, Epistemology and Deweyan Pragmatism ������������������������   25 2.1 The Epistemic Turn in Democratic Theory��������������������������������������   26 2.1.1 Truth by Aggregation������������������������������������������������������������   28 2.1.2 Truth by Deliberation������������������������������������������������������������   29 2.1.3 Pure Proceduralism ��������������������������������������������������������������   34 2.1.4 Epistemic Proceduralism������������������������������������������������������   37 2.2 A Deweyan Alternative ��������������������������������������������������������������������   39 2.2.1 Pragmatism ��������������������������������������������������������������������������   39 2.2.2 Pragmatist Epistemology������������������������������������������������������   41 2.2.3 Deweyan Democracy������������������������������������������������������������   44 2.2.4 Deweyan Pragmatism and Epistemic Democracy����������������   49 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   51 3 A Pragmatist Theory of Judgment ��������������������������������������������������������   55 3.1 Inquiry, Experience and Warranted Assertibility������������������������������   57 3.1.1 The Social, Experimental and Functional Character of Rationality������������������������������������������������������������������������   57 3.1.2 The Pattern of Inquiry����������������������������������������������������������   59 3.1.3 Experience as Qualitative and Reflective������������������������������   65 3.2 The Judicial Sense of Judgment��������������������������������������������������������   72 3.3 To Get Our Judgments Right������������������������������������������������������������   76 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   82 xi

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Contents

4 Political Judgments and Political Inquiry: Arendt and Dewey ����������   85 4.1 The Aesthetic Interpretation Political Judgments: Hannah Arendt and Linda Zerilli������������������������������������������������������   87 4.2 Dewey and the Arendtian Interpretation of Political Judgments������   91 4.2.1 Aesthetic Judgment vs. Aesthetic Experience����������������������   92 4.2.2 Aesthetic Political Judgment vs. Epistemic Political Judgment����������������������������������������������������������������   95 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  101 5 Judgments, Juries and the Political Sphere������������������������������������������  103 5.1 Judicial Judgments and Democracy: The Jury Justified ������������������  106 5.2 Normative Political Judgments ��������������������������������������������������������  111 5.2.1 Perspectivism and the Epistemology of Differentiated Experiences ����������������������������������������������  113 5.2.2 Perspectivism and Political Inquiry��������������������������������������  117 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  124 6 Dewey’s Epistemic Argument for Democracy Reconsidered��������������  127 6.1 Dewey’s Argument for Democracy��������������������������������������������������  128 6.2 The Advantages of Dewey’s Argument for Democracy Over the Neo-Peircean Argument ����������������������������������������������������  136 6.2.1 The Neo-Peircean Epistemic Argument for Democracy������  136 6.2.2 The Limits of the Neo-Peircean Argument and the Advantages of Dewey’s Argument ��������������������������  139 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  146 Part II Pragmatist Political Judgment and the Circumstances of Democratic Politics 7 The Epistemic Value of Diversity in Democratic Publics ��������������������  151 7.1 “Diversity Trumps Ability” in Democracy and Its Discontents��������  152 7.2 Diversity, Consensus and Democratic Pluralism������������������������������  158 7.3 Diversity and Democratic Self-Organization in Publics������������������  161 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  166 8 Diversity, Democratic Systems and Epistemic Quality������������������������  169 8.1 Deliberative Systems and Epistemic Quality������������������������������������  171 8.2 How to Measure the Positive Epistemic Effects of Diversity in Deliberative Systems?������������������������������������������������������������������  174 8.2.1 The Categorical Test: Towards Minimal Requirements for Interventions in Deliberative Systems����������������������������  175 8.2.2 The Systemic Test Applied: The (Nut)Case of Conspiracy Theories ��������������������������������������������������������  178 8.3 Three Problems of Systemic Theories of Democratic Deliberation��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  180 8.4 Conclusion: Deweyan Democracy and the Systemic Turn ��������������  184 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  186

Contents

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9 Which Types of Knower Should Democracies Include and Why?������  189 9.1 Political Problems: Technical and Non-Technical����������������������������  191 9.2 Mapping Political Knowers��������������������������������������������������������������  192 9.2.1 Social Identity as Source of Situated Knowers��������������������  197 9.2.2 Two Objections to Social Identity as an Epistemic Source��  199 9.3 The Place of Political Knowers in Democracy ��������������������������������  201 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  206 Index������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  209

List of Figure

Fig. 9.1 Schematic matrix of political knowers. (This matrix is based on the table of scientific expertise that Collins and Evans (2007) in Rethinking Expertise invented. It differs from their table, however, in two important ways: it focuses on politics rather than science and addresses different types of knowledge)......................................................................... 193

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About the Author

Michael  I.  Räber  is a post-doctoral Visiting Researcher at the Department of Political Science, University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). His research has been mainly focused on theories of democracy (politics and aesthetics, deliberative theory and political epistemology), political pragmatism, philosophy of art, and the history of political thought.

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Chapter 1

Introduction: How to Justify Democracy’s Trust in the Political Judgments of Ordinary People

Abstract  How can we justify democracy’s trust in the political judgments of ordinary people? This is the question this book seeks to answer. By foregrounding the idea of political judgment in democracies, it situates the question between two dominant alternative paradigms of thinking about the reflective qualities of democratic life: on the one hand, recent epistemic theories of democracy, which are based on the assumption that political participation promotes truth, and, on the other hand, theories of political judgment that are indebted to Hannah Arendt’s aesthetic conception of political judgments. I will argue that a democratic theory of political judgments based on John Dewey’s pragmatism can navigate the shortcomings of both these paradigms. While epistemic theories are overly and narrowly rationalistic and Arendtian theories are overly aesthetic, the neo-Deweyan conception of political judgment proposed in this book suggests a third path that combines the rationalist and the aesthetic elements of political conduct in a way that goes beyond a merely epistemic or a merely aesthetic conception of political judgment in democracy. The justification for democracy’s trust in ordinary people’s political judgments, the book suggests, resides in an egalitarian conception of democratic inquiry that blends the epistemic and the aesthetic aspects of the making of political judgments. Keywords  Political judgment · Pragmatism · John Dewey · Hannah Arendt · Epistemic democracy · Aesthetics

1.1  S  etting the Stage: The Problem of Judgment in Democracy How can we justify democracy’s trust in the political judgments of ordinary people? This is the question this book seeks to answer. By foregrounding the idea of political judgment in democracies, it situates the question between two dominant alternative paradigms of thinking about the reflective qualities of democratic life: on the one

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 M. I. Räber, Knowing Democracy – A Pragmatist Account of the Epistemic Dimension in Democratic Politics, Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations 14, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53258-1_1

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1  Introduction: How to Justify Democracy’s Trust in the Political Judgments…

hand, recent epistemic theories of democracy, which are based on the assumption that political participation promotes truth, and, on the other hand, theories of political judgment that are indebted to Hannah Arendt’s aesthetic conception of political judgments. I will argue that a democratic theory of political judgments based on John Dewey’s pragmatism can navigate the shortcomings of both these paradigms. While epistemic theories are overly and narrowly rationalistic and Arendtian theories are overly aesthetic, the neo-Deweyan conception of political judgment proposed in the ensuing chapters of this book suggests a third path that combines the rationalist and the aesthetic elements of political conduct in a way that goes beyond a merely epistemic or a merely aesthetic conception of political judgment in democracy. The justification for democracy’s trust in ordinary people’s political judgments, the book suggests, resides in an egalitarian conception of democratic inquiry that blends the epistemic and the aesthetic aspects of the making of political judgments. For the last seventy years, democracy has been taken for granted in many quarters of the world. For some time now, however, many inhabitants of, and commentators on, democracies have been worried that democracy is in decline and is undergoing a fundamental crisis. Many citizens are increasingly dissatisfied with, and distrustful of, parties and elites; democratic achievements have been reversed in several countries; digital filter bubbles are gradually replacing public debate; right-­ wing populism is on the rise; and, even in some of the oldest democracies in the world, people who openly question basic democratic principles have come to power. It seems that more and more citizens are adopting an indifferent, if not a negative, attitude towards the democratic ideals that govern their social and political common lives. As a reaction to these developments, academics and public intellectuals all over the world are writing books and studies that deal with how democracy got into this crisis and which instruments could solve it.1 This book does not provide a further diagnosis of the crisis, nor does it offer direct solutions for resolving the crisis of democracy. Instead, it contributes a clarification of what exactly we should understand, and what we want to understand, by the ideal of democracy, and the reasons why we should defend, preserve, and realize it. It taps into questions about the normative ideals that underpin democratic politics, the way in which these ideals can be justified, and why democracy is the most suitable political form of organization to achieve these ideals. In particular, it focuses on a question that goes to the heart of modern democratic citizenship: How can we justify democracy’s trust in the political judgments of ordinary people? When we look at the current crisis of democracy through the prism of modern democratic citizenship, we can see that the growing distrust in democracy is also a distrust in one of the principles underpinning democratic citizenship: that the judgments of all citizens are equally valuable in contributing to collective decisions that  To name only a few recent publications: Wendy Brown (2015): Undoing the demos: Neoliberalism’s stealth revolution; Martha Nussbaum (2018): The monarchy of fear; Adam Przeworski (2019): Crises of democracy; David Runciman (2018): How democracy ends; Nadia Urbinati (2019): Me the people: How populism transforms democracy.

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1.1  Setting the Stage: The Problem of Judgment in Democracy

3

are wise and good. The distrust in this principle of equality appears to be justified when one considers that making judgments about how to govern well seems to require the application of extraordinary competence, training, and experience. Democracy, however, relies on the judgment of those of seemingly very little epistemic distinction whatsoever—the judgment of ordinary citizens. To put it another way, the ideal of democracy itself involves an inherent tension between a moral ideal of equal respect and an epistemic ideal of correctness. On the one hand, democracy demands the same respect for the judgments of all citizens alike—it compels us to recognize the necessity of respecting individual judgments as the expression of individuals’ opinions, and regarding citizens as “self-­originating sources of claims” (Richardson 1997, 358).2 On the other hand, we demand that democracy provides the conditions for good (just, correct, true, etc.) judgments that translate into good decisions and thus shape the results of political processes in an epistemically reliable way. Thus democracy compels us to recognize the necessity of making good political judgments. The correctness ideal and the ideal of equal respect can be mapped in terms of two forms of equality involved in the ideal of democracy: vertical equality and horizontal equality. Vertical equality refers to the assumption of democratic rule that citizens possess sufficient epistemic ability to give them equal epistemic authority in making political judgments, hence rejecting hierarchical inequality, despite the fact that there are considerable differences in citizens’ cognitive abilities and knowledge that could represent a hierarchical relationship between these individuals. Horizontal equality refers to the assumption of equal respect for all citizens’ judgments, independent of the epistemic qualities of those judgments (equal inclusion and eligibility). Thus we can put the tension between the moral ideal of equal respect and the epistemic ideal of correctness in different terms: vertical equality and horizontal equality cannot always be maintained at the same time. The ideal of equal

2  Democratic thinkers about modern liberal democracy in the past 350 years have been quite comfortable in justifying the assumption of equal respect. John Locke, for example, held that, at least in cases necessitating collective decisions, all persons should be treated equally in some important sense (Dahl 1989, ch. 6). No one person is naturally entitled to subject another to his or her will or authority—human beings are intrinsically and fundamentally equal in the sense that all humans have equal moral value. The ideal of democracy as a government of the people, by the people, and for the people implies the right of all members of a democratic group to participate in the decisionmaking process, which again implies a public recognition of these members as autonomous and free individuals. If individuals are considered as free and autonomous beings, no-one is naturally entitled to rule over others. Being a legitimate subject to a political authority consequently presupposes equal treatment in terms of the right of freedom and the equal weighting of everyone’s consent to collectively binding rules. For the purposes of this introduction, suffice it to say that the argument for the Lockean idea of treating everybody as equal is much more elaborate and complex than has just been presented, and, while it has faced criticism on different fronts, it has also been accepted—by and large—as one of the most plausible justifications of democracy. The principle of equal respect for each person’s interests and judgments is built into the practices and procedures of democracy: individuals have equal opportunity to voice their consent or refusal through votes and other participatory mechanisms, and they are the ones who choose the collective rules and laws that govern them.

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1  Introduction: How to Justify Democracy’s Trust in the Political Judgments…

respect demands that democracy gives equal worth to all citizens’ judgments, regardless of how epistemically adequate these judgments are, and the ideal of correctness demands that equal respect of all citizens’ judgments is justified only if those judgments help us to produce sufficiently reliable outcomes. This tension between vertical and horizontal equality constitutes what we can call the problem of judgment in democracy—the problem that raises the question of how democracy’s trust in ordinary people’s political judgments can be justified.

1.2  Epistemic Democracy and Aesthetic Judgment There are two dominant theoretical strands in normative reflections on the ideal of democracy in contemporary democratic thought, and they deal with this problem in opposing ways. As opposing as these theoretical strands are, they nevertheless share the underlying view that the tension between vertical and horizontal equality is normatively insignificant3: on the one hand, epistemic theories of democracy deny that the tension is significant because they argue that vertical and horizontal equality are, under ideal circumstances, aligned,4 and, on the other hand, aesthetic theories of democratic judgment dissolve the tension by denying that a vertical (epistemic) dimension is relevant for political rule at all. The aesthetic understanding of political judgment, exemplified by theories inspired by Hannah Arendt’s conception of it, 3  This picture of the current state of democratic thought is surely too reductionist; it can only have a heuristic function here. It neglects many valuable strands, such as theories of radical democracy and theories of representative democracy. Because this book is in part about the epistemic dimension of democracy, I should at least also mention technocratic and epistocratic theories (e.g. Brennan 2016; Somin 2013; Caplan 2011). Such theories almost distrust citizens’ epistemic abilities to make good judgments, and hence either recommend essentially undemocratic means (expert rule) to make democracy efficient in the longer term or recommend that we give up on the ideal of democracy altogether. The skeptical worry is that democracy is far less successful at generating successful decisions and laws than democratic thinkers have hitherto believed, and therefore that we should turn to other forms of political organization that are less liable to error. In the light of such a view, the current crisis of democracy demands the abandonment of both horizontal and vertical equality and the establishment of hierarchical inequality in epistemic authority: democracy’s equal reliance on all individuals in the processes of opinion-forming and decision-making does not make it fit for the task of solving complex collective problems. I will not engage with these theories in this book, as others have already compellingly refuted them; see, especially, the brilliant review of Brennan’s book by Simone Chambers (2018). From a Deweyan perspective we can say that, while it is true that people are often ill-informed about political issues and that they are often biased and ignorant, it would be wrong to draw the radical conclusion that we should give up on democracy and replace it with the rule of a wise few (who, for Dewey, cannot exist in political matters, as I will argue). What is important is that such epistemic shortcomings are partially the result of the cultural, social, economic, and educational conditions and institutions in which people inhabiting a democracy grow up and live, and that these conditions and institutions can and should be changed. 4  For an extensive overview of epistemic theories of democracy see Landemore (2017) and Schwartzberg (2015).

1.2  Epistemic Democracy and Aesthetic Judgment

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holds that democracy is a not a matter of epistemic concern. According to this understanding, the value of political judgment lies, rather, in its “democratic world-­ building potential of judging anew” (Zerilli 2016, 2), which ultimately safeguards political freedom and radical pluralism through imagination and a sense of community. While the Arendtian paradigm of thinking about the problem of judgment in democracy resolves the tension by simply denying that democracy is about correctness or vertical equality, epistemic theories of democracy in turn tend to claim that there is no tension, because we can conceive of ideal communicative (or otherwise epistemically ideal) institutional settings that respect horizontal equality, and by means of which democracy can produce correct outcomes. Epistemic theories of democracy aim to reconcile horizontal equality and vertical equality by claiming that the moral demand for near-universal participation in democratic debate and voting—horizontal equality—aligns with vertical equality because inclusive and egalitarian democratic debate or aggregative vote-counting is able to “track the truth” (List and Goodin 2001, 277). In Chap. 2 I will provide a more detailed discussion of the similarities and differences between different variants of this paradigm, and will also discuss their respective advantages and disadvantages. Here I only want to point to the basic shared assumption of epistemic democracy theorists: these theorists advocate inclusive political participation not for reasons of procedural justice, or as the realization of individual autonomy, or because it enables political freedom and a pluralistic society, but because they are convinced that participation under the right kind of circumstances generally leads to desirable decisions, measured against an independent standard of truth, argued rationality, consensus, etc. In advocating such a view, epistemic theories of democracy contradict the widely held conviction in political philosophy that truth or correctness cannot have a legitimate place in our normative reflections on democracy. For example, John Rawls made the seminal suggestion that truth should not play a role in democracy’s public reason. He held that: once we accept the fact that reasonable pluralism is a permanent condition of public culture under free institutions, the idea of the reasonable is more suitable as part of the basis of public justification for a constitutional regime than the idea of moral truth. Holding a political conception as true, and for that reason alone the one suitable basis for public reason, is exclusive, even sectarian, and so likely to foster political division. (Rawls 1993, 129)

Rawls feared that truth-claims, which are inherently foundational insofar as they imply a claim to universal validity, would lead to “sectarian” consequences and undermine political stability. Without necessarily sharing the same motivations as Rawls, many theorists of liberal democracy have either tacitly or explicitly adopted the view that “the fact of reasonable pluralism” or “the fact of disagreement” teaches us to be (at least) agnostic towards correctness-claims in politics. For post-­ Schmittean and poststructuralist theorists, to think about politics in terms of truth is downright wrongheaded in its attempt to overcome political agonism and, as such, threatens pluralism. The pervasive suspicion about truth in politics is that such an authoritative thing does not exist—truth is a synonym for covert power politics, a

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type of politics that uses “truth” in a strategic self-serving way and that consequently turns the concept into a tyrannical, hegemonic, and ultimately authoritarian instrument. However, the appeal of epistemic theories of democracy resides in their ability to give voice to a strong intuition about the normativity of democratic politics: that democratic processes of collective interaction are capable of adjudicating between competing judgments and of yielding good decisions. The leap that the above-­ mentioned opponents of epistemic theories of democracy make, from the fact of pluralism and the burdens of judgment to the thought that nothing more can be said about differences in judgment other than that we should respect them, displays too limited an understanding of the possible epistemic function of pluralism, diversity, and disagreement in democratic politics. There will obviously always be some differences of judgment in democratic politics and there will always be a certain amount of justified disagreement—even about factual evidence, about what it means to have evidence, about how to interpret evidence, etc. However, it is important to make an effort to get our judgments right, in politics too, because this helps to stave off a culture of “bullshitting” (Frankfurt 2005). Nevertheless, epistemic theories of democracy suffer from some serious drawbacks with regard to the concept of the political, to epistemology, and to conceptions of human action and rationality.5 Their most problematic aspect, which goes to the heart of the question of this book, is that they neglect the fact that democratic politics sometimes involves a trade-off between horizontal and vertical equality. Those two values do not always coincide or complement each other in democracy. Respecting all citizens’ judgments equally sometimes imposes epistemic costs (because certain individuals or groups just have better knowledge about this problem)—in other words, better decisions would sometimes require that we forgo equal respect for the judgments of all citizens. In such cases, either horizontal equality takes precedence over vertical equality and epistemic considerations in democracy, or we forgo equal respect for all citizens’ judgments—horizontal equality—for the sake of epistemic quality. The larger point here is that epistemic theories of democracy make the justification of democracy dependent on instrumental considerations alone and neglect the non-epistemic dimension of democratic action and judgment. This dependence on instrumental considerations could be a reason for their narrowly rationalistic conceptions of human action. They tend to treat ideal democratic processes and ideal democratic institutions as software-programs that are likely to produce reliable outcomes according to well-defined rules and procedures, but political speech and judgment are forms of action that cannot be sufficiently understood in narrowly rationalist and cognitive terms, because they are infused with affective and aesthetic–imaginative sensibilities. In short, they tend to neglect the fact that taking political decisions and making political judgments is something

 See Chap. 2 for a more detailed discussion of epistemic theories of democracy.

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humans actually do, a practical activity that is both intellectual and non-­intellectual.6 It is revealing that the concept of “political judgment” is absent from epistemic democracy debates; this might be due to the fact that it has been used in a decidedly non-epistemic sense since Hannah Arendt’s aesthetic conceptualization of the term. Arendt’s theory of political judgment and Arendtian accounts of political judgment have foregrounded the concept of aesthetic judgment as the key faculty of modern democratic citizenship. According to these theories, political judgment in a democracy cannot have an epistemic function, and thus these theories are in clear contrast to epistemic theories of democracy. For Arendt, true political action is similar to making judgments on aesthetic objects, in that both kinds of action involve not the application of given rules but rather the invention of new rules for specific unknown situations. Political judgments are aesthetic for Arendt, because politics compels a unique kind of being-in-the-world and relating to this world. For her, the realm of politics constitutes a fundamentally different way of acting, because it is the only realm of action in which we truly enter unexplored territory. Politics, Arendt holds, forgoes formulas, because the outcomes of political action are essentially incalculable; it is a realm of novelty, freedom, and plurality—in this regard, it can be compared to art and aesthetic expression and evaluation. Aesthetic judgment becomes primarily relevant for Arendt because what appears to us as political is a confrontation with the new and extraordinary. In our encounter with the new, with the problem of making sense of something that challenges or eludes our available ways of making sense, we must judge in a context in which those familiar and reliable ways of making sense cannot make sense. Imaginative aesthetic judgment, we could say, is the sibling of hypothetical thinking; it lets us envisage the future in a way that might mobilize our will to act in order to make this future a reality. The new takes on a democratic function (Zerilli 2016): absent the possibility that the new becomes part of the political discussion, we are left with a politics of normal politics, a contracting space of politics in which democratic politics is usurped by bureaucratized political parties and monopolized by political technocrats, a politics that leads to a self-sealed democracy, to stagnation, cynicism, and passivity. Thus, the faculty of imaginative–aesthetic judgment functionally enables pluralism and political freedom for all citizens in politics, and the democratic principle of horizontal equality guarantees that all citizens alike are able to imaginatively judge the new. Arendt’s justification for horizontal equality is less directly moral than it is political: horizontal equality is necessary for enabling citizens to appear, speak, act, and judge within an order of plurality and freedom. In her essay “What is Freedom?” she writes: “Men are free […] as long as they act, neither before, nor after; for to be free and to act are the same” (Arendt 2006, 151). Freedom for her is not primarily about respecting the will or the interests of individuals, but rather about the ability to act, which is produced by the public aspects of politics: “Freedom has a space, and whoever is admitted into it is free; whoever is excluded is not free” (Arendt

 Compare my discussion of Dewey’s account of intelligent action in politics in Chaps. 3, 4 and 5. The practical character of political judgment is well conceptualized in Steinberger (1993, 2018).

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2007, 170). Arendt’s political thought is oriented towards an ideal of human plurality and freedom that requires equal respect for all citizens’ capabilities to act politically, involving the faculty of reflective–aesthetic judgment: the imagination of new rules and ways of acting that relates to a sense of community. Thus, when we apply Arendt’s normative conception of the political and her account of political judgment to the question of how to justify democracy’s trust in ordinary people’s political judgments, this justification can only refer to horizontal equality. Arendtian theories of political judgment share the sentiment with many contemporary theories of democracy that considerations about the epistemic quality of political judgments and the application of epistemic concepts to politics is a category mistake—the political and the epistemic are distinct categories, and hence to talk about an epistemic dimension in politics is beside the point. As such, truth for Arendt is the exact opposite of politics, because it undermines the very fundamentals of political life: The trouble is that factual truth, like all other truth, peremptorily claims to be acknowledged and precludes debate, and debate constitutes the very essence of political life. The modes of thought and communication that deal with truth, if seen from the political perspective, are necessarily domineering; they don’t take into account other people’s opinions, and taking these into account is the hallmark of all strictly political thinking. (Arendt 2006, 241)

Hence, the reason why democracy and truth are mutually exclusive is that democracy is about fostering pluralism and political freedom, and thereby enabling a pluralistic society, while truth, in contrast, is not at all about respecting pluralism and difference or about tolerance, but about authoritatively separating falsities from truths. While democracy is pluralistic, truth is monistic. Part of what makes a political system and a society respectful of freedom and justice is their respect for pluralism and diversity. Democracy is about including and respecting opinion (doxa); truth is about separating truth from falseness and about excluding the latter. Arendt feared that the adamant nature of truth is antithetical to the freedom-enabling function of political judgment, as it demands total compliance, allows the mind too little liberty of action, and purges dialogue of all diversity of opinion, thereby drastically reducing its richness. Hence, rather than presuming accepted standards according to which we could adjudicate between citizens’ differing judgments, Arendt foregrounds imagination and the invention of new rules and patterns of collective action. Her theoretical framework of thinking about political judgment in the context of democracies through the lens of aesthetics provides a compelling account of a significant aspect of the texture of modern democratic citizenship. In particular, her framework opens up a view on the importance of affection, imagination, and creativity for democracy and democratic freedom, and, more generally, on the unavoidability of a qualitative–aesthetic dimension of human experience and action. These are both aspects of democratic life that cannot be passed over in a normative reflection on democracy. However, the main problem in taking an exclusively aesthetic perspective on democracy is that it ignores the importance of the epistemic aspects of democratic citizenship. Arendt’s identification of political judgment with reflective–aesthetic judgment has been criticized as being overtly non-cognitive and reliant on the

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faculty of feeling and sentiment rather than reason, and, as I will argue in more detail in Chap. 4, I generally agree with this assessment.7 The main reason why Arendt keeps epistemic considerations at bay in the context of democracy has to do with her conception of the political as a sui generis sphere of human action and interaction, normatively cut off from other realms of collective life. However, by singling out the political as a unique and entirely separate realm of human conduct and action, her conception of the political falls short of a fundamental intuition that we have about democratic politics, namely that we normally expect politics to yield ­decisions that are not made randomly and without any good reason but rather are based on judgments about the comparative worth of various alternatives. What interests me about the aesthetic theory of political judgment and the epistemic theory of democracy is that each contains key elements of an account of democratic citizenship and political judgment that are lacking in the other. In other words, each paradigm foregrounds an important dimension of modern democracies—the epistemic dimension and the creative–imaginative–aesthetic dimension— but does so at the expense of the other. Thus, both convey a one-dimensional picture of democratic politics and democratic citizenship: democratic politics is either taken to be a means to realize an ideal of pluralism and freedom by imagining the new, or taken to be a means to attain political truth. However, this picture is a distorted and abridged reflection of how the tension between truth (correctness) and equality (recognizing pluralism and individuality) in democratic societies and politics takes effect (and how it might be one of the key factors that gives rise to the crisis of contemporary democracies), and of how it challenges democratic theorists to model democracy and democratic citizenship accordingly. Modeling democracy and democratic citizenship accordingly calls instead for an account of democracy and democratic citizenship that involves, first, the assumption of a dual egalitarianism (a vertical and a horizontal axis) and, second, the assumption that the two forms of egalitarianism sometimes come into conflict and thus that the tension between the two values cannot be completely resolved. I suggest that John Dewey’s pragmatism offers such an account of democracy and democratic citizenship. I argue that a  Deweyan–pragmatist perspective on political judgments offers a third way between a purely aesthetic conception of political judgments on the one hand and a purely epistemic conception of democracy on the other. Dewey’s rich philosophical thought offers an account of democracy that incorporates and combines both dimensions of democracy—the aesthetic–moral and the epistemic—in a way that echoes, but also significantly modifies, many aspects of the epistemic and aesthetic theories of democracy, and that recognizes the potential tensions between vertical and horizontal equality. By engaging with Arendtian theories of political judgment and epistemic theories of 7  According to Zerilli (2016), Arendt did indeed reject the concept of Truth (with a capital T) in politics, but allowed a public notion of truth to play a role there. Zerilli identifies this public notion with the Socratic truth of opinion (with a lower case t). In Chap. 4 I discuss, and ultimately reject, this public notion of truth in the context of my presentation of the Arendtian framework of political judgment in relation to Dewey’s notion of judgment.

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democracy, this book develops an alternative response—derived from Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy—to the problem of political judgment in democracy. The response revolves around a view of judgment that includes a key role for epistemic values and virtues, while making clear the potential and limits of this view against the background of the qualitative–aesthetic aspects of human conduct and democratic citizenship. I will construct a Deweyan theory of political judgment that is part of a larger argument that Dewey makes on behalf of democracy. This larger argument for democracy is based on an epistemic pillar and an ethical–moral pillar. The epistemic pillar (his theory of political judgment) is constituted by an epistemology that is rooted in Dewey’s holistic account of experience, which conceptualizes the act of knowing as something that is continuous with a qualitative–aesthetic layer of experience. In other words, because the epistemic and the aesthetic are bound up in Dewey’s notion of experience, the epistemic elements of his argument for democracy are bound up with an account of the aesthetic–qualitative dimension of human experience, action and cognition. Dewey’s larger argument for democracy acknowledges the tension between vertical and horizontal equality as a tension between the moral and the epistemic dimensions of democracy, yet his theory of political judgment also reflects a tension internal to the epistemic dimension of Deweyan pragmatism: the tension between fixing a belief as true or correct and allowing the possibility that a belief might be wrong or inadequate. This possibility arises not only because of a fallibilist epistemic process of inquiry but also because of the openness and potentiality of the qualitative immediacy of human experience. Dewey’s accounts of judgment and democracy reflect both these tensions and bring them into a dynamic relationship.

1.3  Dewey’s Pragmatist Alternative The question of how to justify democracy’s trust in ordinary people’s political judgments also concerned Dewey in his (political) philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century. His main political–philosophical treatise on democracy, The Public and its Problems, was published in 1927 in the midst of a long-lasting crisis of democracy between two world wars that was comparable to today’s crisis of democracy. Dewey saw it as his philosophical task to articulate and defend the ideal of democracy and its trust in ordinary people’s political judgments, but he acknowledged that “the democratic road is the hard one to take,” as he stated in Freedom and Culture (Dewey 1939, LW 12, 154), because “it is the road which places the greatest burden of responsibility on the greatest number of human beings” (ibid.). This burden of responsibility is partially constituted by citizens’ epistemic responsibility to make the right judgments, because democracy’s ability to act reliably in taking up relevant problems and finding adequate solutions refers back to the critical habits and sensibilities of individual citizens. Hence, the question of whether democracies and their citizens are in fact good at making the right judgments and decisions

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pertains not only to democracy’s constitution and institutions but also, and maybe most importantly, to the culture of democracy: the critical habits and sensibilities of the citizenry. What, then, is Dewey’s justification for democracy’s trust in ordinary people’s political judgments? As I said before, his justification is both epistemic and moral. The epistemic elements of Dewey’s argument for democracy are twofold.8 First, he argued that social, political, and economic inequalities come at an epistemic cost, because entrenched and permanent hierarchies and distributions of privilege will inevitably render the perspectives of the privileged on society and its problems distorted and hence inadequate. Second, good political judgment requires democratic conditions. The moral element of his argument for democracy relates to what he calls “growth”, which denotes the flourishing of the human individual and at the same time uses egalitarian terms: everybody should be able to grow. In other words, whereas the first two elements of the argument normatively lay out the ideal of democracy on a vertical axis of equality by arguing for equal epistemic authority, the third element, growth, lays it out on a horizontal axis of equality. The Deweyan case for democracy thus rests on a dual egalitarianism: epistemic and moral. The upshot is not that the tension between the ideal of equal respect and the correctness-­ ideal can be dissolved completely, but rather that, while the tension will always persist to a certain extent, it can be brought into a productive relationship on a theoretical level within a neo-Deweyan model of political judgment. To develop the epistemic elements of Dewey’s argument for democracy, the book constructs a theory of political judgment that takes elements of the epistemic theories of democracy and aspects of Arendt’s theories of political judgment and weaves them together with features of Dewey’s pragmatism into a pragmatic theory of political judgment. I present this pragmatist theory of political judgment in Chaps. 3, 4 and 5. These chapters situate Dewey’s notion of judgment in a larger process of inquiry that relies on an account of intelligent action permeated by aesthetic–qualitative as well as reflective experience. With Dewey we can conceptualize political action, like all other forms of action, as being based on the notion of experience, which encapsulates both aesthetic and epistemic dimensions of perceiving, interpreting and controlling our environment. I will argue that Dewey thought of judgments as emerging from a conception of inquiry that integrates both aesthetic and epistemic conditions of experience, and that he should have thought of judgments as being oriented towards an epistemic ideal of “getting it right” (despite his own reservations in that regard). His concept of inquiry offers a fallibilist view of knowledge that pictures knowledge as situated and perspectival, and as inescapably intertwined with social processes of justification, problem-based solution-finding, and, in the context of social and political inquiries, explication, interpretation, and criticism of experiences and perspectives. Such a view holds that knowledge emerges from local environments and is situated within historical, social, and physical contexts. It further sees knowing as a

 On this see Festenstein (2019).

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functional, mediating activity that occurs at problematic moments within a larger, more immediate realm of qualitative experience, and a fallibilist view of knowledge rejects a priori truths. Because of the fallible nature and situational origins of knowledge, the process of knowledge acquisition is inherently a social one. This implies that our search for knowledge will tend to be more successful if we rely on pooled, social (communicative) intelligence than if we do not. By virtue of these methodological commitments in epistemology, pragmatism shares its problem-based epistemology with democracy. Against the background of this conception of inquiry and experience, I will use Dewey’s own juridical metaphor to present the process of inquiry in terms of a trial by jury, and the resulting judgment as a verdict. Dewey thought of judgments as being a form of action, but a special form of human action: namely an intelligent, controlled form of inferential action. Forming judgments as the outcome of inquiry-­ processes is thus the result of a specific epistemic form of activity, namely judging. What moves us towards doubt, inquiry, and judgment, according to Dewey’s pragmatism, is not a skeptical concern that our beliefs would withstand all conceivable objections and contradictions, but rather a sentiment that our habits are incoherent with a particular situation. Doubt is based on a subjective feeling that moves us to inquiry; inquiry, however, is something super-subjective and social, and then also linguistic and cognitive. Insofar as inquiry starts with a doubt, judgment is important for making this doubt legitimate and for making a claim for the best way to resolve it. Doubt is to be understood in a pragmatic sense as a hybrid emotional and cognitive response to an incoherent and unstable situation, and judgment represents an attempt to come to terms cognitively with doubt. In other words, Dewey’s metaphysics and his epistemology integrate the aesthetic–qualitative and the epistemic into one account of human cognition and action. This is why his pragmatism is so attractive for the task of this book. It acknowledges the differences between affection and aesthetics on the one hand and cognition and knowledge on the other, but it conceptualizes this within a unitary and holistic account of action and cognition that locates these differences on a continuum rather than on either side of an unbridgeable divide. While Dewey’s theory of judgment prescribes in generic terms what it means to cope successfully with the uncertainties and indeterminateness of our experiences in all realms of human action and interaction, it is especially apt for elucidating both the aesthetic and the epistemic dimension of judgment in the context of political and social democracy. Against the background of the reconstruction of Dewey’s theory of judgment, I go on to ask, by way of engaging with Hannah Arendt’s theory of political judgment, how Deweyan pragmatism would understand the concept of political judgment. Dewey’s understanding of judgments (in terms of the analogy between judgments as the outcomes of inquiry processes and judicial judgments as the outcomes of trials) resembles Kant’s understanding of judgments, and Kant’s theory of judgment was the primary point of reference for Arendt’s aesthetic account of political judgment. Arendt identified political judgments with Kantian aesthetic (reflective) judgments, and we can point to the similarities between this understanding of political judgment and Dewey’s notions of judgment and inquiry by stressing

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the affective and aesthetic dimensions of Dewey’s notion of experience. Arendt was certainly right to point out the specific circumstances of (democratic) politics, and to separate this area from other areas of human action and interaction. She was right to hold that political and social problems and solutions are essentially incalculable—democracy is not like algorithmic reasoning that is capable of producing stable mathematical or logical truths and knowledge, nor is it like science that can produce truths and knowledge that have been repeatedly tested in a controlled environment and have found acceptance in a scientific community. However, while democracy is neither algorithmic reasoning nor scientific experimentalism, it still operates through judgments that are, according to Dewey, the products of an antecedent epistemic inquiry-process and hence are also epistemic. Conceiving political judgments in this epistemic sense is appropriate when considering that the problems democracy needs to solve through decision-making are mainly of a social and non-technical nature: going to war, wealth accumulation, gun laws, social housing, oppression, systemic racism, etc. Ideally, what democracy is good at producing, then, is neither mathematical nor scientific truths or knowledge (although it sometimes needs to take those truths and knowledge into account), but social truths or knowledge: self-knowledge about “us” as a society, about the structures of how we relate to one another, and about the plurality and diversity of social reality. Solving social problems through politics is not an instrumental application of well-defined means to given and predefined ends, but a complex and diverse endeavor that again and again should ask about the appropriateness of both the means and the ends; that is, it should ask not only about the solutions to given problems and whether they are the best solutions possible, but also, and importantly, about the ends themselves—which problems do we want politics to solve in the first place? Hence, while the reflection about the means and the ends appropriate to social problems is neither algorithmic nor scientific, the pragmatist perspective offered in this book holds that it is still possible to come to terms with them in a form of social and political inquiry. This kind of pragmatism understands democracy as a special form of inquiry, namely political inquiry that involves political judgments. But how exactly are political judgments epistemic from this Deweyan perspective? In Chap. 5 I will argue that the epistemic functions of political judgments become evident within political inquiry at the stage of detecting and construing social and political problems and at the stage of coming to an overall judgment about the policy proposals for these problems. I present this argument by discussing the nature of and differences between these two functions of political judgment. Taking my cue from Dewey’s metaphor of thinking about judgments in juridical terms, I suggest that we can, to a limited extent, understand political judgment in a democracy as being related to the process of reaching a verdict in court, and that lay juries can serve as a proxy for how ordinary citizens carry out this function of judging. However, an epistemic understanding of the political judgments of ordinary citizens in democracies has to go beyond the judicial interpretation, as political judgment is not just about meting out justice according to pre-established laws, rules, and values, but more fundamentally about making normative judgments about

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these laws, rules, and values. Thus, an adequate epistemic account of political judgment needs to take into account the normative orientation of political judgment, in that making political judgments also involves judging values and norms against the background of a qualitative dimension of experience. By way of relating Dewey’s conception of social and political inquiry to critical social epistemology and debates about epistemic injustice, I suggest that a structure of social interaction and reflection that foregrounds the qualities of attentiveness, articulation, and exchange offers a suitable way of accounting for the genuinely political context of getting judgments right. This theory of political judgment does not create a comprehensive epistemic justification of democracy. While it follows from my analysis that we have good reason to assume that a democracy is better at collecting and generating good political judgments than are competing alternatives (like a monarchy, an oligarchy, a meritocracy, an aristocracy, an enlightened dictatorship, etc.), founding the legitimacy of democracy on its ability to yield correct judgments would require a disproportionate amount of certainty about its capacity to achieve these goals, and would ignore the experience we have gathered over the course of history that shows that the epistemic performance of democracies is ultimately imperfect, fragile, and worthy of improvement. From this Deweyan perspective, there is no need to abandon the assumption of an epistemic dimension in democracy in order to reject the following theses: that a political judgment needs to get it right in order to be a legitimate part of the process; that if a judgment gets it right, it sufficiently qualifies as a relevant judgment in politics; and that if a judgment gets it both right and is relevant it sufficiently qualifies as a judgment that should be accepted. In other words, to hold that epistemic considerations should play a valuable role in democratic inquiry does not amount to a position in which we are forced, for example, to accept correctness as a sufficient condition for acceptability.9 I believe, furthermore, that my construction of a Deweyan theory of political judgment and my reconstruction of Dewey’s larger argument for democracy suggest that what matters about epistemology politically is not so much a remote ideal of political truth (pace epistemic theories of democracy), but rather the substantive material and immaterial egalitarian conditions that enable the political contestation and objection that Dewey’s vision of democracy demands. However, political contestation and objection are valuable for Dewey not just because they functionally safeguard freedom and pluralism or because they facilitate the world-building potential of political judgment (pace aesthetic theories of political judgment), but also—and importantly—because they have a strong melioristic and progressive character in

9  In other words, knowledge, information and truth are not sufficient bases for taking political action. Today’s growing reliance on data and information to organize private and public lives seems to suggest a specific nexus between epistemology and politics, namely that information, not authority, is the basis for action. This relies not only on a reductionist account of knowledge, but also discounts the non-epistemic modes of political authority like accountability, representation, etc.

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inquiry, as they enable judgments to be made that aim to get problems and solutions right on the basis of a normative inquiry about ends and values.

***

Many scholars in political and social philosophy and theory in general, and philosophical pragmatism in particular, have engaged with some of the problems that I take on in this book. In the light of this, I ought to declare that I am indebted to, and have learnt a great deal from, the work of pragmatist scholars who discuss the epistemic implications of democratic citizenship from a pragmatist perspective.10 This book seeks to contribute to this literature by relying on an interpretation of Dewey’s theoretical and social and political philosophy that sees its two main goals as “intelligiz[ing] practice” (Eldridge 1998, 87) and redefining democracy (Westbrook 1993). Thus, by writing this book I hope to be able to contribute to the ongoing pragmatic turn in political theory and to the growing literature in political philosophy that employs pragmatism as a source for its reflections. Having said that, in referring to Dewey’s pragmatism I do not claim to do justice either to his entire philosophy or to “pragmatism” in general, and my account of some of his key philosophical arguments and ideas might not always accurately reflect his words or intentions, but my interest is systematic rather than historical: I take some key elements of Dewey’s philosophy and apply them to the questions of what political judgment is and why democracy’s trust in ordinary citizens’ political judgments is justified.

10  These include, in particular, Elizabeth Anderson (2006), James Bohman (2000, 2004, 2010, 2012), Matthew Festenstein (1997, 2001, 2004, 2008, 2010, 2019), Roberto Frega (2012, 2019), Jack Knight and James Johnson (2011), Colin Koopman (2009), Alexander Livingston (2017), José Medina (2012), Gregory Pappas (2008, 2016, 2017), and Justo Serrano Zamora (2017). On a slightly different but related note, within the pragmatist debate about democracy I would locate my Deweyan account of political judgment in democracy between the neo-Peircean epistemic justification of democracy on the one hand (Misak 2000, 2004; Talisse 2007) and Richard Rorty’s utopian vision of an aesthetized liberal democracy on the other hand (c.f. Rorty 1989, 1991). Just as I see my account as an alternative third way between epistemic theories of democracy and aesthetic theories of political judgments, I see it as a pragmatic alternative between Rorty and the neo-Peirceans. While the neo-Peircean epistemic arguments for democracy share key elements with my Deweyan account of political theory, they are closer to the bold but unconvincing claims of epistemic democrats with regard to the justifiability of democracy in epistemic terms (in Chap. 6 I discuss in detail the similarities and differences between my account and the neoPeircean account). In some ways, Rorty’s trust in an ethos of solidarity and the anti-foundationalist effects of aesthetic expressions within his conception of a liberal utopia is the pragmatist equivalent of Arendt’s visions of a radically pluralized politics (c.f. Phillips 2015, Chap. 3).

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1.4  Plan of the Book The book is divided into two parts and nine chapters in total. The first part constructs a Deweyan theory of political judgment as an answer to the problem of judgment in democracy and as an alternative to the epistemic and aesthetic theories of democracy. The second part discusses and situates this theory in the context of recent developments in democratic theory. In Chap. 2, which follows this one, I expand on my discussion of epistemic theories applied to the problem of how to justify democracy’s trust in ordinary people’s political judgments. In that chapter I argue that epistemic theories of democracy tend to make either underdeveloped or inadequate ontological, epistemological, and political assumptions about social reality, human cognition, and democratic citizenship, rendering their theoretical framework and arguments unfit for the problem of democratic judgment. In the second part of the chapter I lay out the preliminaries of an account of the epistemic dimensions of democracy that offers an alternative theory of democracy to purely epistemic theories; this alternative theory is critically informed by John Dewey’s pragmatism and will guide me throughout the rest of the book. I introduce a Deweyan perspective on the epistemic dimension of democracy by presenting the way in which a pragmatist perspective in general, and the Deweyan conceptions of democracy and epistemology in particular, can avoid some of the most fundamental problems of the epistemic theories of democracy. The chapter introduces three key elements of a Deweyan argument for democracy. The first is a focus on diversity of experiences and perspectives as an epistemic resource in constructing political problems and solutions, which preconditions the argument that equality and inclusion tend to be conditions that make democratic judgments and decisions better. The second is a focus on judgment as a form of cognitive action that occurs within a process of inquiry and that takes place against the background of experiences that are qualitatively saturated. The third is the acknowledgement that democratic politics (even under ideal circumstances) involves trade-offs between equality and inclusion on the one hand and the desire for better judgments and decisions on the other, without offering a clear-cut criterion for how to resolve these trade-offs in the abstract. In Chaps. 3, 4 and 5 I explain my Deweyan theory of political judgment. In Chap. 3 I reconstruct Dewey’s conception of judgment as being situated in a larger process of inquiry that is permeated by both aesthetic–qualitative and reflective experience. In Chap. 4 I relate this conception of judgment to Arendt’s conception of political judgment and discuss the similarities and differences between the two—a discussion that will set up the Deweyan account of political judgment, which is the subject of Chap. 5. In that chapter I argue that the Deweyan account of political judgment consists of two types of judgments: judicial judgments and normative judgments. The first type of judgment suggests that we can understand political judgment in democracies as being related to the process of reaching a verdict in court, and that lay juries can serve as a proxy for how ordinary citizens exert this function of judging. The latter type of judgment suggests that making

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political judgments is, furthermore, about making judgments about values and ends. I relate this type of judgment to Dewey’s conception of social and political inquiry that suggests a structure of social interaction and reflection foregrounding the qualities of attentiveness, articulation, and exchange as a way of accounting for the genuinely political context of getting normative judgments about social and political problems right. Chapter 6 consists of two parts. The first part summarizes the Deweyean argument for democracy. The argument consists broadly of three elements: (i) The epistemic costs of social, political and economic inequalities; (ii) The requirement of democratic conditions for good political judgment; and (iii) Growth as the final end of social and political organization. Dewey’s epistemic argument for democracy (elements i and ii) implies that democratic inquiry is good not only at helping to extract people’s diverse, ready-made knowledge but also at letting people’s diverse knowledge-claims—based on their experiences, perspectives, and judgments— become operative in a process of communicative intervention. The result of this intervention is that solutions to collectively reconstructed public problems emerge that not only are democratically secure but that are, in general, more appropriate for the task of settling doubt and solving problems. The epistemic value of diversity in political inquiry partly derives from the value of mutual communicative engagement; if appropriate procedural conditions apply, mutual communicative engagement is most effective when the participation is most diverse. By establishing vertical equality (equality of epistemic authority) and by including many diverse perspectives in the inquiry, an inquiry tends to give rise to individual and collective judgments of higher epistemic quality. What seems like a contradiction in terms— that by introducing more subjectivity, more perspectives, more diversity, and dissent, we arrive at stronger individual and collective judgments—turns out to be a key element to a proper interpretation of the idea that democracy can be interpreted as a set of institutions and practices with problem-solving qualities. However, because vertical equality cannot under all circumstances (including the ideal circumstances of Deweyan inquiry) be maintained for epistemic reasons, Dewey’s argument for democracy is founded on a second leg, which he calls growth and which pertains to horizontal equality, and I will discuss this in detail. While the first two elements constitute epistemic reasons for vertical equality in democracy, the moral ideal of growth constitutes a moral reason for horizontal equality, and all three elements together constitute a conception of democracy that combines both vertical and horizontal equality. The second part of the chapter contrasts Dewey’s argument with an alternative pragmatic epistemic argument for democracy that has been pursued by neo-Peircean thinkers Robert Talisse and Cheryl Misak. I will show that the neo-Deweyan conception is preferable to the neo-Peircean conception. My criticism will particularly focus on how the neo-Peircean conception both narrows the idea of democracy down to its epistemic dimension and narrows the epistemic dimension down to the holding of true beliefs, thereby not only neglecting other dimensions of democratic politics, but also failing to do justice to Peirce himself (let alone Dewey) and to the way in which pragmatists use concepts such as doubt, experience, human cognition, inquiry, and judgment.

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As Chap. 6 makes clear, diversity is a key term that does a major part of the “epistemic work” in this Deweyan account of democratic judgment. Chapter 7 clarifies how this account understands diversity and how the account contrasts and overlaps with deliberative and epistemic theories of democracy that assign a central role in democratic procedures to diversity. I present the idea of thinking about the epistemic benefit of diversity in connection with social inquiry in terms of reducing the risk of cognitive distortions and injustices insofar as diverse perspectives and judgments potentially work as corrective or compensating sources. In the second part of the chapter I take up Dewey’s suggestion in The Public and its Problems that the “Great Community” should be seen as the entity that can best coordinate democratic interaction in a way that brings about the learning effects in political inquiry; this interaction should arise on the basis of the inclusion of experimental and perspective diversity according to Dewey’s social epistemology and his conception of social and political inquiry. However, I suggest that Dewey’s notion of “publics”— the basic collective units of democratic interaction—is a more adequate way of conceptualizing democratic interaction than his own favored way of theorizing it, which gives priority to the local community over other forms of dispersed and diverse political associations. In Chap. 8 I start with the observation that the neo-Deweyan conception of political judgment and the arguments on pragmatist epistemology and democracy theory developed so far in the book seem to align with the recent so-called systemic turn in deliberative democracy. One key implication of the systemic turn is that deliberative democracy needs to include a diversity of types of communication and practices that was previously dismissed by classical accounts. This implication seems like a natural extension of the argument, developed in the previous chapters, that a diversity of perspectives in democratic inquiries has positive epistemic effects on the quality of problem formulations and problem-solving proposals. Moreover, Dewey’s concept of fragmented “publics” seems to capture the idea of the systemic turn of thinking about deliberation on the level of societies as a whole as a process of communication between decentralized parts of an overarching deliberative system. In trying to develop a model of how successful deliberation could be possible on the macro-level of mass democracies, the systemic turn also promises an answer to Dewey’s basic question in The Public and its Problems, namely how to establish a culture of democratic interaction that possess a strong ability to identify and solve public problems in the face of a factual fragmentation of the public sphere in dispersed publics within mass democracies. By way of discussing three problems internal to the systemic turn itself and the applicability of this turn to Deweyan democracy, I conclude that it does not provide a good answer. In the concluding Chap. 9, I discuss some institutional implications of Dewey’s epistemic argument for democracy—that including diverse types of knowers into the whole process of making democratic decisions is an epistemic imperative. How can we think of institutionalizing social and political inquiry as the experimental collective activity Dewey imagined it to be? I discuss this question by outlining a typology of political knowers and a typology of what the inclusion of these knowers

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would ideally look like on the level of political institutions (policy-cycle), and I relate this to Dewey’s pattern of social and political inquiry. By tapping into the pragmatist critical social epistemology of Dewey that I have developed in the previous chapters, the chapter sets out, more specifically, to answer the following questions: Who are the relevant knowers in a democracy? What are the differences between them, and what are their different roles and functions in the process of political inquiry and political judging? How do these knowers relate to each other? What, for example, is the right relationship between ordinary citizens and experts? And, most importantly, how can we square the view that democracies need to allow some inequalities in epistemic authority with the moral element of Dewey’s argument for democracy, which refers to the normative principle of the equal authority of citizens’ political judgments?

References Anderson, Elizabeth. 2006. The Epistemology of Democracy. Episteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology 3 (1): 8–22. Arendt, Hannah. 2006. Between Past and Future. New York: Penguin. ———. 2007. In The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn. New York: Schocken. Bohman, James. 2000. Public Deliberation: Pluralism, Complexity, and Democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 2004. Realizing Deliberative Democracy as a Mode of Inquiry: Pragmatism, Social Facts, and Normative Theory. The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 18 (1): 23–43. ———. 2010. Participation Through Publics: Did Dewey Answer Lippmann? Contemporary Pragmatism 7 (1): 49–68. ———. 2012. Democratic Experimentalism: From Self-Legislation to Self-Determination. Contemporary Pragmatism 9 (2): 273–285. Brennan, Jason. 2016. Against Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Brown, Wendy. 2015. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Caplan, Bryan. 2011. The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Chambers, Simone. 2018. Against Democracy. By Jason Brennan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. Perspectives on Politics 16 (2): 503–505. Dahl, Robert. 1989. Democracy and Its Critics. New Haven: Yale University Press. Dewey, John. 1927. The Public and Its Problems, The Later Works, 1925–1953, 2. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. ———. 1939. Freedom and Culture. In The Later Works, 1925–1953, vol. 12, 63–188. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Eldridge, Michael. 1998. Transforming Experience: John Dewey’s Cultural Instrumentalism. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Festenstein, Matthew. 1997. The Ties of Communication: Dewey on Ideal and Political Democracy. History of Political Thought 18 (1): 104–124. ———. 2001. Inquiry as Critique: On the Legacy of Deweyan Pragmatism for Political Theory. Political Studies 49 (4): 730–748. ———. 2004. Deliberative Democracy and Two Models of Pragmatism. European Journal of Social Theory 7 (3): 291–306.

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———. 2008. John Dewey: Inquiry, Ethics and Democracy. In The Oxford Handbook of American Philosophy, ed. Cheryl Misak, 87–109. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2010. Pragmatism, Inquiry and Political Liberalism. Contemporary Political Theory 9: 25–44. ———. 2019. Does Dewey Have an ‘Epistemic Argument’ for Democracy? Contemporary Pragmatism 16 (2–3): 217–241. Frankfurt, Harry G. 2005. On Bullshit. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Frega, Roberto. 2012. Practice, Judgment, and the Challenge of Moral and Political Disagreement: A Pragmatist Account. Lanham: Lexington Books. ———. 2019. Pragmatism and the Wide View of Democracy. Cham: Springer. Knight, Jack, and James Johnson. 2011. The Priority of Democracy: Political Consequences of Pragmatism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Koopman, Colin. 2009. Pragmatism as Transition: Historicity and Hope in James, Dewey, and Rorty. New York: Columbia University Press. Landemore, Hélène. 2017. Beyond the Fact of Disagreement? The Epistemic Turn in Deliberative Democracy. Social Epistemology 31 (3): 277–295. List, Christian, and Robert E. Goodin. 2001. Epistemic Democracy: Generalizing the Condorcet Jury Theorem. Journal of Political Philosophy 9 (3): 277–306. Livingston, Alexander. 2017. Between Means and Ends: Reconstructing Coercion in Dewey’s Democratic Theory. American Political Science Review 111 (3): 522–534. Medina, José. 2012. The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Misak, Cheryl. 2000. Truth, politics, morality: Pragmatism and deliberation. New York: Routledge. ———. 2004. Making Disagreement Matter: Pragmatism and Deliberative Democracy. The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 18 (1): 9–22. Nussbaum, Martha. 2018. The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis. New York: Simon and Schuster. Pappas, Gregory. 2008. John Dewey’s Ethics: Democracy as Experience. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2016. John Dewey’s Radical Logic: The Function of the Qualitative in Thinking. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 52 (3): 435–468. ———. 2017. The Centrality of Dewey’s Lectures in China to His Socio-Political Philosophy. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 53 (1): 7–28. Phillips, Anne. 2015. The Politics of the Human. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Przeworski, Adam. 2019. Crises of Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rawls, John. 1993. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press. Richardson, Henry. 1997. Demoratic Intentions. In Deliberative Democracy – Essays on Reason and Politics, ed. James Bohman and William Rehg, 349–382. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rorty, Richard. 1989. Contingency, irony, and solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1991. The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy. In Objectivity, Relativism and Truth, ed. Richard Rorty, 175–196. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Runciman, David. 2018. How Democracy Ends. New York: Basic Books. Schwartzberg, Melissa. 2015. Epistemic Democracy and Its Challenges. Annual Review of Political Science 18: 187–203. Somin, Ilya. 2013. Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government Is Smarter. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Steinberger, Peter. 1993. The Concept of Political Judgment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2018. Political Judgment: An Introduction. Medford: Polity. Talisse, Robert. 2007. A Pragmatist Philosophy of Democracy. New York: Routledge. Urbinati, Nadia. 2019. Me the People: How Populism Transforms Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Westbrook, Robert. 1993. John Dewey and American Democracy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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Zamora, Justo Serrano. 2017. Articulating a Sense of Powers: An Expressivist Reading of John Dewey’s Theory of Social Movements. Transactions of the Charles S.  Peirce Society 53 (1): 53–70. Zerilli, Linda. 2016. A Democratic Theory of Judgment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Part I

A Pragmatist Theory of Democratic Political Judgment

Chapter 2

Democracy, Epistemology and Deweyan Pragmatism

Abstract  In this chapter I argue that theories of epistemic democracy tend to make either underdeveloped or inadequate ontological, epistemological, and political assumptions about social reality, human cognition, and democratic citizenship, rendering their theoretical framework and arguments unfit for the problem of democratic judgment. In the first part of the chapter I discuss and point out weaknesses of contemporary epistemic theories of democracy. In the second part of the chapter I lay out the preliminaries of an account of the epistemic dimensions of democracy that offers an alternative theory of democracy to purely epistemic theories; this alternative theory is critically informed by John Dewey’s pragmatism and will guide me throughout the rest of the book. I introduce a Deweyan perspective on the epistemic dimension of democracy by presenting the way in which a pragmatist perspective in general, and the Deweyan conceptions of democracy and epistemology in particular, can avoid some of the most fundamental problems of the theories of epistemic  democracy. The chapter introduces three key elements of a Deweyan argument for democracy. The first is a focus on diversity of experiences and perspectives as an epistemic resource in constructing political problems and solutions, which preconditions the argument that equality and inclusion tend to be conditions that make democratic judgments and decisions better. The second is a focus on judgment as a form of cognitive action that occurs within a process of inquiry and that takes place against the background of experiences that are qualitatively saturated. The third is the acknowledgement that democratic politics (even under ideal circumstances) involves trade-offs between equality and inclusion on the one hand and the desire for better judgments and decisions on the other, without offering a clear-cut criterion for how to resolve these trade-offs in the abstract. Keywords  Epistemic democracy · Pragmatist epistemology · Deweyan democracy · Political judgment

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 M. I. Räber, Knowing Democracy – A Pragmatist Account of the Epistemic Dimension in Democratic Politics, Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations 14, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53258-1_2

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In this chapter I argue that theories of epistemic democracy tend to make either underdeveloped or inadequate ontological, epistemological, and political assumptions about social reality, human cognition, and democratic citizenship, rendering their theoretical framework and arguments unfit for the problem of democratic judgment. In the first part of the chapter I discuss and point out weaknesses of contemporary theories of epistemic democracy. In the second part of the chapter I lay out the preliminaries of an account of the epistemic dimensions of democracy that offers an alternative theory of democracy to purely epistemic theories; this alternative theory is critically informed by John Dewey’s pragmatism and will guide me throughout the rest of the book. I introduce a Deweyan perspective on the epistemic dimension of democracy by presenting the way in which a pragmatist perspective in general, and the Deweyan conceptions of democracy and epistemology in particular, can avoid some of the most fundamental problems of the theories of epistemic democracy. The chapter introduces three key elements of a Deweyan argument for democracy. The first is a focus on diversity of experiences and perspectives as an epistemic resource in constructing political problems and solutions, which preconditions the argument that equality and inclusion tend to be conditions that make democratic judgments and decisions better. The second is a focus on judgment as a form of cognitive action that occurs within a process of inquiry and that takes place against the background of experiences that are qualitatively saturated. The third is the acknowledgement that democratic politics (even under ideal circumstances) involves trade-offs between equality and inclusion on the one hand and the desire for better judgments and decisions on the other, without offering a clear-cut criterion for how to resolve these trade-offs in the abstract.

2.1  The Epistemic Turn in Democratic Theory Despite the tendency of mainstream political philosophy not to talk about truth in connection with politics, in recent years there has been a growing interest in the epistemic dimension of democracy among some theorists of democracy. Epistemic democracy is a recent paradigm in democratic theory that values democratic decision-­making processes at least in part for their knowledge-producing potential and is defended in relation to this.1 Different versions of the epistemic account of democracy do exist, and we can point out the most salient differences across two dimensions. The first dimension concerns the difference between aggregative democracy and deliberative 1  My discussion of some contemporary theories of epistemic democracy is in no way exhaustive or comprehensive. For an extensive overview theories epistemic democracy see Landemore (2017) and Schwartzberg (2015). I discuss Landemore’s own epistemic argument for democracy in Chap. 7. Schwartzberg’s own suggestion to think about the epistemic dimension of democracy in terms of the concept of judgment bears resemblance to the Deweyan epistemic account of democracy presented in this book.

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democracy. I will limit my comments on this distinction to the ensuing discussion of an account of epistemic democracy that rests largely on the Condorcet Jury Theorem, which constitutes a defense of aggregative epistemic democracy. The second, more important, dimension concerns the differences and similarities in the versions’ underlying epistemologies and ontologies on which they implicitly or explicitly rely. Before discussing and comparing versions of the epistemic representation of democracy, we must address the fundamental premise shared by all theories of epistemic democracy. All versions of epistemic democracy directly or indirectly refer to a procedure-independent standard for the correctness or the rationality of the outcomes of the democratic decision-making process. Joshua Cohen characterized epistemic approaches as assuming (1) an independent standard of correct decisions—that is, an account of justice or of the common good that is independent of current consensus and the outcome of votes; (2) a cognitive account of voting—that is, the view that voting expresses beliefs about what the correct policies are according to the independent standard, not personal preferences for policies; and (3) an account of decision making as a process of the adjustment of beliefs, adjustments that are undertaken in part in light of the evidence about the correct answer that is provided by the beliefs of others. (Cohen 1986, 34)

The first element of this definition of epistemic democracy implies that regardless of the type of epistemology on which an epistemic account for democracy is based, the epistemic case for democracy conceptually requires the adoption of a process-­ independent standard of correctness of the decision made—otherwise it is difficult to see why we should have an epistemic account of democracy, an account that is concerned about the epistemic quality of political decisions. Certainly we need to know how epistemic theories define “correctness” and how they conceive of processes that bring about such correct decisions in order to give further meaning to epistemic approaches to democracy. What they mean by correctness depends on what kind of epistemological and ontological positions they employ. The spectrum of such positions ranges from thick claims (such as that democracy reliably produces true outcomes or that it can track the rational and true argument in debate), over hybrid versions (which hold that democratic decision-making is good at avoiding bad outcomes), to thinner claims (which attribute epistemic value to the process itself because the process itself is designed on idealized values such as impartiality, fairness, equality, autonomy, general interest, common good, transparency, reciprocity, etc.). Dividing up the existing epistemic accounts of democracy according to how thick or thin their claim about the epistemic attribute of democracy are, yields the following picture. At one end of the thick-thin-spectrum we find two thick accounts of epistemic democracy, which are responsible for initiating the recent discussion: on the one hand conceptions that mainly rely on the aggregative power of democratic voting (relying on the Condorcet Jury Theorem), and on the other hand highly idealized conceptions of deliberative democracy ([early] Habermas-inspired theories of deliberation). While both types of conceptions are appealing, both have their limits and shortcomings, as I will now try to show. Note that this overview of the theories of epistemic democracy does not

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cover the entire literature on the subject. Moreover, the overview itself remains intentionally patchy, with the exception of my discussion of the still influential deliberative paradigm of reflection on democracy.

2.1.1  Truth by Aggregation Christian List and Robert Goodin (2001) interpret the epistemic account of democracy in the following way: For epistemic democrats, the aim of democracy is to ‘track the truth’. For them, democracy is more desirable than alternative forms of decision-making because, and insofar as, it does that. One democratic decision rule is more desirable than another according to that same standard, so far as epistemic democrats are concerned. (ibid., 277)

They build their case for epistemic democracy on the formal Condorcet Jury Theorem (CJT), which reveals that the correct outcome is most likely to win a majority of votes under certain formal conditions—democratic decision-making as a truth-tracking device. The CJT holds that if (a) voters are confronted with two options, (b) if they vote independently of each other, (c) if they do not vote according to personal preferences but judge of what the right solution to the problem should be, and (d) if they have a greater than .5 probability of being right in average, then the probability that voters will choose the correct alternative increases the more voters there are (and the correct outcome approaches 1 if the number of voters approaches infinity). As the CJT has been proven to be mathematically sound, it seems to make a compelling case for the epistemic value of democracy. But theories of epistemic democracy that rely on the CJT have some serious drawbacks, as they are too thick in one sense and too thin in another. They are too thin in that they are based only on a mathematical theorem that makes some formal assumptions and gives no explanation of what is meant by “truth-tracking” or what it would mean if political decisions were right or wrong. On the other hand, they are too thick, since they assume that correct or true results are the goal of democratic decision-making, regardless of how these outcomes are chosen, except for majority voting under some limited formal conditions. As seen before, one of these formal conditions is that citizens’ aggregated decisions need to accrue from citizens with an epistemic competence of more than .5 on average. But how do we know that citizens actually do make the correct decisions in at least half of the decisions they would take? How do we measure this, and what is the yardstick for measuring the correctness of any political decisions? It seems that we would need a third-personal epistemic authority in all political issues to make claims about the correct decision in accordance to some objects, facts or truths. Even if we would assume that we could actually

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identify the correct decision for all political decisions the CJT does not say anything about the nature of such a third-personal epistemic authority.2 This problem of the not specified third-personal epistemic authority is related to another problem that epistemic theories relying on the CJT have, namely that the theorem itself cannot capture the dynamic and experimental features of democracy’s epistemic functions—which are centerpieces of a Deweyan-pragmatist epistemic understanding of democracy (Anderson 2006). In democratic voting alone, majorities are often unable to foresee certain consequences of the policies they decide on, which is why we need to account for the fact that democratic institutions and processes are fallible and should be conceptualized in such a way that they can absorb the sensitivities and perspectives of those affected by political problems and policies. Dynamic and experimental modeling of democratic politics, on the other hand, captures the desirable function of ideal democratic institutions that provide feedback channels for collective learning about the consequences of policies determined by an antecedent social and political process.3 The CJT also does not provide a basis for explaining why people who disagree with the view adopted by the majority should change their minds once the outcome is final. In short, the CJT exaggerates the importance of voting for the democratic process. The crucial question for democracies is what options voters have and who decides on those options. The agenda-setting process that takes place before the election is epistemically more important than the act of voting itself. Such processes are not only about voting (if at all), but about a communicative exchange.

2.1.2  Truth by Deliberation While aggregative theories of epistemic democracy overlook the importance of communicative exchange for democratic politics, it is foregrounded in deliberative theories of democracy, which too can be considered theories of epistemic democracy.4 The origins of deliberative theories of democracy can be traced back to the German transcendental tradition of Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. I interpret both authors as defending an ideal deliberative procedure that provides an independent standard of correctness of actual political decision-making procedures and their results.

2  This line of argument against the CJT is extensively developed in David Estlund’s Democratic Authority (Estlund 2008, especially chapter 12). Estlund also shows that the CJT does not offer a convincing case for supposing the claim that democratic decision making tends to get things right, as it depends on the doubtful supposition that individual voters, considered independently, are better than chance knowers. 3  I outline the dynamic and experimental modeling of democratic politics in more detail in Chaps. 3 and 5 in the context of my discussion of Dewey’s conception of (social and political) inquiry. 4  Habermas explicitly acknowledged that the deliberative model of democracy implies an epistemic dimension (Habermas 2006).

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It may surprise the reader that I classify these transcendental thinkers as putting forward a thick epistemic account of democracy. It seems a contradiction to speak in one breath of the epistemic dimension of democracy, which deals with the process-­independent output dimension of collective decision-making, and the transcendental dimension, which is concerned with the conditions of possibility of the process of collective decision-making. However, this would be to construe a false dichotomy between epistemic accounts and deliberative-proceduralist accounts. Martí showed how deliberative democrats are implicitly committed to the acceptance of an independent standard of correctness, because, he argues correctly, participation in deliberation presupposes the acceptance of some inter-subjective criterion of the validity of other people’s claims, and this criterion “must be at least partially independent from the process and from the participant’s beliefs and desires” (Martí 2006, 4). Although today there are many different versions of deliberative democracy, they all share the conviction that political decision-making should be based on public reasoning among members of a democratic collective under conditions of political equality or fairness. The general normative idea of deliberative democracy is that an open, free and fair debate aimed at agreement and consensus will lead to a harmonic society where people do not live in disagreement but in cooperation with each other. Habermas contrasts his own deliberative theory with non-deliberative, elitist models of democracy by insisting that one of the problems of a concept of the rationality of democratic citizenship oriented towards economic rationality is that it is normatively insufficient. For Habermas, the problem with such models is that they assume that rational citizens are merely selfish strategists and that these citizens therefore have no sufficient reason to abide by the rules of democracy. This is a point Habermas makes in Between Facts and Norms (1998) against so-called realistic theories of democratic power in general. According to Habermas, realistic theories—e.g. Anthony Downs’ economic theory of democracy—falsely assume that they can explain how the individual interests of elites and citizens could provide them with good reasons for making their contribution to the normatively demanded legitimation game of liberal mass democracies. (ibid., 290)

However, Habermas argues, they cannot live up to their own demands. As they do not accept any normative criterion for measuring the legitimacy of institutions, politicians and policies, they set as the ultimate criterion the factual (tacit or explicit) acceptance by those who are ruled. But how do the participants justify their de facto acceptance of norms and policies just because a majority has decided so? Habermas insists that de facto acceptance is not a sufficient reason for citizens to participate in democratic processes: The public of citizens will hardly be moved to take part in the democratic process, or at least to tolerate it benevolently, as long as this public can be viewed only as the ideological plunder of competing parties. (ibid., 293f.)

A competitive democracy that functions only according to the mechanisms of economic rationality, political communication has no cognitive function, but only

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strategic functions to generate political acceptance for the political agendas and goals of the communicator. But if citizens see through the pseudo-argumentative structure of political advertising, what other reasons can they have for accepting the processes of democracy and its substance? They will only accept the processes of democracy and their substance, Habermas says, if the decision-making processes and their results can be perceived as fair and normatively legitimized (ibid., 295). Consequently, following Habermas, outcomes of democratic decision-making procedures can only be perceived as fair if these procedures are perceived as fair. Two important features of a Habermasian fair procedure are equality and rational justification. The discursive level of public discussion among equals is the most important variable for evaluating the legitimacy of outcomes of collective decisions (ibid., 304). The idea is this: An ideal procedure of deliberation that reflects the principles of equality and rational justification necessarily and sufficiently generates rational outcomes, which in turn means that the rationality of the outcome is determined by the ideality of the deliberative procedure: Deliberative politics acquires its legitimating force from the discursive structure of an opinion—and will—formation that can fulfill its socially integrative function only because citizens expect its results to have a reasonable quality. (ibid.)

This may sound like a purely proceduralist idea—the idea that the legitimacy or epistemic quality of any outcome of an ideal procedure solely depends on the very procedure by which the outcome comes about. But it is not. There is a sense in which Habermas’ interpretation of rational justification stands for a desirable state independently of the process through which it was reached—it is a social state that all have reasons to endorse. Ideal deliberation is the procedure that can assure that this ideal state is reached. As Bellamy has argued a ‘rational outcome’ for Habermas is a decision that respects what he regards as the criteria for a rational process—namely, one that respects a certain reading of civil, political and social rights that derive from his understanding of autonomy. (Bellamy 2006, xxxv)

The fundamental Habermasian idea is that a belief is justified if all participants of an unconstrained and free ideal discourse could accept it. Yet the principles which prove to be justified in such a discourse are those that mirror democratic values, which means that everybody must have an equal right be heard, that everybody has a right to gain recognition, and so on. This argument is circular, and it is a transcendental argument.5 Karl Otto Apel, an intellectual companion of Habermas, argued that circular arguments and justifications are only then inadequate if they are claimed to be a deductive proof, but not if they are transcendental arguments. In fact, Apel claims, transcendental arguments are only working because of their circularity—to justify a principle is exactly to show how it is always already presupposed (Apel 1990, 43). Since Kant (at the latest) the form of the transcendental argument looks like this: A is a necessary condition for the possibility of B—where then, given that B is the case, it logically follows

 Misak (2000) offers an extended discussion of why it is circular.

5

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that A must be the case too. Apel tried to show that the principles of the ideal political discourse are necessarily valid, namely that we can only consistently participate in public debate without committing a performative contradiction if we expect a rational consensus in debate, and if we assume that the discourse is guided by democratic principles. He held that it is always already presupposed a priori by every person who seriously argues […] that discourse is not merely one possible ‘language game’ among others but rather, as the only conceivable instance of justification and legitimization, is applicable to disputed claims to validity in all possible language games. (ibid., 45)

What this means for Apel is that one and the same person cannot consistently claim to take part in serious communication and at the same time deny that such communication necessarily has to take part in a process of deliberation that aims at consensus. The acts of this person would be performatively self-defeating the same way that the claim “I hereby assert that I do not exist” would be. Or, in other words, the claim “I hereby assert that I do not exist” has the same self-defeating status as “I hereby assert as true (i.e. inter-subjectively valid), that a consensus regarding that which I assert cannot be expected in principle” (ibid., 43). Just like I necessarily have to presuppose my existence in order to make the claim “I do not exist” I have to presuppose the principles of discourse ethics (which ultimately will lead to a true consensus) when taking part in any serious communication, including communication in a political context. The Habermasian version of the transcendental argument is tied up with Apel’s argument. It expresses the same idea, namely that the principles underlying an ideal discourse are a necessary condition for the possibility of communication—because communication is possible, those principles must be correct. Habermas states that anyone who seriously undertakes to participate in argumentation implicitly accepts by that very undertaking in general pragmatic presuppositions that have a normative content. (Habermas 1990, 197f.)

In other words, serious communication unavoidably is oriented toward understanding of each other. This kind of communicative action is distinctly and categorically different from strategic uses of language that aim at influencing the actions of other rational actors by rhetorical means only, without providing reasons. Hence, for Habermas, what we mean when we say that this or that is morally right or factually correct is that we could justify this claim in an ideal conversation. Simone Chambers illuminates this Habermasian claim like this: To believe something is right is to believe that we have good reasons to hold this position. To believe that we have good reasons entails the idea that given enough time, given interlocutors of goodwill, and given a constraint-free environment, everyone would come to the same conclusion as we have. Thus, impartial judgments are judgments that would gain universal agreement in an ideal communication community. (Chambers 1995, 233)

Within Habermas’ oeuvre we can roughly discern between the (early) Habermas of linguistic pragmatics and the ethical conception of the ideal speech situation on the one hand, and the (later) Habermas that tries to interpret this ethical and highly normative conception in sociological terms in order to be able to apply it to the

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circumstances of real political societies and actual processes of social communication. Indeed, already in The Theory of Communicative Action (1984) he makes a distinction between communicative rationality (that is the rational potential built into everyday speech) and communicative realities in modern complex societies. While communicative rationality demands strong social cooperation that is deeply consensual, Habermas admits that the circumstances of complex, pluralistic societies force us to relax these communicative demands. But it is clear that the guiding ideal in the background and the yardstick for measuring the deliberative quality of any such form of communication remains the ideal communicative situation. Here is Chambers again: Not just any conversation is a discourse. Conversations are more or less discursive to the extent that they approximate the ideal conditions of discourse. (Chambers 1995, 234)

The concessions regarding actual communicative circumstances made also later in Between Facts and Norms are best understood as subtractions from the ethical ideals that still dominate his views in the background. Thus, while Habermas acknowledges the gap that lies between an ideal discourse and its institutionalized realization in complex societies, he adheres also in the latter stages of his writings to a notion of the ideal conditions of discourse as the collective normative reference point of different discursive arenas. Although Apel’s and Hambermas’ interpretations of the transcendental argument are slightly different, Habermas follows Apel’s argument when he defines communicative action as non-strategic action that strives at consensual understanding. But this conception of communicative action is much too exclusive because it rules out so much of what communicative action actually is and can be. This is a problem for someone who wants to make a transcendental argument—and as I stated before, Habermas does make a transcendental argument. His transcendental argument gains its power of persuasion from the non-controversial claim that we all communicate and use language as a tool for speaking and uttering statements to others—a claim that even a skeptic cannot refute. By showing that and how these principles are conditions of the possibility for an uncontroversial assumption, a skeptic should be willing to accept the principles as vindicated. But because Habermas’ concept of communicative action is utterly demanding, the whole enterprise of construing a transcendental argument for the principles of discourse ethics and democracy is brittle. Habermas has a too narrow understanding of strategic communication and he has a too narrow understanding of communicative action. He defines strategic action ex negativo as non-communicative action, a distinction that also maps onto the difference between reasoned communicative action versus language use based on passion and affection. Non-communicative action (strategic action) is categorically different from communicative action for Habermas because the former implies a strong intention to manipulate people by means of language into believing a certain proposition, value, or policy, which ultimately helps the person performing the strategic action to reach an originally intended aim; and manipulation seems problematic because it seems to involve force and illegitimate power—the only

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force allowed for Habermas is the force of the better argument (which actually is no force at all, as reason is meant to be the opposite of force for him). Yet isn’t what we want in communicative action to convince and persuade the opponent by the force of an argument, not very unlike what some forms of strategic action entail? Many instances of language uses that we would have to dismiss as unwanted strategic action when measured by the Habermasian standards at the same time are forms of communicative action that too have the telos of reaching agreement. Rhetorical means of persuading and convincing are often not neatly separable from pure reasons. Often we find rhetorical means to fruitfully interplay with reasons inasmuch as they organize reasons in a convincing or persuading manner. In other words, communicative action is something human beings actually do, and we should expect, for example, the desiring and affective parts of experience to make up a legitimate part of communicative action.6 To sum up, Habermas’ epistemic conception of democratic deliberation proves to be insufficient, because it draws its argumentative force from the conditions of a too narrow ideal of communication and action—as occurring within an ideally unlimited, unconstrained and free argumentative discourse aiming at understanding. And it relies on a too narrow understanding of democratic politics, which is based on an exclusive concept of communicative action that rules out so much of what epistemically valuable communicative political action actually is or could be. Finding workable solutions to existing problems and making the right judgments in public debate are not exclusively functions of the harmonic pursuit of agreement and consensus, but also functions of various other forms of (communicative) political action.7

2.1.3  Pure Proceduralism While Habermasian conceptions and aggregative conceptions of epistemic democracy are located at the thick end of the thick-thin-spectrum—which maps how thick or thin the claim of existing accounts of epistemic democracy about the epistemic attribute of democracy is regarding the necessary process-independent standard of correctness—Fabienne Peter’s conception of epistemic democracy is located at the thin end. Peter has introduced an account of epistemic democracy that is promising from a pragmatist point of view, as she (tacitly) shares key insights of a pragmatist

6  Axel Honneth (1998) has made a similar point about Habermas. He argues that democratic action is not exhausted in a Habermasian ideal of political communication, because collective political processes of understanding and rationalization cannot be detached from a background of socially mediating problem-solving processes. In such problem-solving processes, inter-subjective speech is only part of a whole superordinate collective context of action, which must be organized “as the communal employment of individual forces to cope with a problem” viz. “a division of labor under conditions of justice”, in order for the process to be successful (ibid., 769; 780). 7  On this compare especially Chaps. 5 and 8.

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epistemology. She correctly grasps that pragmatist epistemology has a good explanation of the constructive function of deliberative decision-making insofar as it stresses the importance of broad inclusion and participation of diverse perspectives for effective problem solving: For Dewey […] people’s participation in the evaluation and testing of the results of social inquiry is necessary for the results to count as knowledge. (Peter 2011, 120)

In other words, without broad participation there is no social experimentation and hence no social and political knowledge. This understanding of pragmatist epistemology could serve Peter as a basis for supporting the ideal of democratic inclusion on epistemic grounds. However, instead she blames Dewey’s philosophy for being utilitarian in essence: [Dewey] thus has to assume that there are some shared goals that can give direction to the aim of problem-solving and inform the assessment of the consequences of different proposals—even if he grants that democratic procedures are necessary to help determine what these shared goals are. […] The focus on problem solving makes Dewey’s epistemology consequentialist even if not veritistic. (Peter 2011, 120f.)

Her judgment about Dewey is based on Alvin Goldman’s characterization of pragmatist epistemology in his book Knowledge in a Social World (Goldman 1999), where he calls pragmatist social epistemology “utility consequentialism” and characterizes it as “the view that social belief-causing practices should be evaluated by the amount of utility […] that they would produce” (Goldman 1999, 72). This assessment of the pragmatist epistemology is wrong, at least what concerns Peirce and Dewey; both were in an important sense consequentialists, but neither of them was consequentialist all the way down.8 Peter proposes an account of epistemic democracy that she calls “pure epistemic proceduralism” and that she presents as an alternative to accounts of epistemic democracy that are underpinned by (supposedly) veritistic or consequentialist epistemologies. The pure epistemic proceduralist conception of democracy according to Peter rejects the idea that a procedure-independent standard for the correctness of democratic decisions can provide a normative anchor for democratic legitimacy (Peter 2014).

Thus, she urges, in contrast to veritistic epistemology, it [proceduralist epistemology—MR] dispenses with the idea that a procedure-independent standard is necessary to assess the quality of the knowledge-­ producing practices. […] There is nothing beyond critically engaging with each other in transparent and non-authoritarian ways. (Peter 2011, 122; 124)

The most salient characteristic of pure epistemic proceduralism is that the epistemic value of democratic decision-making depends only on its procedural traits (ibid.). She claims that her proceduralist take on the question of democratic legitimacy and 8  Dewey, for example, develops his theory of moral deliberation in Human Nature and Conduct (Dewey 1922, MW 14) in explicit contrast to utilitarian moral theories. I lay out the reasons for why pragmatist epistemology is not purely consequentialist in further detail in the ensuing Chap. 3.

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justification is different from a Habermasian type of perfect or rational proceduralism. The distinction between perfect proceduralism and pure proceduralism goes back to Rawls (1999, 75): Whereas perfect or rational proceduralism (implicitly) assumes a procedure-independent criterion for what constitutes a desirable outcome and assumes that we can come up with a procedure that necessarily will provide the desired outcome, pure proceduralism does not assume such an independent criterion but instead assumes that there is a correct or fair procedure such that the outcome is likewise correct or fair, whatever it is, provided that the procedure has been properly followed. (ibid.)9

Peter discusses the example of how to improve an outcome of collective decision-­ making that is sexist (and thus biased), and her reasoning goes that a non-biased and fair procedure would ensure that all people affected by the decision are able to participate, which includes those opposed to sexism: If the procedure is genuinely fair, one would thus not expect a sexist proposal to go through. (Peter 2011, 134)

In other words, if all participants were truly treated as equals in this process, the outcome cannot be other than not sexist. This strikes me as a false hope. Peter makes a mistake when she is attaching epistemic value only to the procedural dimension of the decision-making process and completely neglects the outcome-dimension. A genuinely non-biased procedure does not necessarily lead to a non-biased outcome. Assume the following: a sexist proposal is debated in a deliberative procedure, all women form a majority and the outcome of a vote on the proposal is not sexist—if these assumptions would be true, they would be true due to the contingent fact that women in this case form an unanimous majority (and that those women do not hold sexist views themselves). We can easily imagine a different scenario: in a society where there is a small minority of gay rights advocates, the fair inclusion of all affected people is no guarantee that the outcome is non-biased. What this also shows is that her account cannot do without some epistemic standard of correctness or rightness when she invokes the biased/non-biased-distinction.

9  While the Habermasian account of epistemic democracy is correctly characterized by Peter to represent a form of perfect proceduralism in Rawlsian terms and Peter’s account represents a form of pure proceduralism in Rawlsian terms, my Deweyan epistemic account of democracy could be characterized as a form of imperfect proceduralism, which essentially implies the assumption that while “there is an independent criterion for the correct outcome, there is no feasible procedure which is sure to lead to it” (Rawls 1999, 75). Against the background of this Rawlsian framework of perfect, pure and imperfect proceduralism, for a Habermasian proceduralist, democratic procedures are exemplified by the procedure of dividing a cake equally among a group of people, and for Peter, democratic procedures are exemplified by a fair process of gambling (Rawls 1999, 75: “If a number of persons engage in a series of fair bets, the distribution of cash after the last bet is fair, or at least not unfair, whatever this distribution is”). The Deweyan imperfect proceduralist stance is exemplified by a criminal trial (Rawls 1999, 74).

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How do we discern between biased and non-biased procedures? Not by striving for neutrality and the elimination of all biases, she holds: Which biases are and which are not harmful has to be determined in an inclusive process. In the example above, it trusts that sexist premises will be more effectively challenged from the vantage point of a—biased—feminist perspective than from the alleged vantage point of—bias neutral—truth. (ibid.)

Again, she repeats her claim that including all biases (e.g. the feminist bias) increases the probability of non-biased outcomes, and that it is not about eliminating biases, but about including them all. Yet then two pages later she urges that making democratic legitimacy dependent on correctness is not necessary and possibly misleading because it [her account — MR] is content with the elimination of biases we already know and may smother the process of discovery of biases not yet recognized. (ibid., 136, emphasis added)

What Peter does not see is that at this point it becomes apparent that her account needs to entail the possibility of constructing some process-independent epistemic criteria for deciding which biases under what conditions we should either include or trying to eliminate from the decision-making process. A possibility that Peter’s account explicitly does not provide. The main problem with her account, then, is that it completely uncouples the epistemic value of democratic procedures from the outcome-dimension of these very procedures.

2.1.4  Epistemic Proceduralism David Estlund’s writings on democratic legitimacy and democracy’s epistemic properties have become the most prominent benchmark in the discussion about epistemic democracy, and they mark the middle ground between what I have been calling here thick and thin accounts of epistemic democracy. His main question is not whether a democratic decision is correct, but rather which political decision-­ making processes are most likely to generate correct outcomes. The conception of legitimacy that Estlund advocates requires that the procedure can be held, in terms acceptable to all qualified points of view, to be epistemically the best (or close to it) among those that are better than random. (Estlund 2008, 98)

He calls this conception “epistemic proceduralism”. Sometimes he refers to it as a “purely” procedural conception of legitimacy (ibid.). The main point of Estlund’s epistemic proceduralism is that democratically reached decisions are legitimate not because of their actual correctness but due to the fact that they are the result of procedures that tend to get things right. The idea here is that as juries’ decisions are binding while at the same time they can be false, democratic decisions are binding while they can be false. One necessary constituent of the legitimacy of both the demos’ and the juries’ decisions is that the preceding procedures tend to get to the

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correct decision. Such procedures are characterized by an epistemic normative surplus, so to speak. To put the point differently, Estlund’s epistemic proceduralism requires both that (deliberative) democratic decision-making-procedures are essential for political legitimacy and that these procedures approximate, as much as possible, an ideal outcome. This establishes Estlund’s account between purely epistemic justifications—the claim that decisions reached through democratic processes are legitimate because they are correct according to procedure-independent standards— and purely proceduralist justifications of democracy—claiming that decisions reached through democratic processes are legitimate because they are procedurally fair. How can we find out that democratic procedures actually do tend to lead to correct choices? How can we be sure that democratic processes get the right answers if we don’t even know how a right answer in general could look like? Estlund holds that democratic procedures largely prevent what he calls “primary bads”: harms which no reasonable person could deny are crucial to evade, such as war, famine, economic collapse, political collapse, epidemic, and genocide (ibid., 163). The reason for this is, according to Estlund, that we can make an extrapolation of the good performance of democratic procedures with respect to primary bads. Good performance in these cases is taken as support for the belief that the same procedures will tend to perform well on other matters. As appealing as Estlund’s considerations are, they still leave open some important questions. The main question that remains unanswered in his theory is for what epistemological reasons democracies should be better suited to collect and handle asymmetric, relevant sources of knowledge and be better able to prevent certain cognitive distortions than competing forms of government such as epistocracy, oligarchy or dictatorship. His theory, in other words, is lacking a clearly stated and developed account of its epistemological underpinnings. As has been noted by Fabienne Peter, Estlund also “does not have a convincing account for what the epistemic value is of sustained controversial democratic deliberation” (2011, 116). Questions such as how participants form their preferences and judgments, or how the political agenda is set, or why the inclusion of diverse perspectives and heuristics as well as persistent disagreements does have epistemic relevance in democratic politics are left unanswered by Estlund’s account. In order to find substantiated answers to these questions we need a theory of social epistemology that we then can apply to the ideal of democracy. Developing such a theory and putting it to use in the context of democratic theory will be one of the main tasks of this book. In summary, this brief overview of contemporary theories of epistemic democracy has shown that they suffer from three main weaknesses: 1. The epistemological and ontological underpinnings on which most theories of epistemic democracy rely remain almost completely implicit (with the exception of Peter’s account); these theories are not backed up with an epistemological theory about what it generally means for social and political procedures to generate correct outcomes. At the same time, they implicitly seem to rely on an overly

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objectivistic epistemology. When aggregative and deliberative epistemic democrats postulate a procedure-independent standard of truth or correctness, they seem to assume a universally valid standard that is fixed prior to and not constructed by the process of making political judgments. Such postulates give rise to the suspicion is that these theories have an overly objectivistic and monolithic understanding of social reality and of truth in the context of politics. This is reflected in the way they speak about the epistemic quality of democracy, most notably when aggregative theories use the metaphor of democracy as “tracking the truth”. 2. Deliberative theories of democracy are committed to some specific substantive principle or standard of reason and  rationality. But the ideal of an epistemic homogeneous principle of argumentative communication is far less desirable than such accounts suggest, because it restricts the scope of democratic communicative action and thereby also misses the epistemic value of diversity and contestation. 3. Epistemic democrats make the justification of democracy dependent on instrumental considerations alone; they foreground the question if democracies are reliable to produce outcomes that are true, correct, right. By making the justification of democracy dependent on instrumental considerations alone, they show a complete disregard for the non-epistemic dimension of democratic action and judgment. But taking political decisions and making political judgments are forms of action that are not sufficiently conceptualized in cognitive terms alone, because they are unavoidably entangled with the aesthetic, affective and imaginative aspects of human conduct. I argue that these shortcomings of theories of epistemic  democracy can be avoided if we base our epistemic considerations about democracy on the tradition of philosophical pragmatism in general and the philosophy of John Dewey in particular. In order to understand on what conceptual basis I will promote Dewey’s account as an alternative to existing accounts of epistemic democracies, I will use the rest of this chapter to explain what kind of pragmatism I have in mind, how I will use the term democracy and why I believe that pragmatism as a philosophical outlook offers an illuminating perspective for an argument that democracy can be partially justified on epistemic grounds.

2.2  A Deweyan Alternative 2.2.1  Pragmatism The theory of democracy for advocated in this book is pragmatic, yet pragmatism is hard to define. One reason for this is that it’s not a unified body of ideas, but many diverse strands. Let us start with the three most salient thinkers of philosophical

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pragmatism, the so called “classical American pragmatists”: Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey.10 What is referred here to as the “classical ­pragmatism” shows less homogeneity than the term promises, since what Peirce, James, and Dewey share is not so much the exact same ideas or arguments as the pragmatist maxim, a method for elucidating the meanings of hypotheses by tracking their practical consequences and a distinctive epistemological stance, a fallibilist anti-­Cartesian attitude to the norms that control inquiry. Peirce, notably, took the most trouble to explicitly distance himself from James’s popularized version of pragmatism by coining “pragmaticism” starting in 1905, joking that it was “ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers” (Peirce 1931, vol. 5, 414). And he at least had as much in common with James and Dewey as with other thinkers not classifiable as pragmatists, such as Frege and Russell, or Kant—Peirce greatly admired Kant, he called him “a somewhat confused pragmatist” (Peirce 1931, vol. 5, 525). James’s writings on psychology, on the other hand, bear many resemblances to Nietzsche’s in terms of how they conceptualize consciousness and will. Dewey’s instrumentalist conception of intelligence, on the other hand, shows many similarities to the later Wittgenstein as well as to the earlier “common sense” scholars, such as Thomas Reid or G.E. Moore. There are many proto-pragmatist thinkers to account for, such as the pre-Socratics—the sophists, Heraclitus, Protagoras—also Hume, Mill, Hegel, and, as mentioned earlier, Kant. A number of thinkers, who could be possibly labeled “pragmatists,” postdate the period of “classical” pragmatism, such as Quine, Sellars, Brandom, Putnam, and Rorty. It is safe to say is that pragmatism is a term that covers a wide variety of thinkers who bear a certain family resemblance, and it is a family with a tradition, an attitude, and an outlook. Richard Posner speaks in this connection of the “pragmatic mood” (Posner 2003, 26) that can be ascribed to these thinkers. In a nutshell, this mood is Platonism turned upside down. This is clearly not a proper definition of the pragmatic mood, not least because it depends on what is meant by Platonism. But here is the general idea: What pragmatists broadly reject about Platonism is the trust it places in a method of tracking profound certainties about morality, reality, and politics, and its contempt for empiricism and practical reasoning. Robert Brandom got to the heart of this pragmatist anti-Platonism when he commented that

 I should mention other thinkers who called themselves pragmatists, such as Chauncey Wright, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., C.I. Lewis, Josiah Royce, and of course George Herbert Mead. For an excellent historical account of the origins of the pragmatist “movement,” see Menand (2002). Cornel West’s genealogy of pragmatism The American Evasion of Philosophy (1989) is a very informative source on this topic too—West pointed out the fact that we shouldn’t neglect Emerson as an original pragmatist, as Emerson prefigured the dominant ideas of American pragmatism. A good historical overview offers also Cheryl Misak’s The American Pragmatists (2013).

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pragmatism’s conception of reason, as practical and action-oriented, “is the reason of Odysseus rather than Plato” (Brandom 2002, 7). Odysseus preferred mortality and an adventurous quest to reclaim a small island, to immortality; he was kind of a proto-pragmatist in that he preferred going to arriving, and exploration, curiosity, and risk to certainty.11 While he is depicted by Homer as being resilient, courageous, and adept in combat, his outstanding trait is his cunning, that is his practical and adaptive use of intelligence to successfully cope with his environment.

2.2.2  Pragmatist Epistemology It is a commonly shared view among both classical and contemporary pragmatists that pragmatism offers no comprehensive theory of knowledge, that is to say it offers no epistemology that would attempt to answer questions like: What are the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge? What is the structure of knowledge, and what are its limits? Is justification internal or external to one’s own mind? And so on. Quite the contrary, many pragmatists have been convinced that the very attempt at answering such questions in a philosophical theory would be wrongheaded. Pragmatism, in this perspective, seeks to shut down the epistemology industry, as John Dewey wrote, instead of breathing new life into it. For Dewey, terms like “knowledge” and “truth” are empty shells if they are treated as fixed and immutable philosophical entities. He held that “knowledge, as an abstract term, is a name for the product of competent inquiries. Apart from this relation, its meaning is so empty that any content  or filling may be arbitrarily poured in” (Dewey 1938, LW 12, 16) and “like knowledge itself truth is an experienced relation of things, and it has no meaning outside of such relation” (Dewey 1906, MW 3, 118). However, pragmatism from its beginnings also focused on epistemology, that is on the study of knowledge, which centers on the differences between believing something that just happens to be true and really knowing something. Peirce outlined pragmatism primarily as an epistemological theory that stands in opposition to other, dominant ways of thinking about truth, knowledge, and inquiry. Hence it is not epistemology tout court that pragmatism rejects, but the domineering version of epistemology based on Platonic and Cartesian premises. Pragmatism rejects a specific theory of knowledge, namely the spectator theory of knowledge, which understands knowledge as that which we receive as passive observers and as that which

11

 For more about Odysseus being a proto-pragmatist, see Posner (2003, 26 f.).

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corresponds to reality. In contrast to Descartes, and the mainstream epistemology that descends from Descartes, Peirce and his pragmatist successors insisted that knowledge is something that humans actively are involved in bringing about rather than something that they passively receive. Peirce outlines his treatment of science in two essays: “The Fixation of Belief” (1877) and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (Peirce 1878). He argues that the methods of modern science are best suited to dispelling practical doubts because their experiments actively intervene in nature. The struggle to effect the transition from a state of doubt to a state of belief is what Peirce calls inquiry (Peirce 1931, vol. 5, 375). Any process by which doubt is exchanged for belief will qualify as inquiry. In the most general terms Peirce offers a definition of reasoning: “The object of reasoning is to find out, from the consideration of what we already know, something else which we do not know” (ibid., 5, 365). He notes that we mostly “reason correctly by nature” but only with regards to practical matters (ibid., 5, 366). When leaving the practical realm, the inquirer “is like a ship in the open sea, with no one on board who understand the rules of navigation” (ibid., 5, 368). In such situations, how are we best to reason? In other words, when should we doubt our acquired or inherited beliefs and how should we amend them if we see the necessity of doing so? Some skeptics hold that inquiry can begin by merely stating a question “and have even recommended us to begin our studies with questioning everything!” (ibid., 5, 376). In rejecting this conception of inquiry, we find that Peirce rejects the Cartesian project of radically doubting everything until we find proof of some ultimate and absolutely indubitable propositions. Stating a question into the blue is merely a “paper doubt,” and not the same as struggling with “a real and living doubt” (ibid.). Hence, inquiry, the process by which we get to know things, is a fundamentally practical affair. Notwithstanding the rejection of the spectator theory of knowledge, it still makes sense in my view to use the term epistemology in connection with pragmatism, especially when we see that pragmatist epistemology is an ancestor of contemporary social epistemology, which holds that knowledge-producing processes are intrinsically social. While social epistemology carries different, competing meanings today, it is an umbrella term for theories of knowledge that premise their analysis on the idea that knowledge is the outcome of social influences and circumstances. In this sense, pragmatist epistemology is a form of social epistemology. Proponents of social epistemology wish to avoid confining the designation of knowledge to individuals. Like pragmatist epistemology they situate knowledge in collectives and social organizations. I shall elaborate this definition of pragmatist epistemology as a form of social epistemology in Chap. 3, confining myself here to a few preliminary remarks. For pragmatists, practical reasoning goes beyond mere practical concerns in the narrow sense the term; and theoretical reasoning is continuous with practical reasoning, rather than a separate human activity. The pragmatist view of knowledge holds that humans possess intellectual skills related to manipulating their local

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physical and social environment. Manipulating the local environment not only means that knowledge emerges from this local environment and this knowledge is itself local, but also that this knowledge is perspectival, being formed by the historical, social, and physical situations and by cultural experiences. Part of what it means to successfully manipulate and explore our environment has to do with our cognitive abilities to imagine and conceive the universal and future-oriented implication of our limited local insights. The pragmatist conception of knowledge implies the rejection of the feasibility of a priori ascertaining the truth of propositions; this conception is, so to speak, anti-essentialist. But it not only rejects the possibility of a priori truths, it also rejects the idea that there exists a method of inquiry that could steadily guarantee unshakable truths. Even firm logic or strict empirical protocol and scientific methods produce knowledge of a tentative, revisable—in short, fallible—nature. In other words, for pragmatists, the import of a judgment lies, in the first place, neither in its correspondence to some definite unknowable reality nor in its deduction from accepted axioms, but in how it is able to solve a problem that has arisen out of the local, perspectival environment. Because human intellect is environmentally adaptive pragmatists think that the experimental method of collective, social inquiry is paramount. The classical pragmatists opposed the persistent and at that time dogmatic view of science and other forms of inquiry that pictured it as basically a single person’s quest for truth. Nature, society, and mathematical concepts were at the time viewed as passive things waiting to be detected by humans applying the techniques of razor-sharp reasoning. Dewey, following in Peirce’s footsteps, challenged the weight this understanding of science and other inquires gave to the individual. Actually, he argued, there are all sorts of inquiry—including scientific inquiry—aimed at acquiring relevant and useful knowledge by means of using tools of experimental reasoning, such as logic, inductive and deductive inference, observation, but also intuition, imagination, know-how, and common sense. As a consequence, for the classical pragmatists inquiry included both situated and (tacit) “knowing-how” as well as the clear-cut propositional knowledge obtained by logical reasoning and observational methods. The classical pragmatists also rejected the idea of a possible form of inquiry that would be purely objective; they rejected, in other words, the possibility of stepping outside the world we live in and recording the correspondence between this world and our descriptions of it. Human beings are perspectival knowers; they are qualified in obtaining control over their environment, broaden their horizons, and enhancing their lives. The notion of humans as perspectival knowers, however, does not lead to relativism; the pragmatist outlook presented in this book holds neither that perspectives and languages would be substitutes for knowledge tout court nor that they should be seen as incommensurable. While pragmatism sees knowledge as what we get at through the filter of symbolic communicative systems, it also sees it as accruing from our experiential praxis of doing and testing things in the world as part of our problem-solving activities, which retroacts on these symbolic systems and might force us to alter them accordingly.

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2.2.3  Deweyan Democracy Richard Rorty held that there is no reason why a fascist could not be a pragmatist, in the sense of agreeing with pretty much everything Dewey said about the nature of truth, knowledge, rationality and morality. (Rorty 1999, 23)

In other words, pragmatism is politically and morally neutral.12 Indeed, the standard view that emerged in the 1990s was either that pragmatism has no contribution to make to political theory or that, if it does, pragmatists are defenders of the status quo, and their works amount to no more than a “politics of acquiescence” (Festenstein 2003). Current developments in pragmatist theory, however, have shown explicit attempts to tap pragmatism’s resources and apply it to contemporary problems of social and political philosophy by drawing on Peirce, James, and above all Dewey. Colin Koopman has called the current return to pragmatism in general, and its focus on political theory in particular, the “third wave” of pragmatism (Koopman 2009)— the first wave being classical pragmatism’s focus on the concept of experience and the second wave being linguistic neo-pragmatism. This third wave is heterogeneous in its aims and approaches. On the one hand, there are theorists like Cheryl Misak (2000, 2004, 2008) and Robert Talisse (2004, 2007) who are more focused on normative debates and rely on the work of Peirce.13 On the other hand, there is a group of theorists including Elizabeth Anderson (2006), James Bohman (2000, 2004, 2010, 2012), Matthew Festenstein (1997, 2001, 2004, 2008, 2010, 2019), Roberto Frega (2012, 2019), Knight and Johnson (2011), Colin Koopman (2009), Alexander Livingston (2017), José Medina (2012), Gregory Pappas (2008, 2016, 2017), Just Serrano Zamora (2017), and others, who draw on the critical resources in the works of James and Dewey. While the latter group of contemporary theorists share the former neo-Peirceans’ view of democracy as a reflective mode of thinking, they also insists on democracy’s progressive ethos. The pragmatist argument presented in this book carries many consequences that are compatible with the idea of democracy as a progressive ethos, as will be suggested in the following paragraphs. In an early essay on democracy, “The Ethics of Democracy” (Dewey 1888, EW 1) Dewey famously distinguished between democracy as a form of government (majority rule, regular elections, wide suffrage, etc.) and democracy as a broader social ideal of democratic culture integrated into civil society and individual lives. The difference between democracy as a form of government and democracy as a social ideal, in contemporary terms, is as follows. The former denotes the  Richard Posner (2003) shares Rorty’s view when he argues that pragmatism is open to liberals and conservatives alike. Posner himself has been described as fluctuating in his political position between conservatism, “eclectic libertarianism” (Ryerson 2000, 26), and a “libertarian right” (Westbrook 2005, 190); at the same time he gravitates toward pragmatism and its faith in methods of inquiry designed under the terms of modern science. 13  For my critique of their pragmatist epistemic approach to democracy see Chap. 6 in this book. 12

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decision-­making procedures of a political people, where all citizens have the right to participate in shaping the rules and actions that guide them and to check political authorities; the latter denotes the general normative ideals of a social way of life that is egalitarian, inclusive, deliberative, pluralistic, creative,  non-coercive, and free from oppression and exploitation. Dewey wrote this early essay explicitly against the view of democracy as a form of government developed by Henry Maine in his Popular Government (1886). Dewey objected to the following three tenets of Maine’s conception of democracy: (1) democracy is only a form of government; (2) government is simply that which has to do with the relation of subject to sovereign, of political superior to inferior; (3) democracy is that form of government in which the sovereign is the multitude of individuals. He rejected Maine’s conception of democracy because it was little more than a numerical aggregation of individual preferences: To define democracy simply as the rule of the many, as sovereignty chopped up into mincemeat, is to define it as the abrogation of society, as society dissolved, annihilated. (Dewey 1888, EW 1, 229)

In contrast, Dewey urges us to picture democracy as a way of life inscribed in the practices, habits, and customs of culture and society. Without such a cultural or societal basis, he insisted, any form of governmental political democracy becomes meaningless. Democracy as a form of government is dependent on a democratic culture. Hence Dewey has a “wide view of democracy” (Frega 2019), insofar as the ideal conception of democracy for him takes the form of political practices and laws that are underpinned by and dependent on a democratic culture. Unless democracy as a form of government is supplemented with a robust democratic and critical culture, we end up with the problem he described in Freedom and Culture: [T]he real trouble is that there is an intrinsic split in our habitual attitudes when we profess to depend upon discussion and persuasion in politics and then systematically depend upon other methods in reaching conclusions in matters of morals and religion, or in anything where we depend upon a person or group possessed of “authority” … Dispositions formed under such conditions are so inconsistent with the democratic method that in a crisis they may be aroused to act in positively anti-democratic ways for anti-democratic ends. (Dewey 1939b, LW 13, 154)

But what does a democratic culture look like? It is a culture with institutions and practices that enable every human being to assume personal responsibility and express individual creativity: There is individualism in democracy which there is not in aristocracy; but it is an ethical, not a numerical individualism; it is an individualism of freedom, of responsibility, of initiative. (Dewey 1888, EW 1, 243f.)

Half a century later, in “Creative Democracy – The Task Before Us,” Dewey affirms that the democratic ideal depends upon a “faith in the capacity of human beings for intelligent judgment and action if the proper conditions are furnished” (Dewey 1939a, LW 14, 227). And he goes on: For what is the faith in democracy in the role of consultation, of conference, of persuasion, of discussion, in the formation of public opinion, which in the long run is self-corrective,

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2  Democracy, Epistemology and Deweyan Pragmatism except faith in the capacity of the intelligence of the common man to respond with commonsense to the free play of facts and ideas which are secured by effective guarantees of free inquiry, free assembly and free communication? (ibid., 229)

Hence, democracy understood as a social ideal is a radical historical project because it “requires great change in existing social institutions, economic, legal and cultural”. (Dewey 1937, LW 11, 298 f.) Dewey’s notion of democracy as a social ideal furthermore relates to a need for the democratic empowerment of citizens in terms of education and culture more generally. Dewey’s conception of individual liberty was liberal in the sense that he was anti-authoritarian and strongly defended the liberal rights protected in the name of individual liberty (freedoms of speech, thought, movement, etc.). Also, for Dewey, individuality demands that humans find their own way, and not have particular doctrines or social customs forced on them in order to achieve a convergence of people’s views, interests, perspectives, values etc. towards a unified and shared communal identity. Individual liberty in that sense does not require a form of paternalistic social action that would liberate the individual from irrational desires. But meaningful social action in the name of individual liberty requires individuality, which for Dewey must mean, not simply certain guaranteed basic individual rights, but also that individuals qua individuals develop intelligent habits: critical thinking, creative imagination, and engagement in experimental problem-solving. Social action inevitably requires basic liberty rights as well as intelligent habits, and in order to develop the latter we need educational and more generally speaking cultural institutions that produce autonomous individuals. Such critical individual habits are a functionally necessary prerequisite for democracy to work properly in an epistemic sense. The crucial point here is that the formation of intelligent habits will, in the majority of cases, take the form of social action or social cooperation or at least interaction with other humans. For Dewey, human experience is an interaction between the human organism and its cultural environment. Out of such interaction emerge what Dewey calls habits, individual behavioral dispositions, against the background of already installed customs and institutions of a cultural environment. These culturally formed and shared customs decisively guide the formation of individual habits. Every concrete individual act partially arises from practiced habitual patterns, while these habitual patterns partially arise from shared customs of a larger culture. Both habits and customs are for Dewey not mere repetitive routines or consuetudes, but contextually formed, activating, purposeful, and targeted dispositions that should enable action even when situations are novel or problematic. Habits and customs thus need to be malleable. The cycle of action, habits, and customs could involve a state of equilibrium among them, but could mean just as well a dynamical tension, depending on the context. Customs can be dominant and paralyzing in contexts of rapid change, and as such can impede the formation of other intelligent, creative, and imaginative customs and habits. A democratic culture is dynamic and pluralistic as well as constantly changing and open for critical inquiry and reconstruction rather than a self-sealed tradition or a fixed set of institutions. Self-sealed traditions

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or unchangeable institutions result in conformity and constriction, which ultimately result in an ossified and self-serving culture. It is thus of utmost importance for Dewey that the learned habits and customs are not thoughtless but intelligent, adaptive, and autonomous behavioral patterns capable of forming constructive solutions to social problems. This is why Dewey frequently stressed that democracy has to be linked to education, most prominently in Democracy and Education (Dewey 1916, MW 9). Schools for Dewey are the primary sites of enactment of the structures of social and democratic life. But to fulfill their roles as democratic citizens and contribute to the development of democracy, human beings need training in the habits of problem-solving, creative expression, and civic self-governance not only in school but throughout their cultural life. As a form of (self-)government, democracy will only be successful if individuals are educated. But to educate democratic citizens in this Deweyan sense is not (but might involve) providing the majority of individuals with highly specialized training or with facts and techniques, but primarily to educate their critical habits. Factual, technical, and specialized knowledge—e.g., learning how to build a bridge or construct accurate historical narratives—is important for the success of democracy as a whole, and hence should be broadly available throughout the citizenry. Educating individuals to become valuable democratic citizens, however, requires an education of a pluralistic and deliberative character (Stuhr 2015; Raeber 2013). When people learn to form intelligent and adaptive habits, they can grow as autonomous individuals and become, as democratic citizens, indispensable epistemic resources for social and political inquiry in a democracy. Intelligent habits thus are a constitutive part of Dewey’s conception of individuality and individual liberty, and in that sense individual liberty is depend upon social action, but not in an authoritarian, non-liberal way. Democracy’s maturity is for Dewey measured by the extent to which citizens who inhabit it, rather than merely reproducing old habits, exercise original and creative thinking when faced with constantly changing circumstances and problematic situations. In other words, political and social culture and institutions should be such that they create habits and customs that are open towards change and novelty. Critics argue (among other things) that Dewey’s conception of democracy leaves no room for conflict and disagreement, and thus does not live up to its own purported pluralism.14 Against the backdrop of what Dewey says about democratic culture and inquiry, it indeed might seem that he neglects the role of conflict and struggle play in such culture, which would in turn set this culture outside the realm of politics. Doesn’t his ideal of democracy in terms of a community of inquirers and problem-solvers require a democratic culture that builds around the ideals of social homogeneity and consensus-oriented deliberation? One could certainly read some  Most notable such criticisms of Deweyan democracy can be found in MacGilvray (2004, chapter 5) and Talisse (2011). A second major criticism of Dewey’s conception of democracy concerns the worry that he closely links democracy up with the moral ideal of “growth”, and that it ultimately founds democracy on a moral basis, which is highly contestable, according to this criticism. I will address and discuss both the ideal as well as the criticism in detail in Chap. 6.

14

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of what Dewey has to say about democracy and inquiry in this way, but this would result in a misconception of his understanding of social and political democracy. He acknowledged the vital role of conflict and struggle in democracy. Robert Westbrook in this connection indicated that Dewey believed elimination of conflict to be ‘a hopeless and self-contradictory ideal’ for social life, like individual life, entailed an ongoing reconstruction of conflict-ridden, ‘disintegrating coordinations’. (Westbrook 1993, 80)

The important point for Dewey is how one reacts to conflict, and this is where the said democratic culture comes into its own: through public discourse, persuasion, and the formation of public opinion. Democratic culture is a type of culture where plurality and difference of perspectives are encouraged, but only if conflict can take the form of disagreement and mutual learning rather than ossified agonistic polarization or even warfare. Conflict is valuable for Dewey only as long as it occurs within the context of what he calls social inquiry—a conception that I will discuss more extensively in Chaps. 4 and 5 in light of the underlying concept of judgment. The view expressed here, that for Dewey conflict and disagreement are integral to democracy, has become the standard view in pragmatist political discourse over the past decade (c.f. Pappas 2017; Zamora 2017; Frega 2015; Hildreth 2009; Rogers 2009), also due to the discovery in recent years of the original manuscript Lectures in Social and Political Philosophy (Dewey 2015) that Dewey delivered in China in 1919. In these lectures he presents an idealized three-stage model of the pattern of social struggles. The premise of this model is the realistic observation that social life is unstable because of “the significant conflicts of groups, classes, factions, parties, peoples” (ibid., 16). Dewey portrays these conflicts as the driving motor of a historical process with an analyzable pattern. As the main cause of conflicts between associations and institutions he identifies the overt unbalance of interest between such groups, where one interest predominates over the other to such an extent as to become a relation of domination and suppression. This distinct unbalance of interest leads to friction, division and conflict between the groups, because the suppressed interests that have not gotten expression and satisfaction come to awareness, and they demand the right to be acknowledged. Society then has to deal with these latent interests and with social conflict. It is here where Dewey’s ideal model of such dealing with social conflicts Dewey comes into play. He presents it as a succession of three stages. The first stage is marked by such an equilibrium that the suppressed group or class is not aware of its suppression, or takes it as part of the established and necessary order of things. There are not opportunities that suggest an idea of a different state of things, and hence no idea of an effort to bring about change. When slavery is most complete, when government is most successfully despotic there is no thought of slavery or despotism as evils to be protested against. (ibid., 23)

While Dewey does not specifically state by which means such a state of equilibrium might be disrupted, he does suggest that shifts in social, political and economic conditions pave the way to enable a consciousness or experience of suppression (ibid.). To put this in a more political context, at this stage of equilibrium we find

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dominant perspectives on social and political problems and conflicts, because there’s an assymmetry of power that is rooted in social inequalities, which is the cause of asymmetrical and unequal framings of claims to such problems. Claims that are not perceived through the dominant lens are dismissed as merely an expression of indivudal/selfish interest, while in truth, Dewey implies, it is often the case that these claims are legitimate and should be taken up as claims about the larger social good of a society. The second stage is “that of restlessness, discontent, because social conditions have changed enough” (ibid.). These changes enable suppressed groups to become conscious about the fact that they voluntarily were denied adequate ways for expressing their interests and for fully participating in social and political life.15 Becoming conscious is a gradual process, which eventually will (under ideal circumstances) lead to a third stage where the suppressed group self-consciously makes claims on behalf of themselves in the name of justice and where other groups finally acknowledge the legitimacy of these claims and the need for addressing them. Dewey thus gives conflict and friction an adequate place in his conception of democracy. Without conflict, politics stagnates into convention and progression of society is inconceivable, which means that the ideal of democracy becomes meaningless. Conflict and friction are, as we will see in ensuing chapters, an integral part of his concept of inquiry, which views every form of collective action as a process of solving problems. But precisely because they are part of this problem-solving process, the process cannot be understood in harmonious, consensual cooperative terms, but has to be understood as assigning a central function to the tensions and contradictions inherent in the process between different interests, perspectives and claims. I will henceforth use Dewey’s ideal of democracy in a way that combines the interpretation of democracy as a social ideal with democracy as a form of government. This defines democracy as a set of practices that are embedded in our everyday public lives within civil society or culture as well as within more formalized political institutions.

2.2.4  Deweyan Pragmatism and Epistemic Democracy Now that I have outlined the contours of a pragmatist epistemology and a Deweyan conception of democracy, let us go back to the shortcomings of contemporary theories of epistemic democracy  and ask how a Deweyan theory of democracy can avoid them. Earlier in this chapter I had identified the shortcomings of such theories as the underdeveloped or untenable assumptions about epistemology and

 He mentions the labor movements and women’s movements as historical examples for such changes in consciousness.

15

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ontology, the strong consensus-orientation, and the indifference for the affectiveaesthetic aspects of human conduct and political life. In contrast, a Deweyanpragmatist account conceives of democracy’s epistemic functions in terms of its dynamic and experimental features and its learning and feedback-loops. Most notably, human cognition and inquiry for Deweyan pragmatism are a methodical reaction to doubt and uncertainty—they originate from doubt and uncertainty, and doubt and uncertainty emanate from a layer of experience that is qualitative and aesthetic rather than exclusively epistemic. Episteme for Dewey is something that starts from and is accompanied by a qualitative layer of experience, which also belongs to the reality of experience. In the political context too the identification and definition of political and social problems in inquiry occurs against the background of a holistic notion of experience that combines the epistemic and aesthetic dimension of human conduct and provides the basis for understanding political judgment in both epistemic and aesthetic terms.16 Furthermore, instead of a strong orientation towards consensus, a Deweyan account of epistemic democracy places emphasis on diversity as the driving motor of democratic judgment in a dynamic process of political and social inquiry. It suggests that such process tends to produce better judgments and decisions if it is inclusive rather than exclusive of diverse perspectives—particularly because citizens make political judgments within social and political structures that tend to prefer dominant experiences and perspectives over other marginalized ones. In other words, Dewey’s conception of democracy foregrounds inclusiveness and diversity as epistemic principles, and thus it combines horizontal equality (respect for and inclusion of all of citizens’ judgments) and vertical equality (equal epistemic authority of all citizens). It makes the claim that democracy tends to be most wise and citizen’s aggregated judgments and decisions tend to be best when democratic life reflects both horizontal and vertical equality of citizens. At the same time, however, it acknowledges that good political decisions and overall judgments sometimes require vertical and horizontal inequality of citizens—it acknowledges the reality of trade-offs between equality and episteme. As such, the account combines proceduralism and instrumentalism, and hence it can avoid the implausible conclusions of both thin and thick accounts of epistemic democracy. What makes inquiry in general and more specifically political inquiry epistemically valuable in this account is a combination of certain procedural features of the inquiry-process itself (including the deliberation and judgments about means and final ends) and of the inquiry’s ability to reinsert into the process considerations about the consequences that the outcomes of the inquiry produce. Thus, this Deweyan understanding of the epistemic process of reaching a judgment understands any process-independent standards for judging as being partially constructed in the very process by which we are also trying to approximate it. Inquiry processes are about figuring out the procedure-­ independent standard of judgment by which we are going to assess alternative

 I will discuss Dewey’s holistic conception of experience in the ensuing Chaps. 3, 4 and 5 of this book.

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options and about judging the comparatively better option in terms of how well it meets this procedure-independent standard of judgment compared to alternative options. Figuring out the procedure-independent standard of what it means to make good judgments in any type of inquiry is a function of the identification and definition of a problematic situation that needs a solution (what about the situation is problematic that needs resolution and why do we think that it is problematic?). Hence, the notion of political inquiry is both an instrumental and non-instrumental (procedural) account of the epistemic dimension of democracy. The argument in this book does not amount to the purely instrumentalist assertion that democratic institutions should and can be made exclusively dependent on the correctness or rightness of their outcomes, which is to say that the argument allows for the possibility that equal respect of citizen’s judgments might take precedence over outcome-­ based considerations. In this point the argument differs from purely instrumental epistemic democratic justifications and can be considered a thin and minimalist epistemic account of democracy. Such a minimalist stance means that we are not in a position to prescribe substantive constraints on legitimate outcomes from an epistemic perspective, and it means that prima facie we have epistemic reasons for respecting the judgments of ordinary citizens and for the necessity of creating democratic habits and democratic institutions to tap, illuminate, and review these judgments. The next chapters will present these epistemic  aspects of a theory of democracy that is informed by John Dewey’s pragmatism in greater detail.

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———. 2011. A Farewell to Deweyan Democracy. Political Studies 59 (3): 509–526. West, Cornel. 1989. The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Westbrook, Robert. 1993. John Dewey and American Democracy. Cornell University Press. ———. 2005. Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Zamora, Justo Serrano. 2017. Articulating a Sense of Powers: An Expressivist Reading of John Dewey’s Theory of Social Movements. Transactions of the Charles S.  Peirce Society 53 (1): 53–70.

Chapter 3

A Pragmatist Theory of Judgment

Abstract  In this chapter I reconstruct Dewey’s conception of judgment as situated in a larger process of inquiry that is permeated by both aesthetic–qualitative and reflective experience. I discuss the conception of judgment  in connection with Dewey’s notion of experience and his method of inquiry. I show that Dewey thought of judgments as emerging from a conception of inquiry that integrates both aesthetic and epistemic conditions of experience, and that he should have thought of judgments as being oriented towards “getting it right” (despite his own reservations in that regard). I do that by explicating how the notions of judgment and inquiry relate to his conceptions of experience, warranted assertibility and truth. I will present the pattern of inquiry with a clear focus on the statement that judgments are the temporary end products of an investigative process that has a transformative and expressive character starting from an undetermined and problematic situation on the basis of a holistic concept of experience. I will use Dewey’s own juridical metaphor to conceptualize the process of inquiry in terms of a trial by jury, and the resulting judgment as a verdict. It is here in this chapter that it will become clear how Dewey thought of judgments as being a special form of human action: namely an intelligent, controlled form of inferential action. Forming judgments as the outcome of inquiry-processes is thus the result of a specific epistemic form of activity, namely judging. Keywords  Theory of judgment · John Dewey · Epistemology · Inquiry · Experience

In this chapter I reconstruct Dewey’s conception of judgment as situated in a larger process of inquiry that is permeated by both aesthetic–qualitative and reflective experience. I discuss the conception of judgment  in connection with Dewey’s notion of experience and his method of inquiry. I show that Dewey thought of judgments as emerging from a conception of inquiry that integrates both aesthetic and epistemic conditions of experience, and that he should have thought of judgments as being oriented towards “getting it right” (despite his own reservations in

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 M. I. Räber, Knowing Democracy – A Pragmatist Account of the Epistemic Dimension in Democratic Politics, Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations 14, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53258-1_3

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that regard). I do that by explicating how the notions of judgment and inquiry relate to his conceptions of experience, warranted assertibility and truth. I will present the pattern of inquiry with a clear focus on the statement that judgments are the temporary end products of an investigative process that has a transformative and expressive character starting from an undetermined and problematic situation on the basis of a holistic concept of experience. I will use Dewey’s own juridical metaphor to conceptualize the process of inquiry in terms of a trial by jury, and the resulting judgment as a verdict. It is here in this chapter that it will become clear how Dewey thought of judgments as being a special form of human action: namely an intelligent, controlled form of inferential action. Forming judgments as the outcome of inquiry-­processes is thus the result of a specific epistemic form of activity, namely judging. Dewey’s theory of judgment in generic terms explicates the intellectual and non-­ intellectual aspects of the activity of judging as such. His theory is better at explaining judgment as an intellectual and non-intellectual activity than existing epistemic democratic theories, which want to understand political action in purely and narrowly rational terms and largely ignore the concept of judgment, as we saw in the previous chapter. And as we will see in the next chapter, it is also better suited to elucidate both the epistemic and aesthetic underpinnings of the concept of political judgment than theories of political judgment, which are inspired by Hannah Arendt’s account of political judgment that  understands political judgment mainly in aesthetic terms. I have organized the chapter into three major sections, each providing a building block for a Deweyan theory of judgment. In the first section, I discuss three key notions that Dewey uses in relation to the concept of judgment, which we must first grasp in order to understand what he means by judgment: inquiry, experience and warranted assertibility. Against the background of section one, in section two I look at Dewey’s conception of judgment through the lens of the metaphor of a jury trial, which he uses to liken any type of judgment to a judicial judgment that is the outcome of a legal trial. The concluding third section asks whether and how Dewey’s theory of judgment provides criteria for adjudicating between competing judgments. While Dewey himself did not give a consistent answer to this question, I try to show that his theory can provide consistent answers to these questions, and that it should provide them if it wants to avoid becoming a rather bland technocratic form of instrumentalism.

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3.1  Inquiry, Experience and Warranted Assertibility 3.1.1  T  he Social, Experimental and Functional Character of Rationality The power of human reasoning, for Dewey, is not merely a faculty of isolated subjects or a property of institutions. He replaces “rationality” with the concept of intelligence; and intelligence is a short for methods of observation, experimentation, and reflexive deduction, induction, abduction and transformation. Hence, rationality is not something finished but possesses hypothetical character: It [viz. the method of inquiry] is a method of knowing what is self- corrective in operation; that learns from failures as from successes. The heart of the method is the discovery of the identity of inquiry with discovery. (Dewey 1920a, MW 12, 270)

This self-corrective process is realized in phases and functions, what Dewey calls inquiry. Such process is inherently social, as Dewey’s conception of intelligence rejects the traditional view of isolated inquirers that would receive general truths, transform them into sentences and calculate with them according to formal conclusions. Rather, inquirers experimentally engage with the phenomena that are discovered and conceptualized, and they communicate through socio-cultural interactions. Intelligence is thus an ongoing continuum of building and testing new hypotheses about existing problems, hypotheses that have the pragmatic function of guiding us from problems to solutions, by showing us the actual potential and feasibility of these solutions. Successfully replacing doubt with belief means that in an emerging problematic situation, intelligent inquiry steps in, which means that the inquirer builds hypotheses, employs experiments and imagines potential ways to go forward in finding a solution and then reaches a judgment about problem solutions until the problematic situation is— if possible—solved and unproblematic. Such a  functional model of intelligence interprets knowledge as emerging from a process that brings the individual inquirer and his or her environment into balance, but this does not mean, as it may seem at first sight, that knowledge and intelligence are no more than uncritical inert habits that are fully preconditioned by the natural and social environment. I will touch upon the supposed conservative implications of Dewey’s pragmatism in more detail when I discuss the transformative character of experience and inquiry further below in this chapter. For now the short answer why Dewey’s instrumentalism is not a conservative theory1 is that intelligence is dynamic and progressive for him. Intelligence is a social process 1  Recent publications have argued that there exist strong intersections between classical British Conservative thought and classical American Pragmatist philosophy (e.g. Lacey 2016; Vannatta 2014). While some elements of Dewey’s philosophy (primarily his conceptions of “habit” and “custom”) acknowledge the historical situatedness of human agents, his philosophical outlook can hardly be described as sharing a conservative methodology with classical British Conservative thought, as his theory of inquiry and judgment is underpinned by a progressive ideal of democratic association that defies any conservative bonds.

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through which strategies, ideas, and actions are evaluated and revised in experience according to their demonstrated success at guiding action reliably and fruitfully. In Dewey’s words, it means that experience has confirmed the faith that silly things are of so many different kinds that they cancel each other over a period of time, and that falsities come out in the wash of experience as dirt comes out in soap and water. (Dewey 1941. LW 14, 276)

Sciences, especially the natural sciences, Dewey argues, have been successful and progressive in giving us greater and greater control of our environment. First of all, this is due to the sciences’ experimental character, in which no knowable constituent of our environment is taken to be beyond intelligent inquiry. Scientific hypotheses and concepts are designed, used, tested, and modified. At the same time, new methods of experimenting with concepts and hypotheses are developed and advanced, as are new criteria for assessing them. Inquiry is intelligent and thus successful when practice meets these criteria, but these criteria themselves may only be judged in the light of how they conform with the current practices of inquiry. It is at the most ordinary level of experience that Dewey finds confirmation that experimental thinking, far from being a rare achievement of specialized minds, is vital to the use of intelligence and thus essential to the human epistemic condition. Humans face uncertain situations every day and conceive of alternative courses of action—which implies learning from past experiences—test them, and make use of the results in forming future habits of behavior. Furthermore, while intelligence is something individuals possess, the conditions that make intelligence possible are inherently a social constructive process, as inquiry relies on communicative social interaction—“it is not an ethical ought that conduct should be social; it is social, whether good or bad” (Dewey 1922, MW 14, 16f.). On a more normative note, intelligent inquiry and experiment are social insofar as their findings must be made public and are subject to examination by other inquirers. The basic idea here is that deliberation requires more than cloistered speculation about what others might think, need, or feel—that the best way to reconcile conflicts is to consult with others, rather than approaching deliberations solipsistically. That is to say, we should rely on pooled social intelligence. Inquirers should not be thought of as solitary individuals receiving general truths, but rather as individuals who are tied into cooperative and competitive contexts. Dewey proposes that inquiry should: (1) grow out of actual social tensions, need, ‘troubles’; (2) have their subject-matter determined by the conditions that are material means of bringing about a unified situation, and (3) be related to some hypothesis, which is a plan and policy for existential resolution of the conflicting social situation. (Dewey 1938, LW 12, 493)

Dewey’s concept of inquiry embraces a broad spectrum of meanings, of which the juridical meaning is the most important, as I will argue later on.  Thus,  although Dewey formulated his theory of inquiry often according to the model of scientific

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inquiry, he almost never identified inquiry solely with science. Inquiry is not a logic-­ positivistic enterprise.

3.1.2  The Pattern of Inquiry Dewey’s instrumental theory of inquiry has been one of the most controversial and misunderstood aspects of his philosophy. It has been read as a theory of bare adaptation to the facts.2 But this completely misses the point of Dewey’s instrumentalism. Instrumentalism does not describe the character of an action, but the relation between thinking and acting: I have from time to time set forth a conception of knowledge as being ‘instrumental’. Strange meanings have been imputed by critics to this conception. Its actual content is simple: Knowledge is instrumental to the enrichment of immediate experience through the control over action that it exercises. (Dewey 1934, LW 10, 294)

The conception of inquiry is the centerpiece of Dewey’s instrumentalism. From his Studies in Logical Theory (Dewey 1903, MW 2) to the Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (Dewey 1938, LW 12), Dewey worked on substantiating it.3 This is Dewey’s definition of “inquiry”: Inquiry is the controlled or directed transformation of an indeterminate situation into one that is so determinate in its constituent distinctions and relations as to convert the elements of the original situation into a unified whole. (Dewey 1938, LW 12, 108)

This quote needs to be unpacked. For example, what is the difference between indeterminate situations and determinate situations? What is a situation and what is a problem? And most importantly, what is this transformation and how does it come about? In an essay called Qualitative Thought he gives the following description of the term situation: By the term situation […] is signified the fact that the subject-matter ultimately referred to in existential propositions is a complex existence that is held together, in spite of its internal complexity, by the fact that it is dominated and characterized throughout by a single quality. (Dewey 1930, LW 5, 246)

The child reaching for the candle’s flame had never encountered such a situation before; maybe it had experienced that light can be warm and that it can be unpleasantly hot. How should it react? Maybe the child hesitates, maybe it reaches out for the flame. At any rate, the situation is unfamiliar and therefore uncertain. If it does 2  A striking example is Horkheimer (2004) who saw in Dewey’s instrumentalism the expression of the American way of life with all its alleged superficiality and profiteering. 3  For an overview, see Levi (2010), Hickman (1998), also Krüger (2000).

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finally reach for the flame, it will experience pain. It learned something new, and the uncertain situation will not occur again in this form. The act of reaching out for a burning candle causes pain is now part of the child’s habit. Yet, the child’s learning was bought at a high price; it had to make the painful experience in order to learn something. But learning, the process of turning problematic situations into unproblematic, familiar situations, is not for the most part blind trial and error; it involves the search for things that could help solve a problematic situation. Precisely this search for signs capable of dealing with a problematic situation is “thinking.” Thinking then means the intelligent handling of obstacles in our actions; it is intelligent insofar as it is neither blunt routine nor aimless trial-and-error. Whenever habits are not effective to reach the desired goal or when we are confronted with different avenues of action, the immediacy of primary experience is interrupted and a more or less intense process of intelligent reflection begins. Thus, for Dewey, thinking emerges from problematic situations, but only if we act neither exclusively in conformity with our pre-established habits nor aimlessly, because neither way of acting would result in a satisfactory solution, even though they could generate transient satisfaction. What is missing in both is a systematic reconstruction of the situation, and consequently the capacity for acting analogously in comparable situations and the possibility of learning. In Chap. 6, “The Pattern of Inquiry,” in his Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, Dewey splits the process of inquiry analytically into five stages.4 These five stages are: (1) the indeterminate situation; (2) problem identification; (3) the determination of a solution; (4) reasoning  and deliberation; and (5) the determinate situation. I will now, first, outline these five stages in a condensed form and then, second, relate them to his conception of experience, (which will further elucidate his conception of inquiry, and which will be central for the purposes of the task of constructing a Deweyan conception of political judgment in the succeeding chapters. 1. Indeterminate Situation. The starting point of every inquiry is an indeterminate situation. It’s the situation as a whole that is indeterminate, for Dewey, and not the pure subjective assessment of it: […] it is the situation as a whole, and not any one isolated part of it, or distinction within it, that calls forth and directs thinking. (Dewey 1903, MW 2, 328) It is, accordingly, a mistake to suppose that a situation is doubtful only in a ‘subjective’ sense. (Dewey 1938, LW 12, 110)

4  Step five on my list differs from Dewey’s. Dewey’s step five is “The Operational Character of Facts-Meanings,” and his point is to stress that facts as well as ideational contents are functional divisions in the work of inquiry. This is not my concern here.

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As it is  the interchange between a subject and its environment that has become unstable, it is not enough—except maybe if the subject is in a pathological condition—to just alter the subjective assessment of the situation. Reestablishing a stable situation is only possible by “actually modify existing conditions, not by merely ‘mental’ processes” (ibid.). Situations, including indeterminate situations, are generic insofar as they are not just personal states of mind but involve worldly and social interactivity. This does not necessarily mean that the situation itself and what the situation calls for is totally indeterminate—while many parts of it are familiar it is unclear how these parts relate to each other, or it is indeterminate how unfamiliar parts fit into familiar terrain, etc. An indeterminate situation is thus called indeterminate not because it lacks urgency; on the contrary, what characterizes this first stage is a need to alter the existing indeterminacy and confusion. Hence, an indeterminate situation, which will become subsequently a problematic situation, involves the factors of confusion and conflict. In an indeterminate situation, our attention is drawn to a unique quality that stands out from the flow of experience and creates a heightened awareness—it refers to a pre-reflexive and pre-propositional form of experience. The indeterminate stage is a necessary precondition of inquiry, because inquiry only ever sets off from a context of action that marks the experiential ground upon which any form of action—and this includes inquiry as the epistemic form of agency and action—comes to life: A universe of experience is the precondition of a universe of discourse. Without its controlling presence, there is no way to determine the relevancy, weight, or coherence of any designated distinction or relation. The universe of experience surrounds and regulates the universe of discourse but never appears as such within the latter. (ibid., 68)

According to Dewey, this qualitative layer of experience, this non-discursive, pre-­ linguistic, pre-propositional life-world background of human existence, is a prerequisite for any cognitive and epistemic activity. The indeterminate situation pertains to the qualitative-aesthetic dimension of experience, which is felt on an affective experiential  level rather than present in conceptual terms on a purely cognitive level. But in order to set the process of inquiry into directed motion, what is qualitatively felt has to be made explicit and needs conceptual articulation and determination. This comes at the second stage of inquiry. 2. Problem Definition. The indeterminate situation is not yet a problematic situation. It becomes problematic in the very process of being subjected to inquiry. A situation signals the need for inquiry insofar as  there is no application of a proven rule at hand. Here the felt qualities that are present in the indeterminate situation are partially translated into linguistic content or otherwise semiotic material and as such described and expressed with words and symbols

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which, as we recall, for Dewey are such that “the universe of experience […] never appears as such within” them (Dewey 1938, LW 12, 68 [emphasis added]). How the problem is defined and framed very much determines the directions of the inquiry. “A problem well put is half solved” (ibid. 112), Dewey held. What we define as problematic aspects will impact the outcome of the inquiry (our judgments), specifically its success or failure. 3. The Determination of a Solution. The definition of a problematic situation is useless for Dewey if the definition has no reference to a possible solution. But “how is the formation of a genuine problem controlled in a way that further inquiries will move toward a solution?” (ibid., 108). First, we have to look for constitutive elements of a given situation that are unproblematic. An entirely problematic situation could not be transformed into an unproblematic one, because the search for a problem solution is only possible in light of an unproblematic reservoir of stable beliefs. Then we can search for a solution idea. Such ideas are “anticipated consequences” (ibid. 113), that is predictions about the conceivable consequences of specific actions. Ideas as suggestions accrue from more or less vague conjectures about possible solutions. Suggestions are ideas only by means of a constant adjustment of conceptual reasoning and observation: The suggestion becomes an idea when it is examined with reference to its functional fitness, its capacity as a means of resolving the given situation (ibid. 114). However, the genesis of an idea cannot be preordained. What is required here is the mental flexibility and sensitivity of the actors that could put them on the right path. This process of suggesting and adjusting ideas in light of observation and thought experiments is the source of creativity, and another way of describing what goes on when we are building hypotheses.5 4. Reasoning and Deliberation. At this stage, the suggested solution idea is modified gradually. This means that it is aligned with preexisting knowledge and operationalized in a way that allows experimental examination, whereby its consequences are unveiled. Dewey’s view of reasoning as interlinked with experimentation is condensed in the following quote from the “Introduction to Essays in Experimental Logic”: Thinking ends in experiment and experiment is an actual alteration of a physically antecedent situation in those details or respects which called for though in order to do away with some evil. To suffer a disease and to try to do something

 Peirce called the process that introduces any new idea “abduction,” as distinct from induction (that does nothing but determine value) and deduction (which merely evolves the necessary consequences of a hypothesis). (Peirce 1931, vol. 5, 172). 5

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for it is a primal experience; to look into the disease, to try to find out just what makes it a disease, to invent—of hypothecate—remedies is a reflective experience; to try the suggested remedy and see whether the disease is helped is the act which transforms data and the intended remedy into knowledge-objects. And this transformation into knowledge-objects is also effected by changing physical things by physical means. (Dewey 1916, MW 10, 339) Yet what is it exactly that makes reasoning genuinely creative and not just a matter of applying habitual priorities or of acting on impulse? Dewey argued that deliberation assigns weights to different esteemed qualities in the context of reasoning, rather than taking them as given. Reasoning continues to be creative even though it requires some priorities not explicitly reflected on, because we can at the same time assign emphasis to valued qualities in light of the new traits of a context. Since the concepts “reasoning” and “deliberation” will play an important role in the context of my discussion of epistemic-deliberative democratic theories later in this book (Chaps. 7 and 8), I want to specifically outline how Dewey imagined moral reasoning. Dewey wrote that deliberation is made better by “dramatic rehearsal” (Dewey 1933, LW 8, 200), where imaginative and dramatic depiction builds on logical reasoning and helps to elucidate the importance and weight of possible choices6: Deliberation is dramatic rehearsal (in imagination) of various competing possible lines of action. […] (It) is an experiment in finding out what the various lines of possible action are really like. […] Thought runs ahead and foresees outcomes, and thereby avoids having to await the instruction of actual failure and disaster. […] Deliberation means precisely that activity is disintegrated, and that its various elements hold another up. […] Activity does not cease in order to give way to reflection; activity is turned from execution into intra-­ organic channels, resulting in dramatic rehearsal.” (Dewey 1922, MW 14, 132f.)

Dramatic means the unfolding of narratives. This unfolding of narratives Dewey contrasts with the quantitative, mechanic adding up of pleasures and pains that stand for rational analysis in utilitarian theory: Deliberation […] no more resembles the casting up of accounts of profit and loss than an actor engaged in drama resembles a clerk recording debit and credit items in his ledger. (ibid., 199)

Of course, calculation of means to already fixed ends or application of universal rules to particular instances may play substantial roles within dramatic rehearsal. But the important point to stress here is that the metaphor of deliberation as calculation locks in a course of action before we even discover what the situation is about, what it portends and promises, while the metaphor of deliberation as dramatic

 A detailed account of Dewey’s notion of “dramatic rehearsal” gives Fesmire (1995).

6

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rehearsal implies that those who engage in deliberation are attentive to what the situation is about and are imaginative because they follow a dramatic structure in which possible narratives of action are interwoven. Imaginative rehearsal is dramatic for Dewey because the options before us are intelligible only in the context of larger life narratives. Fesmire (2003) thus concludes that deliberation for Dewey is not a simple, detached episode. It is continuous with an individual’s developmental history, which is in turn situated within the developmental histories of others. […] Labeling deliberation dramatic rehearsal underscores that it is narrative-structured and that its imaginative phase is not limited to supplementing rule-guided conduct. Just as a character in a drama acts ‘in character’ and those acts make no sense if taken out of context, deliberative behavior is intelligible only in the setting of life-narratives. (ibid., 78f.)

In keeping with his metaphor of drama, Dewey emphasizes the importance not only of constructing scenarios but picturing them vividly. For Dewey, individual sensitivity, like literary creation, functions “to perpetuate, enhance, and vivify in imagination the natural goods” (Dewey 1925, LW 1, 305). That deliberation is penetrated by non-quantitative elements becomes obvious when we take a look at how Dewey envisions how a decision or a judgment is formed in inquiry. The first point Dewey makes is that when we deliberate as well as when we temporarily terminate deliberation because we have reached a decision viz. a judgment about the best course of future action we are not in a state of aloof and bloodless neutrality: It is a great error to suppose that we have no preferences until there is a choice. We are always biased beings, tending in one direction rather than another. The occasion of deliberation is an excess of preferences, not natural apathy or an absence of likings. (Dewey 1922, MW 14, 193)

On this account, what happens when we have reached a decision is not the emergence of a unified preference out of indifference, but the emergence of a unified preference out of competing preferences. 5. The Determinate Situation. The goal of inquiry is to transform a problematic and indeterminate situation into an unproblematic and determinate situation. Inquiry comes to a momentary conclusion with the construction of an object in the process of inquiry, an object that acts as a solution of the initial problematic situation (Dewey 1938, LW 12, 125, 120, 69–76, 118). In order to construct such an object, one needs to combine the analytical and synthetical insights gained over the previous stages of inquiry and examine them in light of the conceivable practical bearings of these insights. In other words, one needs to make a judgment about the best resolution to the initial problematic situation. The “material” of such a judgment and the corresponding plan of action constitute a singular solution to the individual problematic situation. “Singular” means here two things. First, a solution to an individual situation is singular because it only serves as one solution among many, and therefore can never fully grasp the particularity of

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the indeterminate situation, and only selectively transforms the individual situation into a solution. Second, the solution is, for now, only a singular solution because it is not yet used in plural. If the solution would show to be relevant in other situations, it could be transformed into habitual actions. Hence the upshot of inquiry is a judgment that embodies the transformation of an indeterminate situation into a determinate situation, a situation whose further development can be confidently predicted and that is grasped both in its particularity as well as in its unified quality. Tom Burke (Burke 1998, 158) offered a fortuitous metaphor for Dewey’s theory of inquiry, namely that inquiry is helical like a corkscrew. Burke suggests that Dewey’s pattern of inquiry is resolvable into a linear component on the one hand, and a circular component on the other. The linear component is the teleological character of inquiry, which refers to the progressive advancement from an indeterminate situation, the identification of a problem and the determination of a solution, to the final stage where the indeterminate situation is transferred into a determinate situation by means of a judgment. The circular component refers to both the sensual and the reflective aspects of inquiry—the course of reflection starts from a stock of acquired concepts and beliefs, which may give rise to ideas and proposals as to how to solve a given problem by virtue of suggestions formulated in terms of some conceptual framework. Dewey’s conception of inquiry understands knowledge (what he also calls “warranted assertibility”) as the end product of an inquiry process culminating in a judgment about which course of action can best solve the original problematic situation—knowledge is the function of such a judgment. In order to better understand what this means, it will be helpful to explicate his conception of judgment in more detail. However, in order to elucidate Dewey’s conception of judgment, I first need to discuss his conception of experience, which is fundamental to his philosophy and permeates his conceptions of inquiry, judgment, and knowledge. In the following section I will present Dewey’s conception of experience as an activity that is both aesthetic-affective and epistemic-cognitive. Most importantly, outlining Dewey’s aesthetic-epistemic conception of experience will help to explain the claim that judgments for Dewey are both conceptual and aesthetic-sensual.

3.1.3  Experience as Qualitative and Reflective Experience is a term Dewey uses to designate in general how we humans relate to our environment. It is a key term for comprehending in more detail how Dewey understands inquiry and judgment. In Experience and Nature (Dewey 1925, LW 1) Dewey makes an attempt to outline the “principle of continuity,” that is, the conviction that human experience is imbued with nature: experience is not opposed to nature but exists within it and is constitutive of it. In other words, in contrast to traditional

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theories of knowledge that proceed from the assumption that there is a fundamental division between our experience and nature, Dewey is convinced that experience and nature are continuous. The principle of continuity does not mean that experience and nature are identical—it’s not the Hegelian identity of spirit and nature. The principle rather means that experience is both an active and passive process in and with nature. The “in and with” nature of experience is reflected in how Dewey has tried to use the term “experience” to grasp that the way we as organisms are embedded in our environment and how we behave towards this environment is a holistic whole that can be analytically broken down into its individual parts, but is experienced  holistically. This holistic character is characterized by supposedly contradictory traits: experience may be cognitive or non-cognitive (e.g., bodily experiences); it may include both object and subject, both the subject matter of experience and the way it is experienced. Experience designates, for one, a broad flux of consciousness that we barely observe, and, second, the unique instants that protrude from that flux; it involves both immediacy and duration. Experience refers to individual or collective knowledge and wisdom of the past, present, and future and it refers to change and to methods of experimentation. In all these senses of experience, to “have” an experience can mean to passively undergo what is being experienced or it can mean something actively generated by a person. Dewey tried to consolidate all those seemingly contradictory elements in the single term “experience,” because he thought that, most of the time, in our actions and in our practices none of these elements works in isolation, but they are all bound up together. All modes of and methods of generating knowledge, from everyday problem-solving attempts (like finding the right key to the lock) to highly specialized scientific undertakings, are not conceivable without assuming, both, a stock of accepted interpretations of experiences (concepts, meanings, practices), and some sort of subjectively felt immediate experience. Dewey differentiated between primary (immediate, sensual) experience and secondary (reflective) experience. On the one hand, for Dewey the concept of experience refers to an immediately given in primary experience—a not yet analyzed wholeness in which there is no separation of action and material or subject and object. This immediate whole, however, becomes fragile when conscious reflection sets in, i.e. when patterns of action and meaning proven so far can no longer simply be applied to this immediate experience. With regard to this conscious reflection, Dewey also speaks of secondary experience, i.e. the acquisition of knowledge and the formation of theory in inquiry. However, the products of reflexive secondary experience are hypotheses that have to be tested on primary experiences in order to prove themselves; and they are selective-constructive in relation to a problem situation in primary experience—reflection can therefore only be sufficiently understood in the overall context of experience. This also means that primary experience should not be understood in shortened form as meaningless raw material of the downstream knowledge, but rather as

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manifestation of culture, because human experience is enriched with cultural patterns of meaning, interpretation and classification, which are accumulated by the past and passed on through education and communication—patterns which are, so to speak, the accumulated products of reflection and conduct of earlier generations. Experience is therefore always a culturally saturated experience. If experience is culture, part of it (as primary experience) is vague, ambiguous, opaque. Knowledge categories and sign systems produced by humans thus do not remain hermetically closed in themselves, but are open to a remnant of potential novelty and randomness. In positive terms, this means that Dewey understands primary experience as an open, pluralistic universe of possible horizons of meaning, which can only be partially grasped in the present reflection. This residual randomness and novelty in experience is an indicator of the autonomy of reality. Hence, experiences are not the sole matter of the universe; they are based on a complex background of behaviors and conditions. Where these no longer converge, tensions, incoherences and contradictions objectively arise as doubt in experience (which is the expression of an asphyxiation of co-ordination). As we saw, this is why Dewey sees the experimental practice of inquiry as a logic of conflict resolution through transformation as an overarching pattern for all thinking and understanding. The aspect of immediacy in experience features in many of Dewey’s writings, most prominently  in Psychology (1887, EW 2), Ethics (1908, MW 5), The Reconstruction of Philosophy (1920b; MW 12), Experience and Nature (1925, LW 1), “Qualitative Thought” (1930, LW 5), and Art as Experience (Dewey 1934, LW 10). While Dewey in his early years as a philosopher was an adherent of intuitionalism as a mode of cognition, he gradually became convinced that all cognition and experience is mediated. Hence, the term “immediacy” is not meant to denote any form of immediate access to knowledge, but rather denotes both a constitutive part of the activity of experiencing as such and an irreducible part of reality. Such non-epistemic notion of “qualitative immediacy” is hard to define, because its elusive features are not easily accessible to language and meaning. Any attempt at defining the uniqueness of qualitative experience is already detached from this uniqueness. To be more precise: We cannot say anything about the immediacy of the qualitative aspects of our experiences other than about its function in experience, because it registers on an affective level that is pre-reflective and pre-linguistic. However, we must be able say something about the pervasive quality of an experience in order to establish meaningful connections between us and our environments and to avoid finding ourselves receiving meaningless sensory impressions. Yet what we say about this quality already mirrors the ways in which we have positioned, differentiated, and situated ourselves vis-à-vis any particular experience. Language and semiotics discursively mediate our experiences, and different forms of language (everyday, scientific, mathematical, artistic, etc.) all can be put to use for either a closer or a merely shallow relation to the experiences themselves.

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As we saw, the indeterminate situation in inquiry refers to the notion of qualitative immediacy, inasmuch as a situation for Dewey is a complex event that is qualitatively integrated and thus appears to us as a or this situation against the background of the indistinct flux of life. “An experience”, he held, “has its own esthetic quality” (ibid., 45). Dewey talks about such experiences in terms of aesthetic experiences. Aesthetic experience is an intensified feeling that stands out from the everyday stream of experience as something special—as an experience: intense, uniform, striking and memorable. Aesthetic experience can be overwhelming in a way, directly situated and thus present—it is like “a flash of lightning illumin[ating] a dark landscape” (ibid., 29), which includes not only the momentary recognition of a familiar object, but also the ongoing presence of a temporally extended visual process, which is also the result of earlier experiences. The indeterminate situation, thus, refers to a heightened attentiveness we have in primary experience in terms of Dewey’s notion of aesthetic experience, insofar as there is an intrinsic indeterminateness to the aesthetic in experience, which nevertheless appears to our senses and minds as something that stands out of the stream of other experiences. Again, to state that any form of experience is marked by an immediate quality is not say that no form of mediation is possible or relevant. Dewey explicitly affirmed the importance of the possibility of mediation: To say I have a feeling or impression that so and so is the case is to note that the quality in question is not yet resolved into determinate terms and relations; it marks a conclusion without statement of the reasons for it, the grounds upon which it rests. It is the first stage in the development of explicit distinctions. (Dewey 1930, LW 5, 248)

In fact, he declared in Art as Experience that such possibility is the very condition of sanity: The undefined pervasive quality of an experience is that which binds together all the defined elements, the objects of which we are focally aware, making them whole. The best evidence that such is the case is our constant sense of things as belonging or not belonging, of relevancy, a sense which is immediate. It cannot be a product of reflection, even though it requires reflection to find out whether some particular consideration is pertinent to what we are doing or thinking. For unless the sense were immediate, we should have no guide to our reflection. The sense of an extensive and underlying whole is the context of every experience and it is the essence of sanity. (Dewey 1934, LW 10, 198)

Hence, the qualitative immediacy of any experience constitutes the inceptive phase of an interaction between the individual person and its environment, and it is the inevitable background  of any human conduct and action (including, of course, inquiry). Even the most rigorous and methodical inquiry must start from a qualitative layer of experience, and, as the term of experiment suggests, turn back to some form of primary experience. In other words, while the qualitative immediacy is felt rather than known and registers on an affective level, Dewey maintains—similar to Peirce who proffered the notion of a “reasonable feeling” in connection with his category of

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firstness (Peirce 1931, vol. 5, 113)—that the felt qualitative immediacy can be partially comprehended cognitively and intellectually in what he called “qualitative thought”.7 While the experience of qualitative immediacy feels satisfactory due to the felt wholeness, it does not make impossible reflective development of the primary experience. The uniqueness and distinctness of the felt immediacy of an experience, which makes the experience a qualitative whole instead of a mere aggregate of scattered sensual impressions, at the same time are responsible for the aspectual, serial and punctual character of primary experiences. Primary experiences are partial and unfinished in the wider context of experience and history. In a certain sense, then, the sensible immediate satisfaction of the qualitative wholeness leads to the second sensible feature of these experiences: their meanings8: There is no limit to the capacity of immediate sensuous experience to absorb into itself meanings and values that in and of themselves—that is, in the abstract—would be designated ‘ideal’ and ‘spiritual’. (ibid., 36)

The meaning of the qualitative aspect in an experience is not fully articulate—it is a meaning whose qualitative richness is elusive and “irrecoverable in distinct and intellectual consciousness” (ibid., 35). Yet at the same time, it is a meaning that gets enlarged or refined as it becomes subject to inquiry, reflection, and reasoning. Hence, the elusiveness of the felt qualitative immediacy demands some interpretive, public, experimental, and reflective reaction; its vagueness and elusiveness is functional, not absolute. How does this account of the qualitative in experience, then, factor into Dewey’s conception of inquiry? In what sense does Dewey understand the concept of experience as simultaneously cognitive and non-cognitive? As I have outlined above, the non-cognitive nature of aesthetic experiences and primary experiences is due to their immediate qualitative “presentness” that cannot be duplicated and is unrelated. Such “presentness” can only be had but not be directly known (maybe only pointed to e.g. in a work of art). However, we also experience relations, so that any qualitative immediacy “may be referred to other things, it may be treated as an effect or as a sign” (Dewey 1925, LW 1, 82). This is to say that we can direct our attention in experiencing phenomena in two analytically distinct ways: by attending to the immediate quality of it (primary experience) or by relating it to other things in experience (secondary experience). Secondary, cognitive and reflective experience is attentive to relations and regularities the phenomena have with other

7  On the importance of aesthetic immediacy and affect for how Dewey understood the structure of the cognitive dimension of experience see Taylor (2017, 221f.). 8  This view on the continuity between the affective and the cognitive aspects of our experiences suggests that Dewey was unconcerned about a traditional problem of aesthetic judgment—either immediate experiences mark a fully autonomous form of experiencing that is not accessible to language or they can be reduced to distinct propositions.

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phenomena—it is to treat the phenomena as signs with meanings, which is part and parcel of the process reaching a judgment in inquiry. Primary experience and secondary experience are both necessary and indispensable elements of an ultimately experiential process aimed at controlling and understanding relations between phenomena—they become important at functionally different phases of the inquiry process. I have already touched upon the function of qualitative immediacy as constituting the background that unifies and discerns a situation for inquiry above. In this sense, qualitative immediacy constitutes the background-condition in which thinking and knowing occurs. As the general background condition for thought and cognition, the qualitative factors thus into inquiry as a point of departure of inquiry. The qualitative is a point of departure in inquiry, insofar as it motivates and gives initial sense of direction and material for inquiry. As such, it is a condition for the emergence of genuine thinking for Dewey, as Pappas recently has argued (Pappas 2016, 449). The function of the qualitative at this stage of inquiry is not only to be the spark that sets inquiry in motion, but also to give direction to  the ensuing process of inquiry. While the qualitative marks the background-condition and motivational force of inquiry—“it is the big, buzzing, blooming confusion of which James wrote” (Dewey 1930, LW 5, 254)—it also encapsulates the realm of the meaningful and the relational: It buzzes to some effect; it blooms toward some fruitage. That is, the quality, although dumb, has as a part of its complex quality a movement or transition in some direction. It can, therefore, be intellectually symbolized and converted into an object of thought (ibid.)

Dewey’s view about the qualitative presupposes that the qualitative and the discursive are continuous (rather than dualistically separated), and that the non-cognitive and the cognitive way of experiencing and relating to phenomena  are continuous: When it is said that a thing cognized is different from an earlier non-cognitionally experienced thing, the saying no more implies lack of continuity between the things, than the obvious remark that a seed is different than a flower (Dewey 1905, MW 3, 166)

In this analogy our cognitive judgments are the flower and the experience of qualitative immediacy is the seed—as the flower grows from the seed, cognitive judgments arise from the qualitative initial situation. A further implication of the seed-flower analogy is that the flower (the judgment) does not completely displace the seed (the qualitative); the relationship between judgment and qualitative-aesthetic experience, we could say, is “not a total displacement of one kind over the other, i.e., from the qualitative to the purely symbolic or cognitive” (Pappas 2016, 451). Furthermore, the qualitative is also part of the crafting of a judgment at the end of inquiry. What this means is best explained in terms of the difference between propositions and judgments. I will have to say more about this important

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distinction in the next section. Here it suffices to say that propositions for Dewey are assertions about the factual state of things that function as information within the larger inquiry-process, while judgments express the transformative power of the solution to the initial problematic situation and as such take into account the whole bulk of amassed experience and discursive reflection throughout the whole process of inquiry. The qualitative necessarily has to be part of such judgments, because they refer back to the initial indeterminate situation interfused with immediate quality. Pappas goes so far as to claim that what ultimately guides judgments in inquiry are not “shared standards of a community, nor the most stable inherited norm“ but the “underlying and pervasive quality of the situation that is being transformed”, based on what he thinks is Dewey’s thorough contextualism (ibid., 459).9 While it is certainly true that we can read Dewey as a contextualist with regard to judgment, it nevertheless is a mistake to reconstruct him as holding a purely aesthetic-affective view about what ultimately guides judgment. While the qualitative is an important part of inquiry (and hence judgment) for Dewey, we should be skeptical about such a view. Pappas thinks that without the qualitative as the ultimate guiding ideal of inquiry of judgments, we are left with basically two unsatisfactory options: either we assume some universal standard of truth as the guiding principle, or we believe that Dewey’s conception of inquiry is relativist at its core. However,  the main problem with Pappas’ view of the qualitative as the ultimate guiding ideal of inquiry and judgment is that it seems to amount to the statement that a good judgment is sufficiently described as a judgment that resolves the original indeterminate viz. problematic situation in a qualitatively felt satisfactory manner. It is unclear to me, however, how a conception of inquiry that has the qualitative as its ultimate guiding ideal could be sufficiently critical on its own. Doesn’t such a qualitative interpretation of inquiry favor primary experience over secondary experience and immediate experience over reflection? If qualitative experience is the ultimate guide for judgment, why do we need such an epistemically rich conception of inquiry as Dewey offers?10

9  Hence “the final judgment is the qualitative appreciation and assertion that, in light of the terrain explored, this is the solution that is called for by the situation, and not a deduction from propositions or from a universal criterion. (Pappas 2016, 460) 10  Why not reside with a conception of criticism that ultimately relies on the power of aesthetic judgment? The Arendtian trajectory of thinking about judgment in connection with politics in purely aesthetic terms does offer an interesting critical perspective, insofar as the aesthetic judgment is considered to be a function of freedom, which I will discuss in the next chapter. As I will also discuss in the next chapter, there are some substantial points of contact between Arendt’s theory of political judgment and a Deweyan conception of political judgment, but the main difference between them is that from a Deweyan perspective (political) judgment has an epistemic function, while Arendt denies this.

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3.2  The Judicial Sense of Judgment Against the background of the preceding outline of Dewey’s conception of inquiry and his conception of experience, we are now in a position to discuss his conception of judgment. We have seen in the previous section that the upshot of Deweyan inquiry is a judgment that functionally achieves the successful transformation of an indeterminate situation into a determinate situation. Hence, judgment has necessarily to be understood as an act, as a form of action that has an existential function in coping with our indeterminate environment. A judgment, for Dewey, is not only defined by its specific formal structure (relating particulars to universals and vice versa), but also by its position within the whole process of inquiry: judgments are the upshots of an antecedent process of inquiry. This determination of judgments seems to run contrary to the understanding of judgments that has been prevalent in many different periods in the history of philosophy, and also prevails in contemporary philosophy of language and epistemology, namely to conceptualize judgments as  propositions: linguistic entities with which the existence or non-existence of facts is justly (true) or unjustly (false) asserted. Yet, it was already Kant, who introduced a further meaning of judgment, namely that of validity, which is similar to what we find in Dewey’s usage of the concept judgment. Although Kant did provide reflections about politics, his most important contribution for my purposes is a seminal theory of judgment. He provides this generic definition of judgment: The activity of making a judgment is the activity of relating universals to particulars. Schematically, a judgment is an assertion of the form x is P, where x denotes a particular item or entity, P (or some other symbol) denotes the concept of a specific category or quality, and is serves as a linguistic device that performs a variety of predicative functions, depending on the judgment being asserted. Kant situates judgment (Urteilskraft) between understanding (Verstand) and reason (Vernunft). The systematic function of judgment arises as a solution to a problem: Kant characterizes understanding not only as the capacity of concepts, but also as the capacity of rules in the Critique of Judgment (Kant 2007 [1790]); this expresses the fact that unity, which consists in the thinking of different objects by means of the same concept, can also be understood as a unity which arises from the similar (because it obeys the same rule) synthesis of diversity. The ability of the understanding to proceed according to rules (in the execution of its synthetic performances), however, does not enable it to establish an epistemic connection between the rule itself and the cases of its application (thus between a concept P and P-like objects); for this the understanding would again have to fall back on a rule guiding it in the application of the rule, which also would have to fall back on a rule that

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guides the rule that guides the application of the rule, etc. Here the power of judgment takes over and makes the basic connection between the general (the rule) and the particular. For both Kant and Dewey, thus, a judgment functionally connects the general (the rule; the solution proposal) and the particular (the indeterminate-­ problematic situation). In Chap. 7 “The Construction of Judgment” of his Logic (Dewey 1938, LW 12) Dewey differentiates between propositions and judgments. He claims that judgments are the settled outcomes of inquiry; they are concerned with the concluding objects that emerge from inquiry, and judgments in that sense have direct existential import (ibid., 23) and refer back to the initial indeterminate situation and hence to primary experience. Propositions, on the other hand, express content in symbols and thus are an auxiliary construct in serving the process of reaching, justifying, and realizing a verdict. In other words, they function like cognitive expertise in the process of reaching a judgment. A large number of propositions are typically part of the formulation of a judgment, insofar as a judgment involves questions about how the expression and treatment of a given subject matter is developing. Propositions can be classifications, claims, or predictions about the location or behavior of the subject matter in time and space, explanations of those classifications, claims, or predictions in terms of dominating principles, rules, or laws, etc. Judgments, by contrast, are claims about the success, failure, or status of the inquiry as a whole, about whether and how the inquiry might reach a stable conclusion—judgments consist in an instruction, explicit or implicit, about how to proceed with a given inquiry. The process of reaching a judgment in inquiry follows the pattern of juridical procedures, for Dewey. It involves the pattern of contentious hypotheses, hearing of evidence, opinion-giving, and the enforcement of the verdict, and it includes expert opinions. The literal juridical process has to mediate common sense and expert’s opinions from jurists and consultants and has to be open to public debate, for example in hearings. Precedent-setting decisions thus need be both: exemplarily representative and potentially generalizable for future cases, as well as to befit the singular character of the initial indeterminate situation.11 In order to gain a better understanding in what sense Dewey conceives of judgments in terms of the juridical analogy, let me briefly summarize his discussion of

 Hans Joas (1996) calls what Dewey developed in his epistemological and aesthetical writings a “theory of situational creativity.” It’s not hard to see that the aesthetic-artistic power of judgment (the Kantian Urteilskraft) plays an important role in Dewey’s process of inquiry, insofar as this kind of judgment is able to determine situations by producing descriptions of spatial aspects of situations and narrations of temporal aspects of situations (compare Dewey 1938, LW 12, 72ff., 105f., 220f., 371ff.).

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the general case of judgment in a court of law as one example for the process of inquiry and as illustration of how propositions and judgments are differentially functioning in this process. Dewey begins by identifying the occurrence of a trial-­ at-­law as a problematic situation: There is uncertainty and dispute about what shall be done because there is conflict about the significance of what has taken place, even if there is agreement about what has taken place as a matter of fact—which, of course, is not always the case. (Dewey 1938, LW 12, 123f.)

The judicial settlement, which marks the end of a trial, is a judgment that is the outcome of inquiry conducted in court hearings. Propositions are advanced for two different reasons. First, they are about the state of facts and evidence involved, in the form of testifying witnesses, of written records, etc. Second, they are about what kind of rules of law should apply: “The significance of factual material is fixed by the rules of the existing juridical system” (ibid., 124). The final judgment settles the issue, not as an end in itself, but as a decisive directive of future activities (“a man is set free, sent to prison, pays a fine”). It is this resulting state of actual affairs—this changed situation—that is the matter of the final settlement or judgment. The sentence itself is a proposition, differing, however, from the propositions formed during the trial, whether they concern matters of fact or legal conceptions, in that it takes overt effect in operations which construct a new qualitative situation (ibid. 124f.). Hence, a proposition in a court of law is what is asserted by one of the involved parties, while a judgment is the affirmation that is issued by the court or a jury as the upshot of a deliberation, which refers to evidence and to customary legal precedent. According to this analogy, a judgment is a decision adopting one of the potential answers but not others. Dewey recognizes the potential answers as analogues of options available in a decision problem (such as we find in politics). Besides this legalistic meaning of judgment there is another significant aspect in Dewey’s concept of judging, namely that of creativity—which seems to contradict judicial judging that is only realizable on the basis of general rules, authoritative standards and precedents supposed to be applicable to all cases. But Dewey holds that every intelligent judgment “involves a venture, a hypothetical element” (Dewey 1934, LW 10, 312). We have seen in connection with the notion of “dramatic rehearsal” that judgments about moral issues involve creative imagination and are not reducible to calculative efforts about the benefits and drawbacks of actions and principles. While creativity is certainly also important in connection with scientific judgments where there are particularities that do not neatly align with known regularities, imagination in connection with judging is ever more important in connection with moral, aesthetic and political judgments, which occur mainly in a context where there the judgment requires the establishment of

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a rule to an unknown particular situation rather than the application of existing rules to the particular.12 Thus it would be a mistake to identify Dewey’s notion of judgment with a narrowly scientific worldview, in which values are reduced to purely subjective likings or “oughts” applied to inherently value-free facts discovered and defined independently of human appraisal, or with a juridical worldview, in which values and principles are given in well-defined format and written down in law. However, this latter point relates to a fundamental tension in Dewey’s theory of judgment, namely the tension between two ways of understanding the activity of judging: either as reasoning about final ends, ends sought for their own sake, or reasoning as limited to selecting means to ends that are fixed in advance (thus rendering the latter form of reasoning a mere matter of efficiency and instrumentalism). Can we say more about the question what makes a judgment an epistemically sound judgment other than the rather uninformative statement that a good judgment must resolve the original indeterminate viz. problematic situation in a satisfactory manner? According to the contextualist interpretation (of e.g. Pappas) of Dewey, the criteria used to determine whether a situation is problematic, and used to decide whether a judgment can adequately solve the problem, must ultimately be individual and situated, in so far as they depend on the particularity of the situation itself. Because Dewey is an outright contextualist, according to this interpretation, the criteria for judgment must be found in the particularity of the situation itself (and all that emanates from it), and the most appropriate method to find them is a sensitivity and attentiveness towards the phenomenal situation itself. But which ends guide this sensitivity and attentiveness? Dewey does not give a clear answer. He certainly did not want to reduce reasoning and judging to a simple matter of efficiently finding the best means to resolve problematic situations. Therefore he must include in his conception of inquiry the possibility of reasoning about final ends that regulate and guide judgments, something Dewey did not always acknowledge, and something that cannot be part of a purely aesthetic-qualitative reading of Dewey’s conception of inquiry. While the latter reading of Dewey certainly avoids any narrow instrumentalist implications that would understand inquiry and judgment as mechanical or simply technical enterprises, its thorough contextualism seems to imply a form of qualitative consequentialism, by which I mean the assumption that all reflexive normative goals and purposes subject to inquiry are ultimately inseparable from a qualitative horizon of experience of primary experience. This assumption, in turn, is based on the assumption (which

 In Chap. 5 I discuss the limitations of the judicial metaphor for conceptualizing political judgments.

12

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Dewey also tend to make), that the ends of inquiry can never be final and context-independent. Against the background of the outlined conceptions of inquiry, experience and judgment, these assumptions seem appropriate. How can there be fixed ends within a dynamic and active process that starts and ends in primary experience? Intelligent action seems to be rather based on the fact that we constantly remake and refashion our ends as we go along with the inquiry and hence that ends and means stand in a continuum. Ends are always “ends-in-view” (Dewey 1922, MW 14; 1939, LW 13). By this Dewey first of all means that ends are neither transcendent nor transcendental, but are always formed in reaction to a particular problematic situation. He further believes that ends and means should be revised in the light of each other: the meaning of an abstract goal can only be understood in the light of a context that determines the costs and possible ways to achieve it. The context, or qualitative situation, as I have explained above in connection with the notions primary experience and indeterminate situation, is meaningful insofar as it suggests ways of achieving the end. As ends are always means (Dewey 1922, MW 14, 156), it seems that there can be no real final ends for Dewey. Final ends are ends that have a purely intrinsic value, to the extent that they are aimed at only for their own sake; final ends, it seems, would have to be linked to a misguided quest for certainty. However, Henry Richardson has made two important suggestions that are relevant for our purposes with regard to Dewey’s seemingly negative stance on final ends. First, he argued that Dewey’s fallibilistic conceptions of inquiry and judgment on the one hand and the adherence to the possibility of reasoning about final ends within inquiry do not exclude each other—the assumption of final ends is compatible with fallibilism and experimentalism, because it does neither imply certain knowledge nor the possibility of a priori discovery.13 Secondly, Richardson has argued that “to get it right” can be a final end of inquiry and can be a regulative ideal of our judgments. I will discuss these suggestions in the last section of this chapter.

3.3  To Get Our Judgments Right The previous sections have shown that the Deweyan model of inquiry asks us to recognize that judging is a second-order, functional, experimental, and social activity which occurs at problematic moments within a larger, more immediate realm of  Richardson argues that we should not identify the order of finality with the order of justification. In other words, an end can be a final end but at the same time not be the source of all practical justification. The main idea of this is, as presented by Richardson, that a final end can regulate all subordinate actions and pursuits while the justification or establishment of this end “draws holistically on many particular grounds” (Richardson 1998, 120).

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experience; and knowledge is seen as the predicate of judgments that resolve such problems. This pragmatist understanding of knowledge-generating processes is indeed contextualist insofar as no feature of this process is regarded as eternally fixed: neither the definition of the problem, nor the solution to the problem; neither the means nor the ends. They are all reciprocally determined and tested, so that if a solution fails then the definition of the problem should be rethought. This seems to make the identification of final ends that is independent of inquiry and deliberation within a particular context and situation impossible. This impossibility carries with it the rejection of the idea that we can and should presuppose eternally fixed ends, values or standards of correctness for any sort of inquiry. Moreover, against the backdrop of Dewey’s conceptions of judgment and inquiry it has furthermore become clear that reasoning and judging are activities that blend the aesthetic-­ qualitative and the cognitive. Inquiry starts from indeterminate and problematic situations and hence arises out of the qualitative texture of concrete problems; it’s a practical activity that is embedded in specific situations. It is furthermore a transformative activity: reasoning reaches forward and wants to bring change to how we relate to our environment. Such change and transformation is purposeful as it aims at particular ends-in-view that emerge from our specific interactions with the environment, which means that the ends our different specific inquiries will have will likely not be identical. However, as I had suggested at the end of the preceding section, Dewey’s neglect of caring about final ends ultimately goes against his own critical instincts. How we can make up for it without violating the most important basic principles of his theory of judgment? Roberto Frega recently (2012) made an interesting suggestion concerning final ends within Dewey’s theory of judgment and his conception of inquiry. He provided an interpretation of Dewey’s theory of judgment that essentially takes it to be a theory of “objectivity without truth” (ibid., 156). What characterizes the process of inquiry and the concept of judgment in epistemic terms is a structure of objectivity, according to Frega, for which Dewey uses the term warranted assertibility. Warranted assertibility, or objectivity, Frega argues, “constitutes a goal of inquiry” (ibid. 172). While Frega does not use the notion of a “final end”, I take Frega to mean that objectivity is a final end in inquiry for Dewey. To be objective, Frega tells us, does not mean that one is neutral or impersonal, but rather that one’s judgments need “to be supported by the best available evidence” (ibid., 157). Indeed, as we have seen above, Dewey conceives of inquiry and judgment as relying on and bringing about an objective structure of reality. Think about what the notion of a situation implies for Dewey: It is not the individual perception that lets a situation appear problematic but the situation as a whole (its objective properties). Situations transcend the individual horizon of experience because they bear inter-subjectively verifiable matters-of-fact, and because their

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constitution as problematic situations is subject to epistemic standards that guide the process of inquiry. Indeterminate situations thus have an objective character; they are not indeterminate because only a doubting subject, or a group of doubting subjects, decides that is so. Rather, it is the other way around: a doubt is only meaningful if it is provoked by such an indeterminate situation—otherwise, a doubt is not meaningful; it is pathological, a sham, a paper doubt. Also, the process of inquiry itself is structured by experimental experiences, which reflect impersonal properties of the objects of inquiry. Peirce aptly referred to such experimental experiences in his ontology  as secondness—“the absolute constraint upon us to think otherwise than we have been thinking that constitutes experience” (Peirce 1931, Vol. 1, 336). The final outcomes of inquiry, while not copying or representing reality or facts, are still answering to objective properties of initial problematic situations and are informed by constrains that are the result of experimental experiences. Hence Frega is correct: when Dewey talks about warranted assertibility (about the warrantedness of making a judgment), what he means is objectivity. However, I doubt that objectivity can be a sufficiently critical guiding final end of inquiry, especially in the context of political inquiry. I suspect that an objective judgment in politics for Frega is a judgment that is legitimate. Consider what Frega in connection with moral and political inquiry says about the difference between his theory of objectivity and a view of inquiry that has truth as a final end: From a pragmatist perspective, inquiry is a behavioral strategy for responding to environmental challenges that utilizes the regulation of those epistemic states we call beliefs. While “objectivity” names the capacity of these regulations to successfully respond to challenges, “truth” names one of the norms of assertion inquiry must comply with in that process. (Frega 2012, 158)

This means that if we are dealing with a moral or political problem in inquiry, we should not aim to get things right but should only be concerned about being objective in the sense of getting past mere subjective sensibilities. But the norm of objectivity makes of inquiry a purely instrumental undertaking, because it does not allow for an inquiry about what it means to get things right in politics or morality; it does not allow for inquiry about final ends themselves. Indeed, Frega says that our interest in practical inquiry is not to get things right or to get to the “truth of the matter” as concerns an alleged moral fact or moral order. We instead want to “get things done”, which is to say that we want to be able to purse our personal goals in the frame of a social world we consider just. Given the “fact of pluralism”, agents who disagree about fundamental moral or political matters engage in inquiry hoping to reach a shared frame of action. (ibid., 208)

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Hence the aim of political (and moral) inquiry is to make common action possible in a world of pluralism against the background of a framework of justice. Neglect the fact that such framework of justice seems to be a final end that is different from objectivity; what is more striking about this quote is how much Frega reduces practical inquiry (and democratic politics) to a matter of getting along and managing our differences. How can this be true to the critical-progressive sentiments of Deweyan inquiry and democracy? Despite Frega’s own intentions (ibid.), his conception of practical inquiry seems to resemble the liberal-Rawlsian conception of public reason. He says: I can supply a wide array of arguments and consider to have objective grounds in support of my claim, and yet be aware that the same may be happening with my opponent [with which I disagree—MR]. Both our claims might be warranted, and so legitimately entitled to being sustained, objectively. (Frega 2012, 174)

The terms  “warranted” and “objective” here are specifications of “legitimate”. A judgment at the end of a moral or political inquiry is legitimate, we could say with Frega, if it accrues from conditions that largely followed the procedure of inquiry itself. But we want to be able to say that the resulting judgment of any form of inquiry is this that we take to be the right and correct one—that it is most adequate to resolve the initial problematic solution—and not just a legitimate (because objective) option among other legitimate options. We want to say that it is better than the other options. To get the problem and the solution right, then, seems to be the epistemic ethos and one of the final ends of inquiry and judgment. Frega could agree, but only in the case of scientific-like inquiry; while to get it right might be an adequate final end of scientific-like inquiry, it is not for moral and political inquiry, he holds, as moral or political disagreements cannot be aptly described in terms of one disagreeing party being wrong and the other being correct (while disagreement in science, Frega seems to suggest, is aptly described as such). He employs a hard distinction between descriptive inquiry (science) and normative inquiry (moral and political debate) (Frega 2012, 163). But this sharp distinction between descriptive and normative inquiry along the lines of truth invites a fact-vale dichotomy, a dichotomy pragmatists (including Dewey) reject, and which ultimately denies what Dewey and other pragmatists held dear about their conceptions of reasoning and judging, namely to provide a unified account of judging as practical reasoning. Political inquiry and judgment without the end of getting our judgments right renders it uncritical, instrumentalist and consequentialist, as it remains confined to the back-and-forth between means and ends within a process that gets bogged down in finding the right means to ends-in-view.

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Again, this limitation lets a Deweyan outlook about judgment and reasoning become untrue to its own views about critical, creative, intelligent action. Let us thus pursue the question if the possibility of reasoning about final ends in inquiry can be true to Dewey’s own critical ambitions. Let me be clear at the outset about the trajectory of this question. In pursuing this question, I certainly do not aim at being at odds with the general pragmatist sentiment that tries to avoid the language of truth in terms of a theory of truth but tries to think about truth rather, if ever, in functional terms, i.e. tries to explain why and how it matters for inquiry-­ processes. Moreover, I agree with Frega that the neo-Peircean interpretation of how truth matters for inquiry is problematic.14 Frega explains his dismissive attitude towards the idea of declaring truth as the final end of inquiry with reference to neo-­ Peirceans like Cheryl Misak (and, I assume, implicitly Robert Talisse). One of the central problems of this interpretation is the function it attributes to the concept of truth in inquiry. It takes truth to be the ultimate aim of inquiry, which means that it takes truth to be a necessary and also a sufficient condition of rationally holding a belief. Such an understanding of truth in the political context leads to the awkward position that truth is a  necessary and a  sufficient condition of rational political claims, and that truth is the ultimate aim of any form of inquiry, including democratic discussion and justification. However, truth can be taken to be a final end of inquiry, if we understand it as a disposition of individual inquirers “to get it right”. To say that any kind of Deweyan inquirer aims to “to get it right” is to say, for Richardson, that “there is room deliberatively to specify the end of truth and that we must remain open to doing so anew” (Richardson 1998, 130). “To get it right” as a final end of inquiry implies three presumptions: (1) in inquiry we aim at getting our judgments right while being fully aware of inquiry’s fallibilist property that “every knowledge claim—and, more generally, every validity claim—is open to challenge, revision correction, and even rejection” (Bernstein 2010, 36). (2) In aiming at getting our judgments right we must specify what it means for our judgments to get it right by reference to the procedural experiential and experimental epistemic properties of inquiry, again assuming fallibilism. Because of this fallibilist assumption we cannot simply presuppose such specification is eternally given as true, and hence (3) we must work to ensure that  the specification of what it means  to get  our judgments right  is right. This means that “to get it right” as a final end of any kind of inquiry requires specification as soon as we enter a specific inquiry. But while each separate inquiry has its own ends-in-view, what makes them alike is that “to get it right” is a regulative end of all kinds of inquiry. To be a regulative end of inquiry means to function as one orienting goal of all kinds of inquiry (while not being the only and ultimate end of all

14

 In Chap. 6 I discuss in more detail the reasons for why it is problematic.

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inquiry)—in other words, inquiry is a type of activity that is oriented towards different ends, but as an activity it is marked off from other types of activity by having “to get it right” as a regulative ideal. In order to anticipate any misunderstanding here, this does not mean that inquiry may be defined as an activity that is oriented towards truth—in other words, the activity is not sufficiently defined as being oriented towards truth, but it is also not adequately defined in absence of “to get it right” as a regulative, final end. A regulative ideal is an ideal that regulates conduct in a way that is different from  a perfectly realizable ideal that is taken to be some point in the future. As Emmet (1994, 47) has argued, a regulative ideal is different from a perfectionist utopian blueprint. A blueprint-­ideal is in principle realizable but not yet realized, however a regulative ideal is not realizable. The former ideal is an actual destination that we can arrive at with our inquiry, the latter only obtains a functional role in inquiry as it curates our focus and directs our actions. The assumption that “to get it right” is a regulative ideal of inquiry and judgment means that we direct our actions and reflections towards a critique of existing or possible ideas, institutions and arrangements. A specific political inquiry, for example, will not be directly aimed at specifying the public good in these terms or even at specifying “to get it right” as a final end of inquiry; it will rather be occupied with resolving the various concrete problems that arise against the background of this specific inquiry. However, it is difficult to see how dealing with the concrete circumstances of a particular political inquiry could be sufficiently critical without a (simultaneous or separate) inquiry into the norms, values and standards that guide, in the background, the making of judgments in this specific investigation. The alternative to this view would either be a narrow and technocratic picture of thinking about politics in epistemic terms in the context of Dewey’s conception of inquiry—where inquiry and judgment are limited to finding the most efficient means to achieve given ends based on common sense, tradition, etc.—or a conception of political action that is not epistemic (not concerned about problem-solving) and only remotely compatible with  Dewey’s theory of judgment and his conception of inquiry— such as an aesthetic theory of political judgment as offered by Hannah Arendt, which I will discuss in the next chapter. To sum up, in this chapter I suggested that inquiry does have an overall end (to get our judgments about problems and solutions right), one which helps mark it off from other sorts of activity. While it is not an ultimate end, it is a regulative one. Again, this does not mean that inquiry as an activity is sufficiently defined in terms of truth (as the neo-Peirceans have it), but the orientation towards getting our judgments right is a necessary characteristic of inquiry (and hence is not just an accidental goal of inquiry, one among many others, as Frega (2012, 158) suggests).

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This understanding of final ends as part of Dewey’s theories of inquiry and judgment has direct import on the epistemic democracy debate referred to in the previous chapter. I claimed there that the Deweyan understanding of the epistemic process of reaching a judgment would understand the criteria that let us determine the “rightness” (or “correctness”) of judgments as being constructed in the very process by which we are also trying to approximate it. The standard of rightness of democratic procedures is both and at the same time independent of the procedure by which it is determined (the external constraints of conceived and actual consequences of a judgment that emerges out of the inquiry-process) and process-­ dependent (involving all participant’s individual judgments about means and ends-in-view as well as final ends). Inquiry processes are both and at the same time about figuring out the procedure-independent standard of getting our judgments right by which we are going to assess alternative options, and about judging the better option in terms of how well it meets this procedure-independent standard of rightness compared to alternative options. But this chapter has also clearly shown that there is a strong aesthetic thread that can be located within Dewey’s theory of judgment—it exists in the link between judgment and experience. The qualitative dimension of primary experience is as an important factor in the logic of inquiry, allowing it to go beyond the mere negative finding of a disorder: Even if the problem is not yet conceptualized, it already has its own quality. The definition of what the problem is articulates this feeling and is already the first step in inquiry. Feeling and qualitative sensibility are therefore constitutive aspects of human intelligence and cannot be opposed to it. It is this connection between judgment and experience that will allow me to substantiate the claim in the next two chapters that the Arendtian reduction of political judgment to an exclusively aesthetic understanding on the one hand,  and the reductionist tendencies of the of the epistemic literature on democracy on the other hand, can be overcome by Dewey’s framework of experience and judgment, because it integrates both the aesthetic and epistemic dimensions of human action.

References Bernstein, Richard. 2010. The Pragmatic Turn. Cambridge: Polity. Burke, Tom. 1998. Dewey’s New Logic: A Reply to Russell. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press. Dewey, John. 1887. Psychology, The Early Works, 1882–1898. Vol. 2. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. ———. 1903. Studies in Logical Theory, The Middle Works, 1899–1924. Vol. 2, 293–378. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. ———. 1905. The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism. In The Middle Works, 1899–1924, vol. 3, 158–167. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

References

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———. 1908. Ethics, The Middle Works, 1899–1924. Vol. 5. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. ———. 1916. Introduction to Essays in Experimental Logic. In The Middle Works 1899–1924, vol. 10, 320–365. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. ———. 1920a. Introduction to 1948 Reprint of Reconstruction in Philosophy. In The Middle Works, 1899–1924, vol. 12, 256–277. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. ———. 1920b. Reconstruction in Philosophy, The Middle Works, 1899–1924. Vol. 12. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. ———. 1922. Human Nature and Conduct, The Middle Works, 1899–1924. Vol. 14. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. ———. 1925. Experience and Nature, The Later Works, 1925–1953. Vol. 1. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. ———. 1930. Qualitative Thought. In The Later Works, 1925–1953, vol. 5, 243–262. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. ———. 1933. How We Think. In The Later Works, 1925–1953, vol. 8, 105–352. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. ———. 1934. Art as Experience, The Later Works, 1925–1953. Vol. 10. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. ———. 1938. Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, The Later Works, 1925–1953. Vol. 12. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. ———. 1939. Theory of Valuation. In The Later Works, 1925–1953, vol. 13, 189–252. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. ———. 1941. The Basic Values and Loyalties of Democracy. In The Later Works, 1925–1953, vol. 14, 275–277. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Emmet, Dorothy. 1994. Regulative Ideals: Kant. In The Role of the Unrealisable: A Study In Regulative Ideals, 10–17. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Fesmire, Steven. 1995. Dramatic Rehearsal and the Moral Artist: A Deweyan Theory of Moral Understanding. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 31 (3): 568–597. ———. 2003. John Dewey and Moral Imagination: Pragmatism in Ethics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Frega, Roberto. 2012. Practice, Judgment, and the Challenge of Moral and Political Disagreement: A Pragmatist Account. Lanham: Lexington. Hickman, Larry. 1998. Reading Dewey: Interpretations for a Postmodern Generation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Horkheimer, Max. 2004. Eclipse of Reason. London/New York: Continuum. Joas, Hans. 1996. Die Kreativität des Handelns. Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main. Kant, Immanuel. 2007 (1790). Critique of Judgement. Edited by Nicholas Walker. Translated by James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Krüger, Hans-Peter. 2000. Prozesse Der Öffentlichen Untersuchung. Zum Potential Einer Zweiten Modernisierung in John Dewey’s ‘Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. In Philosophie Der Demokratie: Beiträge Zum Werk von John Dewey, ed. Hans Joas, 194–234. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Lacey, Robert. 2016. Pragmatic Conservatism: Edmund Burke and His American Heirs. New York: Springer. Levi, Isaac. 2010. Dewey’s Logic of Inquiry. In The Cambridge Companion to Dewey, ed. Molly Cochran, 80–100. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Pappas, Gregory. 2016. John Dewey’s Radical Logic: The Function of the Qualitative in Thinking. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society: A Quarterly Journal in American Philosophy 52 (3): 435–468. Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1931. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Edited by C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss. Vol. 1–6. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

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Richardson, Henry. 1998. Truth and Ends in Dewey’s Pragmatism. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 28 (1): 109–147. Taylor, Paul. 2017. An Aesthetics of Resistance: Deweyan Experimentalism and Epistemic Justice. In Pragmatism and Justice, ed. Susan Dielemann, David Rondel, and Christopher Voparil, 215–230. New York: Oxford University Press. Vannatta, Seth. 2014. Conservatism and Pragmatism: In Law, Politics, and Ethics. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Chapter 4

Political Judgments and Political Inquiry: Arendt and Dewey

Abstract  This chapter asks what political judgment is—the central concept of the book—given the Deweyan account of judgment presented in the previous chapter. I relate Dewey’s conception of judgment to Arendt’s conception of political judgment and discuss the similarities and differences between the two. Following on from the previous chapter, I start with the observation that Dewey’s understanding of judgments (in terms of the analogy between judgments as the outcomes of inquiry processes and judicial judgments as the outcomes of a trial) resembles Kant’s understanding of judgments. I then go on to outline Arendt’s identification of political judgments with Kantian aesthetic judgments and discuss her conception of aesthetic political judgments in relation to the contemporary neo-Arendtian theory of democratic judgment by Linda Zerilli. In a next step, I first point to the similarities of such an understanding of political judgment and Dewey’s notions of judgment and inquiry by stressing the affective and aesthetic dimensions of his notion of experience, and second I offer a criticism of the non-epistemic Arendtian interpretation of the concept of political judgment from a Deweyan point of view. This critical engagement with Arendtian theories of political judgment will set up the Deweyan account of political judgment, which is the subject of chapter five. Keywords  Political judgment · Hannah Arendt · John Dewey · Charles Sanders Peirce · Democratic freedom

In this chapter I relate Dewey’s theory of judgment to the concept of political judgment. I compare Dewey’s conception of judgment with Arendt’s conception of political judgment and discuss the similarities and differences between the two. Following on from the previous chapter, I start with the observation that Dewey’s understanding of judgments (in terms of the analogy between judgments as the outcomes of inquiry processes and judicial judgments as the outcomes of a trial) resembles Kant’s understanding of judgments. I then go on to outline Arendt’s identification of political judgments with Kantian aesthetic judgments and discuss her

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 M. I. Räber, Knowing Democracy – A Pragmatist Account of the Epistemic Dimension in Democratic Politics, Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations 14, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53258-1_4

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conception of aesthetic political judgments in relation to the contemporary neo-­ Arendtian theory of democratic judgment by Linda Zerilli. In a next step, I first point to the similarities of such an understanding of political judgment and Dewey’s notions of judgment and inquiry by stressing the affective and aesthetic dimensions of his notion of experience, and second I offer a criticism of the non-epistemic Arendtian interpretation of the concept of political judgment from a Deweyan point of view. This critical engagement with Arendtian theories of political judgment will set up the Deweyan account of political judgment, which is the subject of chapter five. In the previous chapter I argued with Dewey that judgments and not propositions are the relevant epistemic “entities” of inquiries.  Judgments in inquiry exhibit a structural resemblance to judgments in juridical procedures. I also suggested that this view is articulated both in Dewey and in Kant: both philosophers emphasize that a judgment is a verdict, similar to judicial judgments, and both present judging as an act of creativity. Neither Dewey nor Kant wrote specifically about the nature of political judgment, but we can nevertheless transfer their notions of what a judgment is into the political realm. Based on the Kantian-Deweyan notion of judgment outlined in the last chapter, I suggest treating political judgments as a subspecies of the broader category of judgment. I defined the activity of judgment with Kant as the activity of predicating universals to particulars and particulars to universals. As judgments are the mental activity by which humans predicate universals to particulars and particulars to universals, judgments are political judgments when this activity arises in a political context in terms of universals and particulars of a political nature. Dewey and Kant can both be interpreted to hold that all kinds of judgments are structurally the same in that they are acts of combining universals with particulars, which renders them acts of synthesis, whether they concern scientific, aesthetic, moral, legal, or political judgments. But, as we also saw, Dewey’s understanding of judgments is different from Kant’s with regard to the transformative nature of judgments; judgments for Dewey are not only analytic and synthetic, they are also transformative in that they are supposed to resolve the problematic aspects of an initial problematic situation. For the moment, let us bracket this crucial difference between Dewey and Kant and focus on the similarities. According to Kant’s usage of the concept, judgments are not linguistic acts (the combination of terms) but epistemic acts (the combination of presentations). This meaning of judgment resonates with the Deweyan legal meaning of judging, particularly the aspects of validity and evidence or proof. Kant, similarly to Dewey, does see two ways in which the specific and the universal can be knotted together: either the specific is subsumed under the generic (the rule, the principle, the law), which is already given, or the specific is given and the generic needs to be found. Kant called the former determinant judgments, the latter reflective judgments. While in the case of the determinant judgment the principle, under which the

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specific is subsumed, is found in the very generic under which the specific is subsumed, such a principle has to be externally applied to the reflective judgment. Reflective judgments are left to their own devices, so to speak, and are the correlate of Dewey’s aspect of creativity in judgments. Kant also describes reflective judgment as responsible for two important kinds of judgments: aesthetic judgments (judgments about the beautiful and the sublime) and teleological judgments (judgments which ascribe ends or purposes to natural things, or which characterize them in purposive or functional terms). As  is famously known, Kant’s theory of judgment has been used  by Hannah Arendt as the basis for a theory of political judgment. Inasmuch as Dewey’s and Kant’s theories of judgment are similar, we can thus ask how the Aredtian theory of political judgment relates to a Deweyan theory of political judgment—where they are similar and where they differ. Working out these commonalities and differences will be the main focus of this chapter. I will try to show that Dewey’s theory of judgment and Arendtian theories of political judgment overlap in that they both capture the dimension of qualitative experience and aesthetic judgment, and that they differ to the extent that Dewey’s theory of judgment attributes to (political) judgment not only an aesthetic dimension, but just as much an epistemic dimension.

4.1  T  he Aesthetic Interpretation Political Judgments: Hannah Arendt and Linda Zerilli It is primarily to Hannah Arendt’s credit that the Kantian theory of judgment has been related to a theory of political judgment (Arendt 1992). In her account, political judgments, like aesthetic judgments, are examples of Kantian reflective judgments. Reflective judgments match the realm of political action for Arendt, because true political action for her is similar to judging aesthetic objects, in that both kinds of action do not involve the application of given rules but rather the invention of new rules to unknown specific situations. Her conception of the political understands the public political space as “constituted by the critics and the spectators, not by the actors or the makers” (ibid., 62), in which the spectators are “impartial by definition” (ibid., 55), because “withdrawal from direct involvement to a standpoint outside the game is a condition sine qua non of all judgment” (ibid.). In aesthetic judgments we simply appreciate beauty without feeling driven to find any use for it, and hence our aesthetic judgments are disinterested. Political judgments, Arendt urges, are similarly disinterested and “useless”. Citizens as spectators have the opportunity of judging impartially, and in doing so they employ two

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key faculties: imagination and common sense. Imagination is the faculty of representing entities that are absent, and thus creates the detachment required for an independent judgment, which allows citizens to reflect on these representations from a variety of diverse standpoints. Common sense is related to the faculty of imagination, as it refers to the human capacity of employing an enlarged mentality (a sense for the community) that transcends individual idiosyncrasies. Political judgment  is aesthetic for Arendt, because politics compels a unique kind of being-in-the-world and relating to this world. The reason why political judgment is aesthetic and different from other forms of judgment resides thus with her ontological typology of the different things that we actually do (the vita activa). The vita activa consists of, first, the activity of taking care of the physical body, second the activity of making things, and third the activity of inventing rules—in her idiosyncratic choice of words, she calls the first type of activity „labor“, the second one „work“ and the third one „action“. As far as I understand it, Arendt identifies “action” with politics. For her, politics is sui generis, a way of being in and relating to the world that is not reducible to labor or to work. The realm of politics constitutes a fundamentally different way of acting for her, because this is the only realm of action where we are daring to enter truly unexplored territory, and where the outcomes are essentially incalculable. In other words, politics, for her, is fundamentally different from labor and work in that it defies the constraints of nature, of economics, and of psychology. It forgoes formulas; it is a realm of novelty, freedom, and plurality—in this regard, it compares to art and aesthetic expression. But the aesthetic dimension of judging does become relevant in the political context for her not primarily because our political judgments are about judging politics like we are judging art or nature in terms of beauty or taste (although this is also an important reason why she links up political and aesthetic judgment, as I will discuss further below). Rather it becomes primarily relevant because what appears to us as political is a confrontation with the new and extraordinary. The confrontation with the new is a confrontation with what is both unfamiliar to us and uncontrollable (or not yet controlled by us), and in that respect the new is also normatively distinctive, in virtue of which it demands a distinctive form of normative judgment, namely reflective judgment—the kind of judgment called forth by that which we cannot subsume under our already available concepts and categories. In our encounter with the new, the problem of making sense of something that challenges or eludes our available ways of making sense, we must judge in a context in which those familiar and reliable ways of making sense cannot make sense. We may be confronted with a problem, the nature of which we are not yet able confidently and coherently to state, let alone to propose the solution it demands—in Dewey’s words, we may encounter an indeterminate situation. Such a problem has to be newly formulated in language or symbols not already at our disposal. Our concepts may need to be expanded, applied differently in this new context, and applied in new ways. Only then can whatever it is that confronts us in perplexing form start to mean

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something, to make sense, allowing us thereby to respond meaningfully and appropriately. Confronted with the new we must first make sense of what it is we are dealing with, and achieve some kind of shared agreement about its meaning (based on sensus communis). Without common sense, citizens as spectators would not be able to get past their specific idiosyncrasies. Sensus communis and imagination are related in that getting past idiosyncrasies will often involve an imaginative extension of existing politically used concepts. By foregrounding these two faculties, Arendt highlights that creativity and novelty are important factors of our political practices and institutions, without which politics would remain  status quo, self-sealed and caught in a series of inalterable causes and effects. Imagination, we could say, is the sibling of hypothetical thinking; it lets us envisage the future and it might mobilize our will to act, in order to make this future a reality. Creating imaginative presentations is a sensible behavior in a context like politics that is occupied with future-­ oriented strategies and with decisions that aim at concrete future results. Imagination thus is a manner of affecting reason by making visible a possible or desirable future, which will and action can try to realize. What makes judging the new special from an Arendtian point of view is that such action cannot be proceduralized without being lost. For proceduralists (such as Dewey), the existence  of procedures (pragmatist inquiry)  is the most significant manifestation of reason and the legitimate basis of normative validity. But when confronted with the problem of the new, an Arendtian take on politics holds, there are no valid or correct rules or procedures for making sufficiently sense of the new. If there were such rules or procedures there could be nothing new to confront, nothing by which to be perplexed or challenged. And yet, there is always something new to challenge us, something that eludes our inherited ways of making sense of things, our habitual and customary understandings and interpretations. Arendt was surely right about this. If the new and the normal case of the political are conceptualized in terms of established procedures, we get the following conservative picture: We take for granted a world of shared agreement and understanding within which our diverse practices make sense and can be carried forward in intelligible, yet largely unquestioned ways. The new, in contrast, might take on a democratic function—this is, by and large, Linda Zerilli’s argument in A Democratic Theory of Judgment (Zerilli 2016): absent the possibility for the new to become part of the political discussion through being voiced or stated, we are left with a politics of normal politics, a contracting space of politics in which democratic politics is usurped by bureaucratized political parties and monopolized by political technocrats, a politics that leads to a self-sealed democracy, to stagnation, cynicism, and passivity—very much like what Dewey calls “democracy as a form of government”. Arendt’s identification of political judgment with reflective-aesthetic judgment has been criticized as being overtly non-cognitive and reliant of the faculty of feeling and sentiment rather than reason, and, as I will argue below, I generally agree

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with this assessment.1 However, Zerilli recently put forward an interpretation of Arendt that countered such criticism by arguing that judging the new for Arendt is not only a subjective expression of affect or sentiment, but has an objective goal, what Zerilli calls “world-building” (ibid., 262ff.). She argues that political judgment (for Arendt) is indeed primarily a matter of expressing affect or sentiment, but that we should understand the expression of affect and sentiment as conveying and constructing an objective structure of our political world. In order to arrive at this conclusion, Zerilli goes back to Arendt and to Arendt’s interpretation of Kant.2  The appeal to universality in aesthetic judgments for Kant is the universality of taste (Geschmack). Arendt claims that this aspect is similar in political judgments. Although Kant rejected the idea that aesthetics could ever be a science in that such judgments could be proved, he insisted that, when we judge aesthetically, our judgment is not merely subjective. The judgment “this sculpture is beautiful” is not the same as the claim “I like vanilla-ice”. It would be strange to say, Kant holds, that this sculpture “is beautiful for me” (Kant 2007 [1790], 44); a judgment of beauty posits the agreement of others—whether others agree is another matter. Kant goes on: “For in a matter in which contention is to be allowed, there must be a hope of coming to terms” (ibid., 166). This hope is it that makes aesthetic judgments not merely subjective and that the debate over taste can live on despite the lack of guarantee of reaching agreement. Thus, aesthetic and political judgments are not purely subjective. They fit into the realm of quarrels and contention (Kant calls it streiten) in lieu of dispute (disputieren). In other words, because they resemble aesthetic 1  Arendt’s description of political judgments in terms of impartiality and common sense has proved to be very useful as an analytical category. However, as has also been observed, her concept of political judgment unnecessarily confines it to an all too aesthetical analysis, because it does not capture the fact that what is involved in political judgments are both reflective and determinant relations between the universal and particular (e.g. Makkreel 1990). Makkreel argued that the structural feature of the Kantian notion of reflective judgments is that they coordinate a particular form with an idea of an overall sense of order, and such coordination is an interpretive mode of cognitive judgment (ibid., 175). In other words, it is this coordination of particularity and universality that makes the reflective judgment interpretive and thus cognitive, be it aesthetic, teleological, or moral. The aesthetic reflective parts of political judgments indeed are marked by disinterestedness and community orientation, but in political judgments we also find teleological considerations about means and ends and determinant practical judgments, both of which need not to be necessarily impartial. Compare also with Beiner’s (1982, 36) assessment that Arendt failed to recognize that “all human judgments, including aesthetic (and certainly political) judgments, incorporate a necessary cognitive dimension.” 2  Apart from Arendt (and Kant) is the ordinary language philosophy of the late Wittgenstein (read in many ways through Cavell) important for her, because Wittgenstein offers her a way of seeing experience and perception as inherently normative (of not having to place normativity above or below them) and thus a way of claiming the “irreducibly conceptual character of all embodied experience” (Zerilli 2016, 252–53) and that we can use concepts “other than [...] as rules or decision procedures” (ibid., 71). I will touch upon this idea of normativity in experience and perception in the next chapter. In this chapter I only focus on Zerilli’s interpretation of Arendt’s theory of political judgment.

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judgments, we can quarrel about political judgments in a communicative interchange that might constitute agreement (if at all) as the result of persuasion rather than steadfast evidence. Hence, while for Kant taste is indeed subjective and judgments of taste cannot be guided, examined and proved to be valid, at the same time he insists that judgments of taste are not purely subjective because it is possible to argue about taste, for if there is hope to come to an agreement, one must be able to reckon on grounds of judgement that possess more than private validity and are thus not merely subjective. (ibid.)

The reason why a judgment of taste is not purely subjective is that it is based on a concept that “acquires at the same time validity for everyone […]: because its determining ground lies, perhaps, in the concept of what may be regarded as the supersensible substrate of humanity“ (ibid., 168). It is this supersensible substratum of humanity—by which judgments of taste acquire validity for everyone—that lets Arendt to draw a parallel between aesthetic judgments and political judgments, because reflective aesthetic judgments are judgments that we arrive at by “think[ing] in the place of everybody else” (Arendt 2006, 217). To repeat, thinking in the place of everybody else requires imagination and a sense of community, the latter of which Kant describes as an enlarged mentality and which Arendt calls „representative thinking“ (ibid., 237). Enlarged mentality requires to bracket the merely subjective and private grounds of a judgment and to reflect one’s “own judgement from a universal standpoint (which [one] can only determine by shifting his ground to the standpoint of others)” (Kant 2007 [1790], 124 f.). And, as we saw with Arendt, taking into account the perspectives of others in the absence of known rules and established concepts is what it means to judge politically. Hence, Zerilli argues, Arendts interpretation of Kant’s account of aesthetic judgments acknowledges the inter-subjective room for argument about concepts that also aesthetic judgments allow for.

4.2  D  ewey and the Arendtian Interpretation of Political Judgments Arendt’s (and Zerilli’s) account of political judgment stresses an important dimension of political action that can also be found in Dewey’s conceptualization of the aesthetic and affective elements of his general theory of judgments: the qualitative experience of a situation and the creativity and imagination involved in exploring possibly new ways and rules to cope with a problem in inquiry. In this regard, the pragmatist outlook and the Arendtian conception of political judgments are related. However, I want to suggest that the activity of judging and the qualitative-aesthetic dimension of experience relate to each other in a slightly but significantly different sense that in Arendt’s account of judging politically. I have organized this section around two main points of divergence between a pragmatist account of political

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judgment (and inquiry) and the Arendtian theory of political judgment3: Aesthetic judgment vs. aesthetic experience, and aesthetic political judgment vs. epistemic political judgment.

4.2.1  Aesthetic Judgment vs. Aesthetic Experience For Arendt, the aesthetic-qualitative dimension of human experience and human action is the paradigm for political action that finds its expression in judging as a specific form of action, because this dimension for her enables pluralism and community, which ultimately enable political freedom. Her conception of political judgment hence has a normative trajectory in that aesthetic judgment and political judgment enable and maintain freedom: aesthetic judgment is the central mode of political action for her, because only this form of action fully acknowledges the aesthetic-qualitative dimension of human experience as a realm of freedom. Aesthetics and freedom are related in Arendt, as she understands freedom not in a narrowly liberal sense of being able to choose between alternatives nor in the Kantian sense of (moral) autonomy but rather in terms of the new: freedom is the capacity to begin, to start something new, to do the unexpected. I have suggested above that the problem of the new, which was the focal point of Arendt’s interest, can be mapped in terms of the everyday (or ordinary) and the extraordinary. According to this Arendtian logic, the ordinary in politics only seems to guarantee stasis and status quo while the extraordinary and the new—which can be tapped for Arendt by relating to the world in a mode of judging aesthetically—enable freedom. Yet, doesn’t an aestheticization of our relationship with objects and subjects lead us away from what we should actually care about when we strive for political freedom, namely the prevention of dominance and alienation by overcoming (conceptual and practical) contradictions? Doesn’t it lead us to be seduced by the deceits of commercial products of advertisement or the ecstatic moments of eruption that spark interest, intensity and consummation? There is a sense in which the classical pragmatists agree with Arendt that the answer here must be “no, on the contrary”, insofar as they too insist on the importance of the aesthetic for human freedom. They would agree with Arendt that the aesthetic-qualitative dimension of human experience constitutes a central component of human action, and they would agree with her that the aesthetic has a normative function of enabling a certain kind of freedom. However, at least what concerns Dewey (and Peirce), they would disagree with her (and Zerilli) in that they think that the aesthetic dimension of our actions and experiences can only be fully accounted for when we refrain from judging. 3  This short overview is not intended to be a fully fleshed-out account of a pragmatist account of an aesthetics of politics. Much more would need to be said about such an account than I have space to do here. I only want to point out here to this often overlooked dimension of the aesthetic for pragmatist political thought.

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While Peirce’s and Dewey’s general philosophical projects differ in many relevant instances, their aesthetics are strongly related. Both suggest that aesthetic attentiveness—through its relation to firstness (Peirce) or quality (Dewey)—constitutes the way by which immediate experience and its novel possibilities enter into intelligent life. In “Qualitative Thought” (Dewey 1930, LW 5) Dewey explains that experience moves from qualitative experience to reflective experience (or, in Peirce’s terminology, from a first to a third): When we conceptually discern different aspects of the felt quality of a situation in reflection, we thereby transform quality into an object within a different sort of experience. This reiterates the point that quality (firstness) cannot be experienced in the mode of judging but needs aesthetic attentiveness to the quality that compels the absence of judgment altogether. However, while quality (firstness) surrounds and precedes cognition, this does not mean that the qualitative and the cognitive are incommensurable. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the function of the qualitative within Dewey’s conception of inquiry is to bind the elements of an experience and move them “toward some fruitage”. The qualitative marks the necessary initial stage of all kinds of inquiry. While inquiry concludes with a judgment, it starts with refraining from it in the initial indeterminate situation so as to be attentive to the richness of the qualitative texture of the experienced situation. We should add here, however, that perception (or sensation) for Dewey could be an experience of pure quality, because perception is a functional component of the interaction between organism and environment. Therefore, qualitative situations are not self-contained characteristic complexes, but rather possibilities for their explication. The unanalyzed qualitative effects of perception have an epistemological function in that they are the beginnings of judgments and inquiry. This means that while perception and experience is profoundly qualitative, qualities are never merely passively received nor are they simple or context-free. This is another way of restating that the notion of immediate qualitative experience refers to an ontological category (quality or firstness) and has no epistemic meanings—immediate qualities are not representations of actual entities that are simple and discrete; they have no representative character. Qualities, taken in their epistemological function, however depend on discriminations made in inquiry and language. This is so, for Dewey, because perception is never a passive apprehension of external stimuli but rather an activity of an organism already engaging with its environment. Perception is never direct or immediate, an encounter with some “given”. Perceiving is perceiving as—selection, differentiation or unification within a larger horizon of action. Wilfried Sellars’ rejection of the myth of a raw perceptual given echoes this pragmatist conceptualization of perception. The myth, as Sellars describes it, implies, firstly, that what is given to our minds is non-inferential knowledge that “presupposes no learning, nor forming of associations” (Sellars 1997, 20). It implies secondly, that such knowledge is necessarily error-free. Against this myth he argues that knowledge requires conceptual awareness. Concepts are linguistic objects, and knowledge hence relies on one’s knowledge of a language. Sellars suggests that for something to amount to knowledge it must play a normative role on the strength of its impact in appropriate

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inference. The given cannot have such impact. While it can cause us to believe something, it cannot unambiguously justify us in doing so: The essential point is that in characterizing an episode or a state as that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says. (ibid., 76)

In other words, even low-level, pre-reflective perceptual engagements with the world are always already conceptually mediated. Human action in the social world requires a conceptual apparatus that supplies particulars based on which we impose upon the social world some kind of intelligible order: the mind functions more like a lamp than a mirror (Brandom 2001, 8). The mind and our conceptual apparatus do not simply reflect but rather actively structure the particulars of the world as those particulars appear to us. The conceptual apparatus through which we acquire perspectives on the world will mostly operate tacitly and implicitly, and also the perspectives acquired through these operations that define the propositions and beliefs we commit ourselves will remain mostly tacit. Dewey insisted on a form of experience, aesthetic experience, which requires the bracketing of judgment, comparison and conceptual generalization in order to be fully open to the richness of the qualitative texture of situations. At the same time, however, Dewey in his own way insisted that our epistemic and conceptual ways of relating to such situations is possible. Because of the pragmatist assumption that perception is always conceptual and related to the qualitative, it is possible (and even necessary in the sense of a theory of action) to explicate the qualitative in language and symbols. This also means that from a pragmatic perspective there is no insurmountable gap between aesthetic-qualitative experience and conceptual-­ cognitive experience. Aesthetic attentiveness and epistemic interest simply constitute two different ways of relating to the ontological notion of experience, as Taylor has pointed out: “In Dewey’s view, knowledge is what we get when we manage experience in certain ways, while aesthesis is what we get when we manage it in different ways” (Taylor 2017, 222). In other words, the aesthetic way of relating to experience is to be attentive to the qualitative by bracketing our epistemic desires of meaning-inference and interpretation in favor of emotional capture and imaginative creation (that require the absence of a structure of judgment), while the epistemic way of relating to our experiences foregrounds what is bracketed in aesthesis: meaning-making, interpretation, analysis and synthesis. My understanding of Dewey is that while these types of relating to experience are not reducible to each other and therefore conceptually different, they are inextricably linked. Being attentive to the qualitative, hence, requires refraining from judgment—it requires an artificial isolation of the qualitative aspects of experience and perception, what we try to do when we, for example, appreciate art. The realm of political pluralism and freedom that is created for Arendt in judging aesthetically, Dewey’s conceptualization of the qualitative in perception and experience suggests, demands the absence of a structure of judgment in favor of an affective and imaginative appreciation of our experiences. And Dewey’s conception of inquiry suggests that such

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appreciation of the qualitative is a constitutive part of our knowledge-generating practices (inquiry), which is to say that for him the aesthetic and the cognitiveepistemic are not divided by an insurmountable gap but rather are to be seen as continuous. This latter point leads to a second contrast between Arendtian theories of political judgment and Dewey’s theory of judgment.

4.2.2  A  esthetic Political Judgment vs. Epistemic Political Judgment Dewey in Art as Experience developed a normative argument for the claim that all relationships we have with economic, educational, political or any other form of institution should be structured in a way that enables the attentiveness to aesthetic quality.4 Rather than reserving the moment of aesthetic judgment as the exclusively adequate mode of the relationship of aesthetic and political concepts, subjects and objects in the sense of Arendt, Dewey believes that qualitative experience permeates all spheres of action and that we should pay attention to this dimension of e­ xperience in all spheres of our lives. While Arendt separates the political sphere from all other spheres of action based on her sui generis thesis, Dewey understands the political sphere as continuous with other spheres of action based on his continuity thesis, which is to say that inquiry in any context roughly follows a similar pattern; hence inquiry can be intelligent in any context of action. While Arendt holds that confronting or imagining the new by way of an aesthetic mode of judging is specifically political, Dewey’s conceptions of primary experience and aesthetic experience in contrast convey that for him all human action and interaction with the world should be characterized by an aesthetic sensibility, if it would to become intelligent action and interaction. As soon as our actions become mechanical applications of inherited concepts in any realm of our action in the world, such action becomes less intelligent. While Dewey would agree with Arendt that politics is a specific context of inquiry, Dewey differs from Arendt in that he believes that the generic pattern of inquiry—which recognizes not only the aesthetic level of human experience and action, but also the human desire for directed, controlled and intelligent action—also applies the political context. Such desire is reflected in his conceptualization of political and social inquiry in The Public and Its Problems (Dewey 1927, LW 2). Another way of contrasting Arendt and Dewey in terms of their understanding of the political and political judgment is by contrasting their stance on (political) procedures. From the Arendtian point of view the primary function of political judgment is to invent and to imagine the new, which implies that political judgment

 I reconstruct this argument in Raeber (2013).

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cannot be proceduralized or institutionalized (viz. cannot be part of a larger procedure), insofar as the act of judging the new in imaginative terms is set outside the boundaries of law and (formal) procedures. Truly imagining the new compels a form of artistic freedom and creativity that defies regularities and procedural patterns of action and interaction. But, as we saw, Arendt’s conceptualization of political judgments in terms of aesthetic judgments is also based on a sense for community. The making of political judgments for Arendt is not identical with subjective artistic expressions of creativity but rather consists in judgments about such expressions and presentations, which demand an enlarged mentality and representative thinking based on a sensus communis, and which are a prerequisite for the existence of a political community, which is also a moral community. But while such community is a political and moral community, it is not an epistemic community. This is different from how Dewey imagines democratic communities. Like Arendt, he thinks of them as political and moral communities, but in addition to that he conceives of them also as epistemic communities of inquirers. Thus, for Dewey, democratic political communities have an epistemic meaning, as they are built around problems: hence political communities functionally are closely related to inquiry procedures.5 In other words,  Dewey, like Arendt, understands democratic action and political judgment as not confined to formal procedures or institutions—“democracy as a way of life”—but in contrast to Arendt he shows how judgment (including political judgment) is part and parcel of a larger fallible and dynamic process of inquiry, in which aesthetic attentiveness and judgment about the adequacy of problems and solutions are inextricably linked. Hence, for Dewey, social and political procedures and processes matter for judgment, especially for inter-subjective communication via symbols. Arendt’s conception of political judgment overly emphasizes the aesthetic character of judging politically (inventing new rules, preserving freedom by ensuring the plurality of imaginative perspectives, etc.) and by that neglects the epistemic character of judging politically. I had suggested above that also Dewey acknowledged freedom as a function of the aesthetic. However, I suggested that this function emanates from aesthetic experience, which  requires the temporary suspension of the faculty of judgment. Hence, in order to foreground the relevance of the aesthetic to democratic politics, we do not need a theory of judgment. We need a theory of (political) judgment primarily if we want to make evaluative or normative judgments. Such a  theory should at least indicate in the abstract what it means for a judgment to succeed or not. We should not expect that a theory of political judgment could provide us with a template or give us a recipe based on which we could

5  See chapter seven for an elaboration of Dewey’s conception of democratic publics, which are the political-moral-epistemic communities of political inquirers.

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discern between better or worse judgments, but it should nevertheless allow for the possibility of distinguishing heuristically between such judgments. Arendt’s theory of political judgment does not seem to provide such possibility. However, Zerilli has been arguing that Arendt’s theory of political judgment does provide this possibility. According to Zerilli, Arendt has been wrongly interpreted as holding a view of the political and of political judgment that favors subjective opinion over objective truth. She wants to correct what she believes to be a partially distorted perception of how Arendt relates to truth in politics. Indeed, it is common to interpret Arendt as having forcefully excluded truth from the domain of politics in favor of doxa (opinion)— my introductory chapter of this book cites one of her passages where she explicitly says that. Yet Zerilli considers Arendt’s conception of political judgment to be perfectly compatible with the concept of truth, under the condition that we conceptualize truth in a way that is adequate for politics. She writes that far from being hostile to the supposedly antipolitical concepts of objectivity and truth, Arendt takes them to be ordinary concepts sustained through quotidian public acts of speaking among citizens. (Zerilli 2016, 33)

Provided we do not understand truth in a “Platonic [sense], with its characteristic contempt for all things worldly and contingent” (ibid., 120), Arendt could accommodate truth in politics, Zerilli argues. Arendt does that, Zerilli argues, by calling “into question the idea that proof is our sole access to truth in the political realm” and by pointing to the “distinctive character of truth claims in politics and their entanglement in opinion” (ibid.). Such distinctive character of truth compels an “alternative notion of truth”, for which Zerilli enlists Sokrates and hermeneutical thinkers like Gadamer and Heidegger, and which she calls “a public notion of truth” (ibid.). Public truth is not the Platonic absolute Truth (with a capital T) pitted against opinion, but the Socratic truth of opinion (with a lower t). Zerilli cites Arendt: [Socrates], in opposition to the Sophists, had discovered that doxa was neither subjective illusion nor arbitrary distortion but, on the contrary, that to which truth invariably adhered. (Arendt 2007, 19)

In order to elucidate the meaning of this public notion of truth, Zerilli turns to Gadamer. In Gadamer, like in Arendt, she finds a conception of truth that concerns the truth of opinions. Opinions are composites of prejudices und tradition, Gadamer in Truth and Method (2013 [1960]) argued, insofar as our opinions are inevitably primed by our habitual and customary life-experiences, which are heavily laden with prejudices and tradition. The hermeneutic task is to become aware of these prejudices and traditions by making them explicit in inter-subjective conversation. Opinions are truth-laden, in this view, in so far as the truth of the tradition asserts itself in them. Truth here does not pertain to some transcendent property of judgments or propositions, but rather relates to an immanent structure of past practices

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and ideas that are operative in our present actions and judgments. Zerilli argues that it is precisely the political space viz. the public realm that is suited to depict this expressive hermeneutical function: public exposure of one’s opinions in politics makes explicit our prejudices that we all inevitably have. Instead of aiming at an eschewal of prejudices from public discussion and persuasion, the aim of politics is to make these prejudices explicit. But does this say more than publicity is a requirement for judgment? Zerilli argues that it does. She holds that Arendt’s goal in proffering a conception of political truth goes beyond the mere hermeneutical exercise of making explicit what is implicit in judgments, in that she thinks that publicity is not only helpful in explicating but also in formatting judgments. Thus, the political space has both an expressive and a formative function. Political judgments have a formative function by virtue of their “world-building” potential as devices through which a common world is performatively created rather than externally assumed. The formative function of political judgments is about “freedom” and, especially, “a world-building practice of freedom rooted in the plurality of perspectives that alone facilitates our capacity to count as real, as part of the common world, what is real” (Zerilli 2016, xv). Such world-building comes about when different citizens make political judgments from their own perspectives: “Representative thinking strives for validity by taking account of plural ordinary perspectives that alone give us a sense of an objective world that we have in common […]” (ibid., 141). In this capacity of world-­ building, “judging is a practice through which citizens can enlarge their sense of what belongs in the common world” (ibid., 279). In sum, Zerilli urges that Arendt believed that political judgments are indeed related to truth, insofar as they (inadvertently) reveal an objective structure of the past that is rooted in our current practices and experiences on the one hand, and on the other hand because they have the function of formatting perspectives about what the common world is or is not viz. should or should not be (their world-building function). This latter function is not a matter of taking stock of an objective reality or recording facts about the world, but to award such reality or fact political objectivity by judging their value and relevance for our practices. We could say that political judgments can exert this function, because they share the same structure with aesthetic judgments: they do not just apply given rules to specific issues, but they invent new rules; they decide under what rules we want to live, and hence it is not the rules but we who decide “what will and will not belong to the common world” (ibid., 22). But certain things clearly do not belong to our world and certain things clearly should not belong to our world. How could we know with Zerilli and Arendt what does or doesn’t and should or shouldn’t belong? It is safe to say that when Zerilli uses Arendt’s theory of political judgments (and her stance on truth and politics) to argue for the cognitive nature of her own account of “democratic judgment”, what she means when she talks about truth is

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“objectivity”—which is defined as the product of an inter-subjective practice of judging politically. The concept of public truth is not different from the concept of objectivity, as the former can be expressed in terms of opinions being objective insofar as the seemingly subjective structure of doxa carries with it (mostly implicit) traces of the past that transcend both the judging subject and the present moment of judging. However, doesn’t the notion of a public truth viz. political objectivity purported by Zerilli acknowledge the necessity of transcending the otherwise purely subjective nature of political judgments? Objectivity in politics, as we have seen, for them is a function of foregrounding the expressive und formative functions of political judgments. Both these functions refer to objectivity via the notion of sensus communis: the traces of past habits, customs and practices in our present judgments and the common world that is built by judging politically. But the problem with anchoring objectivity in common sense is that it remains unclear how a sensus communis can be a critical foil against which to judge the desirability of the status quo, as the status quo is a product of sensus communis. The Arendtian answer to this challenge could be that the terms status quo and sensus communis do not refer to something fixed and authoritative but rather to a highly unstable inter-subjective web of perspectives and judgments, which has to be performatively created over and over again. Common sense is something that is in constant flux and in the making as we make our political judgments. Such radical openness seems to be the whole point of thinking about political judgments in terms of freedom: freedom can only be achieved and sustained politically if we do refrain from assuming the correctness of certain judgments on the basis of which we should aim for a sensus communis (that should not be changed). Political freedom is a function of a radical pluralism with regard to political judgments and to common sense—it demands the constant remaking of the status quo. While such constant remaking is an epistemically blind process of attempting to break up and rearrange the status quo, it is not blind towards (other) people’s judgments—it is a theory of political judgment that acknowledges the democratic value of horizontal equality (the equal respect of people’s judgments). Judging politically, as we saw, for Arendt normatively implies the faculty of representative thinking and an enlarged mentality, which compels us to take into account the judgments of others when we make our own judgments. This attentiveness towards and respect for other people’s judgments is what makes political judgments not subjective but objective, is what Zerilli claims. But it is important to note that this notion of objectivity has no link to epistemic processes nor is it fallibilist in any sense—it has no epistemic bearings whatsoever. The Arendtian theory of political judgment is normative and critical, though, in that it is a theory of freedom that conceives of freedom as the actualization of plurality (cf. Loidolt 2017); freedom is the function of a radical pluralism that is anchored in an ethical commitment to an enlarged mentality and to representative thinking. From such an aesthetic view, the critical function of

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aesthetic judgment is a produced effect on a systemic level: political and public spaces, which bring about the actualization of plurality in judgment, ensure that common sense, status quo and the imagined “we” of politics always remain in motion and never ossify. However, no evaluative or comparative statement can be made about the substance or content of the judgments themselves—an aesthetics of judgment is only concerned about the form of judgments and the conditions under which they occur.6 This is also the reason why the Arendtian theory of political judgment is not fallibilist. While we do not need to show how judgments can assert something with absolute certainty in order for them to be fallible, we nevertheless have to be able to show how judgments and processes by which they occur are (self-)corrective by virtue of a critical methodology and how they lead to a “gradual revision of our beliefs and habits of action in the course of experience” and argument (Pihlström 2012, 6). Fallibilism as a concept necessarily requires the possibility of correcting and revising convictions and judgments. This possibility for correction and revision only exists, however, if there is a possibility that process-­ independent standard(s) for these processes can be agreed upon, on the basis of which the need for correction and revision can be determined. In the absence of such a process-independent standard(s), judgments and processes cannot be described as being fallible. Hence, while Zerilli’s Arendtian democratic theory of judgment is normatively anchored in foregrounding political freedom as the actualization of plurality, it can hardly be described as having an epistemic dimension, despite Zerilli’s own assertions to have developed a theory of judgment that is both and at the same time non-­ cognitive and cognitive (ibid., 29). Maybe this lack of an epistemic dimension again goes back to Arendt’s sui generis thesis about politics (Zerilli seems to agree on the validity of this thesis), which says that politics is a self-contained world and seems to imply that we (as those who judge) can shape and model the world voluntaristically, free from the forces and facts that compel us. From a pragmatist perspective, this is problematic. In contrast to the sui-generis thesis, Dewey’s naturalist yet culturally and qualitatively saturated conception of experience as well as his dynamic theory of inquiry (and judgment) can avoid these voluntaristic implications. Let me note that elements of Zerilli’s notion of political objectivity can be found in a pragmatist theory of judgment as well. Understanding our actions, practices and habits as underpinned by traces of the past is in line with the pragmatist understanding of practice. Therefore, from a Deweyan perspective, it makes sense to attribute an objective character to our practices and actions. As we have seen, for Dewey, qualitative experience is already conceptually (and normatively) laden, and the job of the inquirer is it to articulate and make explicit these conceptual aspects of qualities. This is the hermeneutical task of the Deweyan inquirer. Yet, the articulation and explication of conceptual content in qualitative experience is only one step in  Which are, to be clear, legitimate and important concerns.

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inquiry towards an overall judgment. Inquiry for Dewey demands that we problematize the articulated and the explicated. He thinks of a problem in terms of a disturbance or irritation of the otherwise as unproblematic experienced flux of life—in terms of an incoherence between old ways of coping and this particular situation: a broken motor, a sick body, an unjust society, a mathematical problem. Whether we consider a situation to be problematic or unproblematic depends on our values, which accompany our evaluative judgments about the situation, and the goals that can trigger an inquiry: health, justice, mathematical proof, etc. In the previous chapter I suggested that we can read the Deweyan conception of inquiry and his theory of judgment as allowing for the possibility of thinking about the process of inquiry and the act of making a judgment as simultaneously being about procedure-immanent ends and means and about procedure-independent ends (or, in Dewey’s own language, about ends-in-view and about final ends). In the next chapter I will clarify how Dewey’s general theory of judgment can serve as a model for conceptualizing the epistemic meaning of political judgment, but also how this theory must be adapted to the specific circumstances of the political context—as touched upon in this chapter—which will then lead us to a Deweyan theory of political judgment.

References Arendt, Hannah. 1992. In Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press. ———. 2006. In Between Past and Future, ed. Jerome Kohn. New York: Penguin. ———. 2007. In The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn. New York: Schocken. Beiner, Ronald. 1982. Interpretive Essay: Hannah Arendt on Judging. In Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Brandom, Robert. 2001. Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Dewey, John. 1927. The Public and Its Problems. The Later Works, 1925–1953, 2. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. ———. 1930. Qualitative Thought. In The Later Works, 1925–1953, 5, 243–262. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 2013. Truth and Method (1960). London: Bloomsbury. Kant, I. 2007 (1790). Critique of Judgement (Ed. Nicholas Walker, Trans James Creed Meredith). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Loidolt, Sophie. 2017. Phenomenology of Plurality: Hannah Arendt on Political Intersubjectivity. New York: Routledge. Makkreel, Rudolf. 1990. Kant and the Interpretation of Nature and History. Philosophical Forum 21 (1): 169. Pihlström, Sami. 2012. A New Look at wittgenstein and Pragmatism. European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 4 (2). Raeber, Michael. 2013. The Art of Democracy—Art as a Tool for Developing Democratic Citizenship and Stimulating Public Debate: A Rortyan-Deweyan Account. Humanities 2 (2): 176–192.

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Sellars, Wilfrid. 1997. Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Taylor, Paul C. 2017. An Aesthetics of Resistance: Deweyan Experimentalism and Epistemic Justice. In Pragmatism and Justice, ed. Susan Dielemann, David Rondel, and Christopher Voparil, 215–230. New York: Oxford University Press. Zerilli, Linda. 2016. A Democratic Theory of Judgment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Chapter 5

Judgments, Juries and the Political Sphere

Abstract  This chapter presents a Deweyan account of the epistemic nature of political judgments in democracies. I argue that the Deweyan account of political judgment consists of two types of judgments: judicial judgments and normative judgments. Taking cue from Dewey’s metaphor of thinking about judgments in juridical terms, the first type of judgment suggests that we can understand political judgment in democracies as being related to the process of reaching a verdict in court, and that lay juries can serve as a proxy for how ordinary citizens exert this function of judging. However, an epistemic understanding of ordinary citizen’s political judgments in democracies goes beyond a juridical interpretation of judgment, as political judgment is not just about judging justice according to pre-­ established laws, rules and values, but more fundamentally about making normative judgments about these laws, rules and values. Thus, the latter type of judgment suggests that making political judgments is, furthermore, about making judgments about values and ends. I relate this type of judgment to Dewey’s conception of social and political inquiry that suggests a structure of social interaction and reflection foregrounding the qualities of attentiveness, articulation, and exchange as a way of accounting for the genuinely political context of getting normative judgments about social and political problems right. Keywords  Political judgment · Social and political inquiry · Juries · Critical social epistemology This chapter presents a Deweyan account of the epistemic nature of political judgments in democracies. I argue that the Deweyan account of political judgment consists of two types of judgments: judicial judgments and normative judgments. Taking cue from Dewey’s metaphor of thinking about judgments in juridical terms, the first type of judgment suggests that we can understand political judgment in democracies as being related to the process of reaching a verdict in court, and that lay juries can serve as a proxy for how ordinary citizens exert this function of judging. However, an epistemic understanding of ordinary citizen’s political judgments

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in democracies goes beyond a juridical interpretation of judgment, as political judgment is not just about judging justice according to pre-established laws, rules and values, but more fundamentally about making normative judgments about these laws, rules and values. Thus, the latter type of judgment suggests that making political judgments is, furthermore, about making judgments about values and ends. I relate this type of judgment to Dewey’s conception of social and political inquiry that suggests a structure of social interaction and reflection foregrounding the qualities of attentiveness, articulation, and exchange as a way of accounting for the genuinely political context of getting normative judgments about social and political problems right. Political judgments are epistemic in two different but interrelated ways of being about something, from the perspective of a Deweyan theory of judgment. On the one hand, political judgments are about rendering a comparative verdict about possible solutions to specific problems in light of which the judgments take shape. When citizens vote, or, more generally, make political decisions, they are judging the advantages or disadvantages of (ideally) well-determined alternatives. In this sense of judging, they speak a verdict not terribly unlike a judge or jury who judges the guilt or innocence of a defendant. I will henceforth call this type of judgment judicial political judgment (jpj). On the other hand, political judgments are about judging ends and values that constitute the normative horizon for both judging the existence and framing of political problems as well as their solutions. Hence political judgment also refers to a much broader dimension of political action than the juridical understanding of judgments could. Making judgments in democratic-­ political contexts not only demands that citizens judge the advantages or disadvantages of different future courses of action (by choosing between alternative policies, politicians or political parties) but also that citizens make normative, qualitative and factual judgments about the problems their political community should care about. This second sense of political judgment is a kind of meta-judgment that precedes the first (judicial) sense of judgment. I will call this type of judgment normative political judgment (npj). This chapter specifies these two types of political judgments, asks about how they are connected and how they are different in the context of democracy, and how they fit in with the Deweyan framework of judging that I have outlined in the previous chapters. In the context of this framwork, we can think of jpj and npj as referring to two key moments during the process of inquiry: (a) The moment of sensing, constructing and reasoning about the existence and nature of specific social and political problems and (b) the moment of coming to an overall judgment with regard to the aptness of the solutions to these problems. If we take Dewey’s analogy of understanding the outcome of an inquiry-process—a judgment—as the outcome of a trial seriously, the type of judgment required at (b) is a judicial political judgment. The judgment required at (a), however, has a much broader scope in that it requires

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a focus on questions like “Why do we judge a situation to be problematic?” or “Which values and ends let us frame the problem in this or in that way?” or “What is it about this problem that we think that it deserves political attention?” It is questions like these that reflect a larger horizon of qualitative experience and normative ends and values that are at stake at this stage. With reference to the terminology I used in the last chapter, the type jpj is a determinant judgment (subsuming particulars under universals) and npj a reflective judgment (finding unknown universals for given particulars). In making jpj, we apply universals to specifics by way of considering specific facts, reasons, intentions, behavior, etc. that grow out of an experimental process in light of established rules and norms. In making npj, we judge our efforts to establish rules and norms against the background of a qualitative and normative horizon of experience and reflection. In contrast to Arendtian theories of political judgment that interpret political judgments in primarily aesthetic terms and identify political judgments with reflective judgments, the Deweyan theory of judgment understands political judgment as consisting of both determinant and reflective judgments, insofar as they intersect within a larger conception of political inquiry.  It  understands reflective judgments not purely in aesthetic terms, but also in epistemic terms about “to get it right”—however provisional, unstable and fragmentary such attempts to get these normative judgments right are. The chapter consists of two main sections. The first section outlines the epistemic sense of judicial judgments in democratic terms. I suggest that jpj is best understood in terms of judging in judicial contexts: the process of coming to a political judgment resembles the process of reaching a verdict in court. Building on this, I examine possible reasons for the justification of lay juries—a democratic institution that relies on the judgment of ordinary citizens. I try to show that some of the reasons refer to epistemic advantages and thus that the jury can be partially justified instrumentally. To the extent that this justification succeeds, we can take the epistemic justification of lay juries as a proxy for justifying democratic institutions that rely on the equal participation of ordinary citizens and on their judgments in epistemic terms in general. In this sense, legal judgments are the paradigm for understanding the epistemic sense of jpj. Section two addresses the question what the meaning of npj is in the context of Dewey’s notion of social and political inquiry. What are the similarities and differences between normative political judgments and judicial political judgments? The main difference, among others, is that jpj are decisions about a problem (guilty or not guilty?) that has a clear definitional form that is fixed prior and outside of the process of reaching a verdict. They are decisions that are guided by norms, rules and laws, which are not directly in question at that moment, as they are given externally to, and applied in, the process of reaching a verdict. Normative political judgments involve considerations about the adequacy of the problem-definition to which

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judicial political judgments are an offered solution. Npj is about the adequacy of bringing a problem into the political space, and about the aptness of the framing and definition of this problem—it is a judgment about the problem-ladenness of “situations”. In order to make such judgments in an epistemically responsible way, citizens need to reflect both on the qualitative dimension of their and other people’s experiences and on the values, norms and rules by which they conceptualize and evaluate these experiences. Dewey’s notion of social and political inquiry, applied to contemporary critical social epistemology and discussed in the context of his theory of valuation, will help me both to unpack this claim, and to show how such reflection can become part of a social and political processes of communicative interaction.

5.1  Judicial Judgments and Democracy: The Jury Justified In this section I link Dewey’s theory of judgment to arguments suggesting that the jury is an example of a democratic institution that can be justified (at least partially) instrumentally, and that the type of judgment members of the jury exert partially mirrors political judgments. The argument for the idea that members of a jury are capable of making competent judgments is twofold. First, I will provide a very short historical outline of this idea by showing that jury eligibility is historically of the same origin as the idea that members of a demos are capable of making competent judgments. Second, I will interpret some justifications of the institution of lay juries made by the US Supreme Court on the basis of the ideals of representativeness and citizenship as epistemic justifications of this institution. If lay juries can be justified (at least partially) in epistemic terms and if lay juries are to be considered as a democratic institution, then the justification of lay juries can be taken as a proxy for the justification of other democratic institutions and democracy in general.1 One reason why the jury exemplifies the epistemic justification of democratic institutions writ large is historical. In ancient Greece, deciding politically and judging as jurors have constituted the two basic activities of democratic citizens. In Athens, for example, citizens had the right to attend the assembly, the council, and other bodies, or to sit on juries. This fact is reflected in Aristotle’s definition of the citizen, which he defines in the Politics as a person who has the right to participate in deliberative and judicial office: Who the citizen is, then, is evident […]. Whoever is entitled to participate in an office involving deliberation or decision is, we can now say, a citizen in this city. (Aristotle 2010, 87; 1275b 18–21)2  The argument is largely based on Schwartzberg (2018).  The term “office involving deliberation or decision” refers to an office with political decisionmaking functions and judicial power, as the context in Book III of Politics makes clear. 1 2

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Over the course of history, the right to vote and the right to participate in a judicial office often appeared simultaneously, or, if they did not appear simultaneously, the claim that voting rights and the right to judicial office and jury duty are not separable was made repeatedly. In medieval England, the eligibility to vote and to serve as juror emerged at the same time, although these rights were restricted to those who possessed freehold property, or lands held directly of the king, of an annual rent of at least forty shillings clear of all charges (Hirst 2005, Chap. 2). The political quarrels and negotiations in the French Constituent Assembly in the eighteenth century about who should have the right to vote and who should be eligible for jury service was about the question who should be considered a citoyen, a democratic citizen (Donovan 2010). Robespierre and his allies advocated the view that “the most common of men” can be the judge of facts and thus that everybody should be eligible for jury service.3 In the rich tradition of US constitutional ruling the right to vote has repeatedly been connected to the constitutional right of citizenship. A case in point is the 1994 ruling of the US Supreme Court that peremptory challenges based on sex, like those based on race, violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,4 which essentially has established the right of women to serve on juries (Grossman 1994) and has acknowledged that citizenship includes both the right to vote as well as the right to serve on juries.5 The justification for lay juries based on past Supreme Court holdings in various jury selection cases in the context of the US legal system has been established in democratic terms by reference to the principles of representativeness and citizenship (c.f. Grossman 1994). The principle of citizenship refers to the function of lay juries to enable citizens to participate in public life and hence is a valuable instrument to realize the ideal of self-governance. Tocqueville alluded to this function when he wrote that the jury system places the people, or at any rate one class of citizens, on the judge’s bench […] and places control of society in the hands of the people, or of that class. […] The jury is above all a political institution. It should be regarded as a form of popular sovereignty. (Tocqueville 2004 [1835], 314–15)6

 A majority in the assembly claimed that “only propriétaries are true citizens” (Donovan 2010, 32), and the majority view prevailed, which meant that the property qualifications that applied to electors also applied to jurors. It was from among the representatives (the elécteurs) that jurors were chosen. 4  J. E. B. v. Alabama Ex Rel. T. B., 511 U.S. 127 (1994): “The Equal Protection Clause prohibits discrimination in jury selection on the basis of gender, or on the assumption that an individual will be biased in a particular case solely because that person happens to be a woman or a man.” 5  See also e.g. Re (2007) or Amar (1995). 6  See also e.g. Powers v. Ohio, 499 U.S. 400, 407 (1991): Jury service “affords ordinary citizens a valuable opportunity to participate in a process of government.” Furthermore, empirical evidence suggests that the experience of jury service promotes citizen actions favorable to democratic selfgovernance. Gastil et al. (2008) show that citizen who vote only infrequently and then deliberate with fellow citizens in criminal jury trials are subsequently more likely to vote. 3

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In the following, I will mainly focus on  the principle of representativeness. Representativeness refers to the right of a defendant to a trial “by an impartial jury”, established by the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.7 The intent is for the chosen jurors to be representative of the defendant’s community. The United States Supreme Court has furthermore specified that an impartial jury must be “selected from a fair cross-section of the community” (Taylor v. Louisiana, 419 U. S. 522 [1975]). A vast amount of scholarship on the jury provides various normative reasons for the trial by an impartial jury: impartiality, protection against oppression, legitimacy, etc. (Abramson 2015, 864). For example, representation increases legitimacy: normative legitimacy (as representativeness ensures that the jury reflects a cross-section of the community) as well as de facto legitimacy.8 But representativeness also has epistemic implications. Representativeness in the context of the justification of lay juries implies the assumption of both horizontal equality (equal respect) and vertical equality (presumption of equal competence) between members of a society. The jury’s epistemic value in terms of representativeness is reflected in a Supreme Court ruling in the 1946 case Thiel v. Southern Pacific Co. where the court stated that recognition must be given to the fact that those eligible for jury service are to be found in every stratum of society. Jury competence is an individual rather than a group or class matter. That fact lies at the very heart of the jury system (Thiel v. Southern Pacific Co., 328 U.S. 220 (1946) n.d.)

While the court’s ultimate aim in this case was to argue that denying citizens the right to jury service eligibility based on their status as a member of a group or class is impermissible because it was “not justified by either federal or California law” (ibid.), the logic in this passage about jury competence being an individual matter suggests an additional reason—an epistemic one—for the argument that exclusion based on class or group membership is unwarranted. The statement that jury competence is an individual matter means first of all only so much: nobody may be excluded on the basis of social identity characteristics. This means that the statement still allows for the exclusion of someone from juries because of the person’s individual incompetence. So we should define next what is meant by competence. Competence as a juror demands the capacity to comprehend evidence presented at trial, to draw conclusions from it, to deliberate with the other

7  The Sixth Amendment says: “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed.” The same right is furthermore protected by the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. 8  A study from 2008 found for the American context that public acceptance of the jury is very high. The study cites a “typical poll” in which “three-quarters of respondents say that if they were on trial, they would prefer a jury to a judge” (Hans and Vidmar 2008, 230).

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jury members and to come to a judgment as a group (c.f. Bornstein and Greene 2017; Hans and Vidmar 2008). Where the threshold is to be set precisely, below which a potential juror would be deemed to be incompetent, remains open here. What matters for my purposes is that above such a threshold, jurors are considered competent, although their abilities will certainly differ in degree. Hence, the assumption of individual competence in jury trials only seems to demand that the jurors are sufficiently competent, defined by this threshold.9 Yet why should we be satisfied with jurors being sufficiently competent? What is stopping us from asking that the jury should only include the most competent, given that individual competences will vary above the threshold? A reason to be content with the sufficiently competent condition is given by the ideal of representativeness itself. Representativeness ensures that the jury members represent a large part of a diverse population with all their differences. Assuming that the cross-section of the community is diverse with respect to life-world backgrounds, experiences and perspectives, a representative jury for this specific community would by and large mirror this diversity. A jury constituted by diverse members, who reflect a society of the defendant’s peers with a broad collection of experiences, backdrops and knowledge is prone to interpret the facts, testimonies, and narrative accounts from distinctive perspectives, which enhances the epistemic quality of decisions reached in deliberative settings.10 Hence, the reason why we should accept the merely sufficiently competent ones, even though we could try to pick the most competent ones, is that this would most likely only be practicable at the expense of the jury’s diversity. That would occur, for example, if we would try to pick the most competent ones by selecting the jurors based on the presumption that educational achievements predicts competence in judgment (Schwartzberg 2018, 452). But educational achievements likely correlate with affluence or with belonging to privileged groups. In this case, identifying the most competent ones would have to rely on group membership or class, which violates the ideal of representativeness and might most likely reduce

9  Empirical evidence suggests that juries are competent in this sense of sufficiently competent (Hans and Vidmar 2008, 227). As many mock jury studies and the Arizona Jury Project have shown, “juror’s individual and collective recall and comprehension of evidence are substantial. Jurors critically evaluate the content and consistency of testimony provided by both lay and expert witnesses, and do not appear to rubber stamp expert conclusions.” (ibid.) 10  Empirical findings seem to confirm this: “Heterogeneous juries have an edge in fact finding, especially when the matters at issue incorporate social norms and judgments, as jury trials often do [italics added]” (Hans and Vidmar 2008, 230; see also Hans and Vidmar 2013, 50). The idea that diversity in a deliberative setting correlates with a high probability to arrive at the correct conclusion has been around in democratic theory for some time now (c.f. Rawls 1999, 315; Landemore 2012; Hong and Page 2004; Anderson 2006; Bohman 2000). I will examine the idea that diversity provides epistemic advantages in more detail below in the next section as well as in Chap. 7.

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group-diversity within the jury, which is detrimental to the epistemic success of the group (and in the case of juries will likely lead to less just outcomes). Above a certain threshold of competence, diversity adds an epistemic advantage in comparison to individual judgments. To be sure, the idea is not to say that diversity can replace education and cognitive ability. The idea is that diversity is desired from an epistemic point of view in addition to sufficient education and cognitive ability. I will present arguments for this claim in the next section. Hence, if diversity is a positive property for the overall epistemic success of the jury, diversity (via the principle of representativeness) partially justifies democratic lay-juries in epistemic terms. What is the meaning of this in the context of Dewey’s conceptions of judgment and inquiry? Let us bracket all possible differences between the jury-process and Dewey’s conception of inquiry for a moment and focus on the similarities between judging in juries and judging in Deweyan inquiry. Jury members exert judgments that aim to get it right in the sense of finding the just solution to the specific problem (e.g. is the defendant guilty or not?) by subsuming the specific (the specific case) under the generic (the given laws). To a certain extent, this describes how Dewey thought about judgment in inquiry: Inquirers exert an overall judgment that aims to get it right in the sense of finding the best solution to a specific problem with which inquiry started. From this we can infer that political judgment for Dewey in part is in a political context what judgment is in inquiry in general: a judgment that resembles judgments of jury members in a judicial context. Consequently, judging politically is making a judgment that represents an individual solution to a specific, context-dependent case (the judgment is a solution to this case and cannot simply be applied to other cases). However, the judgment the jury reaches is also a reflection of the final end of what it means to execute and perform justice, and hence the specific judgment about this specific case is a reflection and specification of a final end that lays outside of the process of reaching a verdict in juries. In other words, juries are doing two things at the same time when they judge: they judge a specific case and hence solve a specific problem, and at the same time they specify the final end of justice that lies outside of the process of reaching a judgment in jury. Such specification of end, however, is not a judgment about the end itself, it only exemplifies and specifies it. For the jury to be able to exercise this dual function, it must rely on standards that define and prescribe justice in general terms. In the legal context, these standards are written down and codified in laws. The justifications for these standards, however, are dependent on a political context in which the sovereign discusses and determines which laws are just. This requires political debate and confrontation in which citizens argue and ultimately judge what laws they should want. Dewey’s theory of judgment and his conception of inquiry acknowledge such requirement, which means that a Deweyan theory of political judgment cannot be reduced to the model of judicial judgments.

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5.2  Normative Political Judgments Citizens are not just judges; they are (directly or indirectly) legislators, and in their function as legislators they need to exert a form of judgment that is not reducible to judging on a jury. According to Nadia Urbinati (echoing Arendt), citizens judge politically if they are “making opinions concerning the course of actions it would be good for them to take or avoid taking”, but when courts (or juries) issue judgments, they intend to “produce true-false inferences” (Urbinati 2014, 23). In other words, Urbinati claims, while political judgments are opinions (doxa), judicial judgments establish truth or knowledge (episteme)—judicial judgments are about establishing the truth about a case and as such aim at establishing facts (and not give guidance for future action); political judgments, however, are not about establishing the truth or about establishing facts but are future-oriented opinions and concern the course of actions citizens as a collective are willing to take or not. To put the contrast in slightly different terms: judicial judgments, like scientific judgments, aim to get it right for Urbinati, while political judgments do not have this aim. By drawing up a fundamental distinction between political and other kinds of judgments, maybe Urbinati intends to point to the fact that juries and judicial systems more generally rely on well-established and widely accepted formalized rules and standards for what it means to get it right, while the political sphere does not have such well-­ established rules and standards. To get it right in making a judgment in a jury means to get the specific case (“it”) right (measured according to an underlying standard of what it means to “get justice right”), but in the political context both what “it” exactly is (what “it” is and if “it” should count as a political problem) and what to get it “right” means (the best solution to the problem) is highly contested and subject to continuous disagreement. However, the Deweyan perspective that I have adopted here suggests that the difference is one of degree rather than one of kind. While Urbinati, like Arendt and Zerilli, claims that political judgment is a type of its own kind and fundamentally different from other types of judgment with regard to their aim and scope, my appropriation of the Deweyan theory of judgment suggests that political judgments are continuous with judicial (and other) types of judgment. At the same time it acknowledges that the political sphere is not reducible to other spheres of our communal lives. The difference is a matter of degree for Deweyan pragmatism, as it regards all judgment as the outcome of inquiry, which is a form of action that is a fundamentally epistemic reaction to the indeterminacy of existence and experience, to which judgment relates by ideally finding the best way of coming to terms with indeterminacy and problematic situations. Political action and judgment, in that regard, is not fundamentally different from other contexts of judging. Indeed, the most relevant difference between judgments by juries and judgments by citizens is that the former aim at establishing a correct judgment about a specific case according to a given generic norm (the given law, and ultimately justice), while the latter is the process of politically establishing the generic norm, which is intended to provide a future-oriented judgment on the course of collective action in  a specific society. As said, from a Deweyan perspective, both these types of

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judgment are alike in that they both have a transformative character and both concern our practical actions. Recall my discussion in Chap. 3 of how Dewey compared judgments in general in the context of inquiry with judicial judgments in particular: When talking about the function of judgments in inquiry in general, he uses the example of the final judgment in a trial to explain that a judgment settles the issue, not as an end in itself, but as a decisive directive of future activities (“a man is set free, sent to prison, pays a fine”). It is this resulting state of actual affairs—the changed situation—that is the matter of the final settlement or judgment. The sentence itself is a proposition, differing, however, from the propositions formed during the trial, whether they concern matters of fact or legal conceptions, in that it takes overt effect in operations, which construct a new qualitative situation. Like all judgments, for Dewey, judicial judgments ultimately have this reference to action. A jury’s judgment reflects both the specific situation of the case and how the law bears on it, as well as our normative understanding of what the law should mean. In this sense, judging the specific case is also, but only secondary and indirectly, issuing a judgment about what is deemed to be justice.11 Juries are institutions that rely on well-established procedures and standards that help to determine what justice means for this specific case, while political judgments are more loosely related to established processes or accepted normative standards. I take Dewey to say that inquiry about normative standards is possible, also in political matters.12 His conception of social and political inquiry highlights the interpretative and evaluative dimensions of political inquiry, and offers a useful conception of inquiry as a critical epistemic praxis. When we apply Dewey’s conception of inquiry to the political context we can conceptualize citizens as political inquirers, who in the initial phase of an inquiry  When a jury judges about a concrete case (about the guilt of a defendant, say), it primarily judges the concrete case. If we take Ferrara’s view here, however, we can interpret this judgment as having a strongly exemplary character for judging the underlying values that transcend the situated case— in the context of juries this concern for process-transcendent values is oriented towards justice. Hence, the judgment about the guilt of a defendant is also and at the same time an exemplary judgment about justice. Or, to put it in more general terms, while judging judicially (and this applies also to judging politically) is about the concrete the same judgment is an example for a judgment about “our shared sense of who we could be at our best” (Ferrara 2004, 593). Compare also Ferrara (1999, 2008 and 2014), where he extensively explores the exemplary character of political judgments to combine the appraisal of concrete situations with a context-transcending claim to a larger normative horizon. Judgments about concrete situated cases are illustrative of judgments about the larger normative horizon—and hence when we inquire about the particular, we simultaneously reflect the general. 12  Pragmatism’s position in this respect thus not only contrasts Arendtian conceptions of the political, but also liberal theories of the political (and of liberal democracy) that limit the function of “public reason” to the production of political legitimacy. Compare e.g. also Urbinati, for whom the “appeal to basic principles” in political debate and persuasion is “not for epistemic goals, [...] but rather with the aim of overcoming disagreement and making decisions that are legitimate or acceptable to those who are to bear them.” (Urbinati 2014, 35) 11

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are attentive to the unique quality of the indeterminate situation, and who attempt at explicating what they find as problematic in this situation, and then transcend this particular situated context by way of relating it to normative ends and values in order to grasp it as a problem that deserves attention. I now want to suggest that from a Deweyan perspective there are three conditions that constitute the epistemic character of normative political judgments. The first condition concerns citizens’ embeddedness in a particular life-world, against the background of which they form particular perspectives on the social and political world that bear on their judgments about the existence and urgency of political problems. The second condition concerns the social and deliberative structure of inquiry, which enables an exchange of those diverse perspectives by way of discussion and comparison, not only with regard to their experiential and informational content but also (and above all) with regard to the values and normative evaluations that condition these perspectives. The third condition relates to the epistemic interpretation of the second condition: Political inquiry has epistemic significance, because it is guided by an ideal “to get it right”, among others. I will now discuss these three conditions consecutively in detail.

5.2.1  Perspectivism and the Epistemology of Differentiated Experiences The pragmatist epistemology developed in this book claims that being positioned (located, situated) in the social world has epistemic significance. I will now try to explain how we can make sense of this claim in the political context by drawing on some ideas from contemporary social epistemology and by connecting it to the Deweyan framework that I have developed in the previous chapters. At several occasions throughout the book I had already shown that a Deweyan pragmatist epistemology rejects individualist approaches to knowing and individualist descriptions of what it means to be an epistemic agent in favor a re-description of epistemic agents as socially embedded subjects. One of the key assumptions of social epistemology (at least in some relevant variants, including Deweyan pragmatism) is that “the social location of the knower affects what and how she knows” (Anderson 2012). The trouble with individualistic epistemology, social epistemologists have argued, is not just the assumption that knowers are mainly individuals, but that such individual knowers are envisaged as interchangeable and self-­sufficient in knowing (Grasswick 2018).13 Today’s stratified and segmented mass societies

 While individualistic epistemology does not oppose the idea that knowers are embedded socially, it opposes the idea that social location is a relevant feature to include in epistemic assessments. For instance, if knowers are conceptualized as interchangeable, then any differences in individuals based on social location are epistemically irrelevant.

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provide a vast range of experiences differentiated along the lines of social location. If we think about society in the metaphor of mapping social spaces, then to be a member of a society is to be located in one or more such social spaces, which structures the ways we understand our experiences with other members and institutions. Inhabiting a locus in society enables and at the same time restricts the scope of experience. Based on these experiences, individuals develop an interpretative perspective from which they try to make sense of these experiences. In other words, experiential differences lead to differences in perspective, and these perspectival differences carry epistemic consequences. If the notion of perspective is to do any epistemological work, it must be possible to share them across social locations and perspectives. My perspective will necessarily be relative, to a greater or lesser extent, to my own particular social location. But the metaphor of perspective not only implies that my perspective is one of many other conceivable perspectives and could be corrected or supplemented by them, but also that my perspective is directed towards something (i.e. the object, which the perspective is a perspective of) that does not coincide conceptually with my perspective but is independent of it. Hence the perspectival nature of judgment itself does not necessarily present an insuperable obstacle to the development of intersubjective and cross-cultural perspectives and representations that can plausibly, if maybe only provisionally, be accepted as right.14  Zerilli (2016, 4f.) uses the notion of perspective to elucidate her claim that Arendt’s theory of judgment is also a theory of political objectivity. She primarily relies on James Conant’s discussion of the epistemological import of the notion of perspective (see Conant 2005, 2006). Conant has defended both the everyday concept of perspective and more elaborate philosophical conceptions of perspective, juxtaposing them with the widespread belief that human perspective is irremediably distorting. While the perspectival nature of human judgment could be seen as utterly problematic from an epistemic point of view, because subjective perspectives give rise to false beliefs and bias, entrenched as they are in our subjective and affective habits of perceiving the world, he claims that the perspectival nature of human judgments is nothing that we should be worried about, but rather as something that can be epistemically valuable. As Conant shows, the notion of perspective draws its metaphorical meaning from the optics of perception. The original historical understanding of perspective (in Renaissance painting) referred to “a technique for representing three-dimensional objects and depth relationships on a two-dimensional surface” (Conant 2005, 10). The original understanding implied that viewing the same object from other perspectives could rectify distortions arising from viewing an object from one perspective. Hence, “the concept of perspective,” Conant notes, “from its very beginning, involves an internal relation between objective and subjective moments in a perceptual encounter between a perceiving subject and the object(s) of his [or her] perception. The objective moment is tied to a larger enterprise of achieving faithful representations of reality, the subjective moment to one of mastering techniques of pictorial illusion” (ibid., 12). In other words, the notion of perspective not only denotes the subjectivity of perceiving an object from a distinct location, it also denotes our understanding of an object’s shared reality and objectivity. While I take it that the Deweyan theory of political judgment would not disagree with Conant and Zerilli about the presupposed sense of objectivity in the notion of perspective, the disagreement it has, is about what political judgments try to achieve—for a Deweyan theory of judgment, political judgment is not only a world-building activity that aims at making our perception of a common world more objective, it is also an epistemic activity that aims at the adjudication of claims to the  rightness of judgments with regard to political problems and corresponding solutions.

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According to these considerations, one’s perspective both shapes and sets limits on how a particularly located individual can know, at least through his or her own achievements. The epistemic difficulty with occupying a social space—which generates a certain set of experiences that is interpreted trough the available conceptual apparatus, which again provides a perspective on these experiences and on social reality as a whole—is that it might render these perspectives distorted. There are at least two relevant ways in which perspectives can be distorted. The first refers to instances where our perspective lacks the conceptual framework by which we would be able to account for social reality (for what the experience actually was). An often cited example to describe perspectives that are distorted due to a lack of conceptual resources is the concept of “sexual harassment”; before people started to use it, it was much harder (if not impossible) to account for an experience that now can be described as sexual harassment.15 The second way in which perspectives can be distorted is when the conceptual framework the perspective is founded upon is cognitively dysfunctional. An example is the long history of representing Native Americans as stateless savages living in an undeveloped wilderness (Mills 2015, 26–7).16 This is why Charles Mills concludes that alternative sets of experiences are not epistemically indifferent vis-à-vis one another, but […] hegemonic groups characteristically have experiences that foster illusory perceptions about society’s functioning, while subordinate groups characteristically have experiences that (at least potentially) give rise to more adequate conceptualizations (Mills 1988, 246).

While Mills here clearly means that the dominance of one specific interpretative perspective on social reality over others represents a form of epistemic injustice, and thus that the consideration of these other perspectives is a demand for justice, he also says that taking them seriously is an imperative for our concern about knowledge. He has introduced the conception of “alternative epistemology”, by which he means that “social causation can be epistemically beneficial” (ibid., 243). It is mainly what Mills calls “differential group experience” that according to him makes

 This is an example of what Miranda Fricker calls “hermeneutical injustices”, involving “structural prejudice in the economy of collective hermeneutical resources” (Fricker 2009, 1). Hermeneutical injustice occurs when there exists a lack of collective interpretative resources required for a group to understand (and express) significant aspects of their social experience. It is also an instance of what Iris Marion Young called “internal exclusion” (Young 2002, 53), by which she means the exclusion of some people from political participation, decision and communication by way of making “assumptions some do not share” and interacting that “privileges specific styles of expression” over others styles of expression that are “dismissed as out of order.” 16  While cognitively dysfunctional perspectives get social reality wrong, they nevertheless shape social reality. Hence, perspectives, which are informed by our conceptual apparatus, have a transformative effect on how we perceive our own experiences. As Linda Alcoff notes, “there is a rather sensitive relationship between the way life appears and feels, and the conceptual repertoire we have available to us to describe it. And changes in the terms by which we bring experiences under a description can affect the actual things themselves—especially in so far as these are experiences—that are referred to by the terms” (Alcoff 2010, 136). 15

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the best case “for the cognitive superiority of alternative viewpoints” (ibid., 245). One’s position in the social space thus partially determines the “kinds of experiences one is likely to have and the kinds of concepts one is accordingly likely to develop” (ibid.). Hence, being differentially positioned in the social space gives access to parts of social reality that others are not occupying and hence might not see.17 Mills’ argument is that the explication of experiences from subordinate groups has a particularly high epistemic weight for the assessment of social reality insofar as they can functionally correct for the distortions of people’s perspectives: expose blind spots of the dominant perspectives about social reality; expose when perspectives are distorted, cognitively dysfunctional and getting social reality wrong; they can be occasions to offer new concepts or narratives to account for social reality in a more adequate and accurate way (e.g. sexual harassment) and thereby transform social reality itself. In the “Lectures in Social and Political Philosophy” Dewey presents a similar picture about experience, perspective and distortion, as Mill does. As I had outlined in Chap. 2, Dewey there advances an abstracted three-stage model of the pattern of social struggles: first, only dominant perspectives on a specific social and political problem are part of public perception and of public communication, then emerges a self-awareness on the part of those who’s perspectives have been prevented from being formed or oppressed and exluded—succinctly, they begin to express this awareness by making claims in the name of justice, and finally the larger public recognizes the validity of these claims, which means that they acknowledge them as “neglected social duty” and take them serious as a source “to perform a badly needed social function” (Dewey 2015, 18), because they recognize them as claims about the public good and not as mere expressions of individual idiosynchrasies and interests. It is clear that Dewey presents this as an idealized abstraction and that in real-world political settings the transitions from one to another stage is subject to hard political struggles and contention. But his point is this: because social and political communities tend to internally exclude perspectives, the political functions of struggle, contention, “epistemic friction and the mutual contestation of perspectives” (Medina 2012, 11) are to be taken real as necessary requirements of epistemic and social melioration. Dewey’s picture of social struggles particularly shows us how conflict and contention are necessary means for the identification, expression and acknowledgment of social and political problems. These considerations suggest that the exclusion of perspectives from political communities comes with epistemic costs, and in turn that including individuals and groups from diverse social positions is a way of avoiding such epistemic costs,

 The idea that being differentially positioned in the social space has positive epistemic implications is also expressed in the principle of subsidiarity as it is established and applied in human rights law (c.f. Besson 2016). For example, the justification in European Union law of the precedence of the local exertion of responsibilities is that domestic authorities know better. This is reflected in the ECtHR reference to domestic authorities’ being “better placed than an international court to evaluate local needs and conditions” and that thus “the role of the domestic policy-maker should be given special weight” [emphasis added] (see ECtHR, SAS v. France, par. 129).

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because the ensuing pool of individuals and groups will be constituted of members with diverse experiences and perspectives that will increase the chance of correcting for distortion in perspectives and thus enable social and political change. Certainly not all experiences, and the perspectives that grow out of them, will be equally instrumental for producing such corrective and melioristic effects. Left-­ handed people, for example, may have different sorts of experiences than right-­ handed people, such as not being able to use easily the same scissors or knives as others18; yet these sorts of experiences are unlikely to be relevant to evaluating perspectives on, for example, structural racism and social housing. From a purely epistemic point of view, then, the epistemology of differentiated experiences does not necessarily imply an argument for the maximum representation of diversity of experience and perspective in a polity. But, as I try to show in the next section, we have prima facie reasons to strive for the maximum inclusion of diversity of experience and perspective in a polity, because in the political realm it seems unlikely that we could determine in advance which experiences and perspectives will be epistemically relevant, since this will often only become apparent in the course of specific inquiry and communicative interaction.

5.2.2  Perspectivism and Political Inquiry To the extent that democratic politics is about co-determining what should be regarded as a political problem, and is about  how citizens can most adequately describe, grasp and solve it, we can understand democratic politics as a form of inquiry that directs our actions in ways so as to get the social and political problems right, which inevitably will speak to the question of who we want to be as a political community and what values we hold dear. Dewey’s theory of judgment models the conditions for a democratic process of defining political and social problems. These conditions ought to bring inquirers into a position out of which they are able to form a comparative judgment about the aptness of problem identifications and definitions. In the previous section I suggested that a key condition is the inclusion of diverse experiences and perspectives, because inclusion has both positive epistemological and progressive democratic effects in this theory. But how should such inclusion look like in democratic politics and what further requirements are attached to this condition? I argue that we can infer three key requirements from the Deweyan conception of inquiry with its different phases, which procedurally condition judgment, and from his model of social and political struggles, as described above. The first requirement (i) relates to the qualitative dimension of experience and consists in the ability to be attentive and responsive vis-à-vis one’s own and other people’s experiences and perspectives. The second requirement (ii) consists in the hermeneutic work of

18

 To borrow an example from Intemann (2011).

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explicating and articulating the (mostly implicit) underlying norms and values that co-­determine the conceptual content and the relevance of situated experiences and perspectives for political problems.19 The third requirement (iii) consists in a public process of reflection and exchange of perspectives, which relates what is expressed and articulated to the situated context of the problem-formation and to the realm of the normatively desired. (i) Responsiveness and Attentiveness This requirement of a Deweyan account of political and social inquiry requires first and foremost an aesthetic sensibility to the qualitative level of experience in interaction with other people.20 Aesthetic sensibility requires the deferral of ­judgment, prejudice and attribution of meaning. But responsiveness and attentiveness surely is more than aesthetic sensibility, as it can also refer to a hermeneutical process in which individuals try to grasp what their own and other people’s experiences mean and how they can best understand them.21 Such hermeneutical attentiveness requires aesthetic sensibility and epistemic responsiveness. The transition from aesthetic sensibility to epistemic responsiveness, we could say, is the first step in the passage from qualitative experience to reflective experience and hence marks the beginning of those parts of inquiry in which we consciously operate with language and symbols. In Dewey’s terms, this transition indicates the evolution from an immediately experienced qualitative presence to qualitative thought. We engage in inquiry because we have an interest in resolving and transforming the indeterminate and problematic situations in our experiential encounters. Part of what it means to engage in epistemic activity is to express what we encounter as qualitative for the sake of reflection and discussion.22 Epistemic responsiveness takes place against the background of a context of expression and articulation of meaning in language  Vessey (2007) shows that interpretation for Dewey takes the form of a hermeneutical circle because of the contextual nature of interpretation: interpretation takes place in a context of customary interpretations; as interpreting subjects we move back and forth, modifying our novel interpretations against the background of our habitual interpretation and modifying our habitual interpretations in light of the novel interpretations. Similar, when we interpret something (a text, and experience, an event, etc.) we aim at rendering the meaning of, say, a text, coherent with the meaning of its parts, modifying our interpretations until we arrive at a coherent understanding between the parts and the whole. Thus the act of interpretation is a process of making coherent old and new interpretations as well as parts and the whole of the interpretation’s object. 20  Compare my discussion of Dewey’s notions of primary and secondary experience in Chap. 3 and my discussion of the aesthetic dimension of experience, and how it relates to the faculty of judgment, in Chap. 4. 21  Several authors close to pragmatism raised this point in similar fashion (e.g. Taylor 2017; Medina 2011, 2012, 2017; also Young 2002). They haven been arguing that a political debate on political problems requires an epistemic sensitivity towards those who may not have the opportunity or ability to express their own perspectives. 22  Dewey’s model of experience compels us to recognize that there is no way of engaging in epistemic activity without prior attentiveness to the qualitative. Epistemic theories of democracy that emphasize only the narrowly cognitive and rationalist dimension of politics are reductionist in our 19

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and symbols. As we have seen, Dewey thought of inquiry and of social inquiry in particular as a theory of knowledge that has to be situated against a backdropnotion of human practical engagement with nature and culture. Inquiry explains and makes sense of a realm of human living that is marked by cultural symbols and norms (habits, customs, rules, practices). This cultural web of symbols and norms necessitates articulation and explication in inquiry, and is open to a plurality of perspectives that aim at elucidating the meaning of these symbols and norms. (ii) Explication and Articulation Since Peirce, “meaning” in pragmatist terms refers to the anticipated and conceivable consequences of any action or belief. For Dewey, anticipating and conceiving consequences is only possible because of the structure of experience. The essential prerequisite of meaning for Dewey is the “‘stable,’ the regulative supportive order, and the ‘precarious,’ the adventitious, problematic, and aleatory disruption of that order” (Alexander 1987, 125). Meaning is based on the back-and-forth between the stable and the problematic, the real and the possible, which shapes the consistencies of structure. Hence experiences are meaningful because of this temporal back-and-forth that makes consistencies and structure possible, which again opens up a space for anticipating future possibilities or recollecting past experiences. Humans can anticipate what might happen or might have happened successfully because experience has stabilities and consistencies. Meaning and perspectival interpretation are linked, inasmuch as in interpretive acts an inquirer brings to bear his or her background-framework of meaning on the subject. Interpreting any kind of action, sign or linguistic expression involves situating them in a broader cultural context of explicit or implicit norms, rules, conceptions, ideas, etc. that makes it lucid. Meaning for Dewey thus is “not inherent but derived,” reliant on the context of the act, sign or linguistic expression (Dewey 1931, LW 6, 4). With "context" Dewey here means the stable individual habits and cultural customs of the inquirer. Articulation and expression in inquiry thus takes the form of an interplay between such an individual-cultural matrix of meaning and the inquirer’s subject-matter, and this matrix in the context of politics influences what he or she perceives as a problematic situation that needs political attention. The articulation and explication of all experiences and perspectives is an imperative of inclusion in the context of social and political struggles—particularly the articulation and explication of experiences and perspectives on social and political realities of those who’s voices have been ignored due to the dominance of entrenched perspectives. Curtailing the ability of marginalized individuals or groups to express themselves blocks the advancement of social inquiry. Explication and articulation denote a crucial function of social and political change and the resulution of the understanding of politics. There is a tendency in these theories to take the epistemic dimension as a sufficient defining characteristic of politics and legitimacy, which is reductionist at best.

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causes of social conflict, because they bring the diverse and dispersed experiences and perspectives in society into a conceptual or narrative form that enables them to become part of public awareness and consciousness. This requires an openness to changes in established forms of social and political communication towards more inclusive forms.23 Dewey’s model of social and political struggles in his “Lectures in Social and Political Philosophy” makes clear that social mobilization is part of an epistemic learning-process on the part of both the dominant and the subordinate groups (Zamora 2017), and that such learning is partially dependent on the first two requirements (i) and (ii) of social and political inquiry. (iii) Reflection and Exchange of Perspectives The third requirement relates to communicative processes of reflection and exchange of perspectives. Epistemic responsiveness and hermeneutical explication and articulation bring to light a complex web of facts, affects, norms, values, habits of understanding, etc. They reveal and present people’s experiences and perspectives and make them public and as such create the material that enable a collective to have a less distorted view of social and political realities and the problematic aspects of such realities. How can this material be associated with each other, so that it becomes more than just a disjointed aggregate of experiences and perspectives, and instead becomes part of a collective learning-process? With Dewey’s pattern of inquiry in mind, we can say that collective learning-process requires reflection and communicative exchange—in particular, it requires reflection and communicative exchange on the values and norms that guide people in comparing different experiences and perspectives and judging how they bear on problems that political inquiry should address. In the context of democracies, what is politically considered as a problem to be solved depends on how citizens identify and interpret a problem as a problem. Such identification and interpretation depends on normative evaluations of whether this situation and its effects are problematic at all. The judgment “This situation is problematic” is evaluative, insofar as it includes both normative and descriptive (and prognostic) beliefs. Normative beliefs guide citizen’s judgments about what they perceive as problematic i.e. why they believe that this or that situation deserves public attention and should therefore be the subject of a political inquiry. Dewey believed that values and facts can only be separated analytically and conceptually, but that they are inextricably entangled in problem-solving processes— i.e. that facts already presuppose a set of values and norms that make it possible for

 In the second part of the book, I will focus on the need to broaden our models of the forms of explication and articulation in public communication beyond the argumentative exchange of reasons.

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us to unvover them in the first place.24 He maintained that when values are understood as something that guides conduct, and when inquiry is understood as providing the means to realize (in this temporal world) more securely the things we value, we would not anymore adhere to the gap that some philosophers find is known as the fact–value dichotomy: while facts are objective and knowable, values are subjective. Good judgment is the upshot of a reasoned inquiry-process, and reasoning, both theoretical and practical, always has a practical-experimental side. If the problem at hand is a patient’s poor health, the problem determines the relevant traits: effectiveness, speed of action, possible side effects of treatment, costs, etc. These traits exist independently of the judgment of value (the patient’s health), but they obtain their status as valued through the function they play in the resolution of which proposed course of action is to be adopted. In other words, what inquirers discuss as factual matter uncovers and presupposes an entire system of value commitments. In this sense there is no way of denying the normative, practice-guiding role played by inquiry and judgment. Far from being hidden in any transcendent dominion beyond the natural and social realities we know, values are, according to the entanglement-thesis, entangled with the ordinary we find ourselves embedded in. There is no way of talking about facts that would not presuppose some shared values of a certain language community or of a larger social community, and the structure of knowledge-generating processes (in the idealized form of Dewey’s process of inquiry) is connected with valuations that accrue from such communities, most explicitly when it comes to judging for which kind of problems we think it to be appropriate to initiate inquiring. While values are anchored in the interests and desires of the individual inquirers, they are not to be identified with subjective opinion (doxa). Dewey makes a distinction between desire or interest and what he names “prizing.” Prizing is only one aspect of desire. The meaning of desire is not captured by the affective evaluation of prizing, but involves a cognitive component. In real inquiry we do not value

 Hilary Putnam (2002) has suggested that the rejection of the so-called fact-value dichotomy has been a key pragmatist theme not only of Dewey, but of philosophical pragmatism writ large. As I have shown in Chap. 3, Dewey understood all forms of inquiry as continuous with one another and championed the same method of inquiry in all human areas of coping with instable and uncertain situations. The main difference between scientific inquiry and political inquiry, for example, might be that the former has a much greater capacity of control and prediction due to algorithmic modeling, reproducible and controlled experimentation, statistical coverage, etc. than the latter. What any form of inquiry has in common for him, however, is that it is inherently practical and action-based; inquirers are actors and inquiry is a form of action and practice, which means that it is concerned with the experiences inquirers have with other subjects and objects of inquiry. Dewey’s model of inquiry does neither subscribe to scientism (the reduction of inquiry to scientific inquiry) nor to positivism (defying any separation of inquiry and normativity or ethics that would treat given social norms, values and beliefs as mere subjectivist additions to inquiry). Just the opposite, Dewey understood inquiry to be crucially also about the explication and critical scrutiny of norms and values.

24

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possible, or actual, ways of action in terms of efficient means to grasp predetermined ends; instead, our valuations and desires are partially shaped and constituted in deliberation. If you want to go to the cinema, this gives a particular course of action value, e.g. taking the train. The value of taking the train is constructed as a means to deal with the situation (your initial desire). Yet, neither the desire, nor the value itself, is isolated from reasoned  evaluation. For one, we can  evaluate whether the value is an effective means to the given end (you wanting to go to the cinema). For the other, we should take into account that the value is not simply a given, but is rather selected or constructed. Which means of transportation is more convenient, or costs less, or is more environmentally friendly? Reflection allows for an evaluation of whether or not the value (the means) fulfills the desire. But also the initial desire can be evaluated in terms of a reflection about the relativity between desire and value: Reflection might make you aware of the fact that your desire to go to the cinema is itself a value created in support of some other desire, such as to relax after a stressful day at work or to meet friends, which may be satisfied by some other values.25 If you desire health or better working conditions or the elimination of structural racism in society, you and I can rationally appreciate your desire, Dewey would suggest, by looking at the conceivable practical bearings this desire brings about and how these bearings are able to organize the instable and indeterminate situation, and by looking at the coherence of this desire with other desires we have and evaluations we make. However, as I have argued in Chap. 3, the reference to the qualitative context and to the consequences of courses of action raises the worries about instrumentalism viz. technocracy and “acquiescence” (Festenstein 2008, 100) for Dewey’s theory of social inquiry. Dewey concedes that “judgment at some point runs against the brute act of holding something dear as its limit” (Dewey 1915, MW 8, 46). Without holding certain things dear, it seems, there is nothing to guide our critical reasoning. It seems that without some external criteria of right or wrong we are lost, and critical normative judgment is not possible. The Deweyan outlook has two answers to this challenge; one is procedural and epistemic, and the other is moral. The procedural answer is that fallibilism is key to a critical evaluative judgment of desires. The important point here is that, for Dewey, values, desires and interests are revisable, fallible and rationally improvable against the procedural conditions that inquiry provides: openness, reversibility and a general reservation towards certainty. In other words, the procedure of inquiry does not suggest that there factually exist eternally fixed political standards of normative judgment, but rather that, in principle, we have the procedural means to make our disagreements about our desires, interests and valuations more rational, when trying to get political and social problems right, because of the epistemic properties of the process of inquiry. Our assumed certainties are only assumed, transient and open to

25

 A good overview of Dewey’ epistemic account of valuation is provided by Festenstein (2008).

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revision, which depends on a process of comparison and learning between perspectives and judgments, for which the diversity of experience and perspectives must be presumed. As I also had suggested in Chap. 3, “to get it right” for a Deweyan theory of judgment does not imply the assumption of an ideal convergence of pluralistic perspectives into one singular perspective that wishes to do away with, or eliminate, the diversity and heterogeneity of conflicting perspectives. Trying to “get it right” is not a concern for convergence and unification, but a concern for cooperation under the assumption of fallibilism. The idea of Deweyan fallibilism is an assumption about our epistemic agency that is neither skeptic about the possibility of making our judgments better, nor does it imply a universalistic claim about the possibility of absolute certainty of judgment beyond any shred of doubt. Deweyan fallibilism is rather premised on the idea that an ever-necessary openness to revision and contestation of our judgments is at the center of our epistemic endeavors. Fallibilism requires that we are attentive to our own experiences, which emerge from our interaction with our environment, and that we are responsive and accountable to the experiences and judgments of other agents. Hence, the diversity of citizens’ perspectives is not something that has to be erased in favor of the one absolutely correct judgment; we rather have to view diversity as epistemic capital that must be used for learning and correction in favor of improvements of distorted or mistaken perspectives and judgments. Dewey’s theory of political judgment applied to political and social inquiry does not suggest that there exist eternally fixed standards of normative political judgment; but it suggests that a process of social and political inquiry that is structured according to the three conditions alluded to above, provides the procedural requirements for making justified claims about the epistemic superiority of specific judgment(s) over others. In other words, Deweyan  judgments can be about procedure-­immanent ends and means, when inquirers judge the comparable best option that solves the initial problem. At the same time, they can also be about procedure-independent ends, namely when inquirers use these independent ends for making  comparative judgments. In this way inquiry-processes, often at the same time, are both about making a judgment about the procedureindependent standards by which evaluate judgments are made and about judging the better solution in terms of how well it meets this standard and is adequate to the specific problem at hand, compared to other solution-proposals. In order to grasp what I have in mind here, think about a political context where we are invited to arrive at a judgment about, say, policies on immigration or wealth redistribution. In these contexts our judgments reflect our preferences for general ends and values (justice, national sovereignty, etc.) and they reflect our efforts to adjudicate between the best policy option given the specific context and the preferred ends and values. In other words, such political judgments are simultaneously about two different but interrelated things: about the prospect of a political idea to measure up to a procedure-­independent standard and about this standard itself. The procedure-independent standard is independent in the sense of

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functioning as a regulative ideal. It guides this specific inquiry and judgment (and hence is partially independent from this process), but it is not independent of any inquiry or judgment. These considerations about judicial political judgments and normative political judgments constitute, in a nutshell, the proceduralist answer to the question of how a Deweyan theory of political judgment conceptualizes political judgments as epistemic. In a  democracy, this answer means that the aim of public discussion and communication is not the elimination of conflict between rivaling policies, values, or justifications. Rather, the task of democracy is to elucidate conflicting perspectives of diverse individuals and groups, which can, if done collectively, lead to shared (or overlapping) perspectives that are justifiably to be considered better than alternative perspectives, by reference to some normative standards that we think our (shared) perspective can be justifiable said to be better than others. However, the problem of judgment in democracy is not sufficiently addressed with a Deweyan theory of political judgment alone. In addition to epistemic-proceduralist considerations, the problem  requires an answer that relates to a moral ideal—human growth—which I will discuss in the next chapter.

References Abramson, Jeffrey. 2015. Four Models of Jury Democracy. Chicago-Kent Law Review 90 (3): 861–898. Alcoff, Linda Martin. 2010. Epistemic Identities. Episteme 7 (2): 128–137. Alexander, Thomas M. 1987. John Dewey’s Theory of Art, Experience, and Nature: The Horizons of Feeling. Albany/New York: Suny Press. Amar, Vikram. 1995. Jury Service as Political Participation Akin to Voting. Cornell Law Review 80 (2): 203. Anderson, Elizabeth. 2012. Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2012/entries/feminismepistemology/. Accessed 13 Jan 2020. Aristotle. 2010. The Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Besson, Samantha. 2016. Subsidiarity in International Human Rights Law—What Is Subsidiary About Human Rights? American Journal of Jurisprudence 61 (1): 69–107. Bohman, James. 2000. Public Deliberation: Pluralism, Complexity, and Democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bornstein, Brian, and Edie Greene. 2017. The Jury Under Fire: Myth, Controversy, and Reform. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Conant, James. 2005. The Dialectic of Perspectivism, I. Sats: Nordic Journal of Philosophy 6 (2): 5–50. ———. 2006. The Dialectic of Perspectivism, II. Sats: Northern European Journal of Philosophy 7 (1): 6–57. de Tocqueville, Alexis. 2004. Democracy in America. New York: Library of America. Dewey, John. 1915. The Logic of Judgments of Practice. In The Middle Works, 1899–1924, vol. 8, 14–82. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

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———. 1931. Context and Thought. In The Later Works, 1925–1953, vol. 6, 3–21. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. ———. 2015. Lectures in Social and Political Philosophy. European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 7 (2). Donovan, James Michael. 2010. Juries and the Transformation of Criminal Justice in France in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Ferrara, Alessandro. 1999. Justice and Judgement: The Rise and the Prospect of the Judgement Model in Contemporary Political Philosophy. London: Sage. ———. 2004. Public Reason and the Normativity of the Reasonable. Philosophy & Social Criticism 30 (5–6): 579–596. ———. 2008. The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2014. The Democratic Horizon: Hyperpluralism and the Renewal of Political Liberalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Festenstein, Matthew. 2008. John Dewey: Inquiry, Ethics, and Democracy. In The Oxford Handbook of American Philosophy, 87–109. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Fricker, Miranda. 2009. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gastil, John, E. Pierre Deess, Phil Weiser, and Jordan Larner. 2008. Jury Service and Electoral Participation: A Test of the Participation Hypothesis. The Journal of Politics 70 (2): 351–367. Grasswick, Heidi. 2018. Feminist Social Epistemology. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminist-social-epistemology/. Accessed 13 Jan 2020. Grossman, Joanna. 1994. Women’s Jury Service: Right of Citizenship or Privilege of Difference? Stanford Law Review 46 (5): 1115–1160. Hans, Valerie, and Neil Vidmar. 2008. The Verdict on Juries. Vol. 297. Cornell Law Faculty Publications. ———. 2013. Judging the Jury. New York: Springer. Hirst, Derek. 2005. The Representative of the People?: Voters and Voting in England Under the Early Stuarts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hong, Lu, and Scott Page. 2004. Groups of Diverse Problem Solvers Can Outperform Groups of High-Ability Problem Solvers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 101 (46): 16385–16389. Intemann, Kristen. 2011. Diversity and Dissent in Science: Does Democracy Always Serve Feminist Aims? In Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science, ed. Heidi E. Grasswick, 111–132. Dordrecht: Springer. Landemore, Hélène. 2012. Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Medina, José. 2011. The Relevance of Credibility Excess in a Proportional View of Epistemic Injustice: Differential Epistemic Authority and the Social Imaginary. Social Epistemology 25 (1): 15–35. ———. 2012. The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2017. Pragmatism, Racial Injustice, and Epistemic Insurrection: Toward an Insurrectionist Pragmatism. In Pragmatism and Justice, ed. Susan Dielemann, David Rondel, and Christopher Voparil, 197–213. New York: Oxford University Press. Mills, Charles. 1988. Alternative Epistemologies. Social Theory and Practice 14 (3): 237–263. ———. 2015. Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Putnam, Hilary. 2002. The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rawls, John. 1999. A Theory of Justice, Revised ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Re, Richard. 2007. Re-Justifying the Fair Cross Section Requirement: Equal Representation and Enfranchisement in the American Criminal Jury. Yale Law Journal 116 (7): 1568–1614. Schwartzberg, Melissa. 2018. Justifying the Jury: Reconciling Justice, Equality, and Democracy. American Political Science Review 112 (3): 446–458. Taylor, Paul C. 2017. An Aesthetics of Resistance: Deweyan Experimentalism and Epistemic Justice. In Pragmatism and Justice, ed. Susan Dielemann, David Rondel, and Christopher Voparil, 215–230. New York: Oxford University Press. Urbinati, Nadia. 2014. Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vessey, David. 2007. Philosophical Hermeneutics. In A Companion to Pragmatism, ed. John R. Shook and Joseph Margolis. Malden/Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Young, Iris Marion. 2002. Inclusion and Democracy. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Zamora, Justo Serrano. 2017. Articulating a Sense of Powers: An Expressivist Reading of John Dewey’s Theory of Social Movements. Transactions of the Charles S.  Peirce Society 53 (1): 53–70. Zerilli, Linda. 2016. A Democratic Theory of Judgment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Chapter 6

Dewey’s Epistemic Argument for Democracy Reconsidered

Abstract  This chapter consists of two parts. In the first part I summarize the Deweyean argument for democracy. The argument consists broadly of three elements: (i) The epistemic costs of social, political and economic inequalities; (ii) The requirement of democratic conditions for good political judgment; and (iii) Growth as the final end of social and political organization. The first two elements have been outlined and explained in detail in the previous chapters, as part of Dewey’s theory of political judgment. In this chapter, I mainly focus on the third condition: growth. While the first two elements constitute epistemic reasons for vertical equality in democracy, the moral ideal of growth constitutes a moral reason for horizontal equality, and all three elements together constitute a conception of democracy that combines both vertical and horizontal equality. The second part of the chapter contrasts Dewey’s argument with an alternative pragmatic epistemic argument for democracy that has been pursued by neo-Peircean thinkers Robert Talisse and Cheryl Misak. I agree with the many critics of the neo-Peircean argument that it is too reductionist and that we should favor instead the Deweyan argument for democracy. My criticism will particularly focus on how the neo-Peircean conception both narrows the idea of democracy down to its epistemic dimension, and narrows the epistemic dimension down to the holding of true beliefs, thereby not only neglecting other dimensions of democratic politics, but also failing to do justice to Peirce himself (let alone Dewey) and to the way in which pragmatists use concepts such as doubt, experience, human cognition, inquiry, and judgment. Keywords  Pragmatist epistemic democracy · John Dewey · Growth · Charles Sanders Peirce · Doubt and belief This chapter consists of two parts. In the first part I summarize the Deweyean argument for democracy. The argument consists broadly of three elements1: (i) The epistemic costs of social, political and economic inequalities; (ii) The requirement 1  This structure of Dewey’s epistemic argument for democracy follows Festenstein (2019, 223–232), who divides the argument into four different components.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 M. I. Räber, Knowing Democracy – A Pragmatist Account of the Epistemic Dimension in Democratic Politics, Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations 14, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53258-1_6

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of democratic conditions for good political judgment; and (iii) Growth as the final end of social and political organization. The first two elements have been outlined and explained in detail in the previous chapters, as part of Dewey’s theory of political judgment. In this chapter, I mainly focus on the third condition: growth. While the first two elements constitute epistemic reasons for vertical equality in democracy, the moral ideal of growth constitutes a moral reason for horizontal equality, and all three elements together constitute a conception of democracy that combines both vertical and horizontal equality. The second part of the chapter contrasts Dewey’s argument with an alternative pragmatic epistemic argument for democracy that has been pursued by neo-Peircean thinkers Robert Talisse and Cheryl Misak. I agree with the many critics of the neo-Peircean argument that it is too reductionist and that we should favor instead the Deweyan argument for democracy. My criticism will particularly focus on how the neo-Peircean conception both narrows the idea of democracy down to its epistemic dimension, and narrows the epistemic dimension down to the holding of true beliefs, thereby not only neglecting other dimensions of democratic politics, but also failing to do justice to Peirce himself (let alone Dewey) and to the way in which pragmatists use concepts such as doubt, experience, human cognition, inquiry, and judgment.

6.1  Dewey’s Argument for Democracy In chapter two I was only able to outline the reasons why I believe that Dewey’s theory of judgment and his notion of democracy constitute a better epistemic argument for democracy than alternative arguments. Now I am in a position to state these reasons in a more concise form. (i) Epistemic costs of social, political and economic inequalities. Dewey’s claim against epistocracy (the view that a permanent class of knowers should rule) is that entrenched and permanent hierarchies and distributions of privilege inevitably will render the perspectives of the privileged on society and its problems distorted, and hence inadequate. This means that social, economic and political inequalities, when perpetuated, have negative epistemic consequences in terms of distorted perspectives and judgments about society’s problems and solutions. As democracy balances the distribution of privileges and power, it can serve as a safeguard against such emerging negative epistemic consequences. Under circumstances of equally distributed access to other people’s experiences, perspectives and ideas, democracy enables inter-subjective learning opportunities about the experiences and judgments of other members of society, as I have argued in chapter five. Absent such learning opportunities, those who are closed out from access to ideas have their perspectives and experiences marginalized, and those of privileged access have their outlook narrowed. Social, economic and political inequalities on the one hand, and unequally distributed access to other people’s experiences and perspectives on the other hand, mutually reinforce one another. The absence of learning opportunities is a partial effect of social and political

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inequalities and vice versa—social and political inequalities establish an assymmetry of power, which both are cause for the asymmetrical and unequal ­perceptions and framings of claims to political and social problems (to which we can count social and political inequalities that establish assymmetry of power). Thus a necessary part of social change and the resulution of the causes of social conflict are learning-processes, on the part of those who are oppressed, marginalized and excluded, and on the part of those who dominate society and politics intellectually and materially. These learning-processes imply challenges to entrenched forms of social and political communication and of dominant ways of perceiving and fraing claims of social problems, because the exclusion and marginalization of groups and individuals and the exclusion of their ability to express themselves blocks the advancement of learning and thus of social and political inquiry. Claims that do not fit in with dominant ways of perception and framing are falsely dismissed as merely an expression of indivudal and selfish interest, while in truth it is often the case that these claims are legitimate and should be taken up as claims about the common good. Democracy, then, is not only a prerequisite for more just social relationships, but also an epistemic imperative, as it offers the best way to mitigate epistemic costs of hierarchies and inequalities, by maximizing inclusion of citizens in framing and solving social problems. This argument brings us to the second claim on behalf of democracy that we can make with Dewey. (ii) Good political judgment tends to require democratic conditions. A second cornerstone of Dewey’s argument for democracy, which we can derive from his theory of judgment, is the claim that good political judgment is the outcome of an antecedent process of political and social inquiry, and that successful inquiry needs to be experimental, which requires democracy, both as a form of government and as a social ideal. Hence, successful political judgment must be based on inquiry, which needs to be conducted democratically. One argument that justifies this claim for Dewey is that successful human cognition takes the form of inquiry, which is a form of action that starts with attentiveness to the qualitative dimension of our experiences and the sensing and identification of a problem. Sensing and identifying a problem for Dewey is something we are moved to do against the background of our struggles to cope with an unstable and uncertain environment. Hence, our epistemic and cognitive efforts start in our coping with the qualitative immediateness of the unstable and uncertain. Making sense of the richness of the qualitative is something that requires collective efforts. For one, because our individual cognitive and hermeneutical capacities are limited (both due to biological and cultural factors and due to our situatedness as knowers), a cognitive and hermeneutical division of labor will yield better and more fruitful interpretations of experience than individual cognitive labor will. For the other, meanings and concepts are social and cultural products, mediated by habits and customs, and hence cannot be determined individually, but require social interaction. A second argument that justifies the claim that good political judgment requires democratic conditions is that suc-

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cessful inquiry (which yields good political judgment) needs to be experimental, which requires a fallibilist mindset that keeps our interpretations and judgments open to revision, based on our experiences. Democracy provides the means for the openness and fallibilism required for inquiry to be successful. Therefore, as successful inquiry depends on democratic conditions, epistemic considerations require us to promote democracy. Hence good political judgment requires democratic conditions. Based on these arguments, we can conceptualize democracy in epistemic terms as a process of inquiry in which the ability to form knowledgeable judgments is dispersed broadly throughout the collective body rather than clenched in a handful of experts. Lay juries exemplify this epistemic conceptualization of democracy by way of prescribing the equal representative inclusion of all citizens (through the principle of representativness) in a process that tends to produce epistemically reliable judgments. Hence, the semi-political institution of lay juries is a proxy for justifying democratic institutions that rely on the equal participation of ordinary citizens. But lay juries only approximate democratic political judgment. Judgment in lay juries occurs under highly formalized and constrained institutional conditions, where judicial but not normative-political questions are debated and, ultimately, judged. In turn, ordinary citizen in democracies make political judgments under non-formalized and non-constrained institutional conditions about situations and problems that pertain directly to the normative realm of values. Yet with Dewey we can argue that social and political inquiry also tends to bring about comparably better normative political judgments, if it is organized democratically. While social and political inquiry and judgment cannot follow mathematical rigor and accuracy, they nevertheless represent a process that is oriented towards getting political and social problems and solutions right. One of the central epistemic benefits of democracy is that inter-subjective communication, in  various forms and configurations, makes accessible perspectives and experiences, which otherwise would remain unavailable. In addition, the epistemic value added by processes of public reflection is that individual judgments can get refined and can become more complete and thus superior to mere individual opinions or preferences and as such produce better identifications of and solutions to political problems. (iii) Growth as the final end of social and political organization. Growth is the final end of social and political inquiry for Dewey. As a final end, growth is the common good of a society, and Dewey specifies this good as the ideal form of association and a pluralistic (democratic) ideal of self-development. In a way, then, growth combines elements (i) and (ii) of the argument for democracy and gives them a unified name, insofar as it is an ideal of inclusion and equality that has positive epistemic benefits: it represents the ideal democratic conditions for inquiry and political judgment. This is true to the extent that we can interpret growth in epistemic-proceduralist terms. But a more comprehensive interpretation of the Deweyan notion of growth, which I will discuss now, shows that it is a moral ideal with epistemic implications—a moral ideal that he needs to support his argument for democracy.

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Growth, Dewey held, is a condition of “final happiness” for an individual (Dewey 1932, MW 7, 302). In order to attain such condition of growth, the individual needs a certain kind of involvement with “the needs and claims of others” (ibid., 304). In other words, individuals are social beings, dependent on others in various ways, in particular in complex modern societies, and individual growth is tied up with the growth of others. One reason for this is that, according to Dewey, I can only grow when I am able to exercise reasoning in formulating individual and collective goals that guide me; and reasoning about these goals is only possible for me in a context where other people can and do exercise their reasoning in shared interaction. Hence the exercise of reasoning is liberating and enables growth. Dewey in “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy” indeed refers to this liberation when he writes: The pragmatic theory of intelligence means that the function of mind is to project new and more complex ends—to free experience from routine and from caprice. […] Intelligence as intelligence is inherently forward-looking; only by ignoring its primary function does it become a mere means for an end already given. The latter is servile, even when the end is labeled moral, religious or esthetic. But action directed to ends to which the agent has not previously been attached carries with a quickened and enlarged spirit. A pragmatic intelligence is a creative intelligence, not a routing mechanic. (Dewey 1917, MW 10, 43)

Thus, inquiry is a building block of individual growth, which implies that individual growth involves appropriate  social surroundings. The growth of individual A is mutually reliant on the growth of individual B, and thus A and B equally need to be able to participate in the making of collective decisions through inquiry. Democracy as a social ideal thus contains a specific valuation of group participation and of recognition. This latter aspect of recognition has been linked to Hegelian theories of recognition (Honneth 1998),2 and, as Festenstein highlights, the core idea behind this specific valuation of participation and of recognition is that “my own growth is hampered or warped if it takes place at the expense of yours” (Festenstein 2008, 104). However, for the critics of Dewey, the notion of growth as the basis of his conception of democracy is highly problematic, as it makes democracy dependent on a conception of human flourishing. Growth seems to involve a conception of the good according to which participation in democratic processes is an essential part of the individual good. And because this conception of the individual good competes with other conceptions of the human good, it would be philosophically inappropriate to take it as a foundational pillar for a conception of democracy (Talisse 2007). Robert Talisse thus claims that “Deweyan democracy is a substantive conception of democracy that cannot countenance the fact of reasonable pluralism” (ibid., 41).3 Similarly, for MacGilvray,

2  My interpretation of Deweyan democracy aligns with Honneth’s interpretation with respect to the interpretation of Dewey’s conception of social inquiry, which understands it as a form of proceduralism that is charged with an underlying social ideal of growth. 3  Talisse has softened his sharp criticism of Dewey lately (Talisse and Aikin 2016) but still holds on to a view that is largely dismissive of Deweyan democracy (Aikin and Talisse 2017, chapter 6).

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Dewey’s democratic faith appears, at best, as one ‘comprehensive’ vision of the good among many and, at worst, as one that dangerously denies the basic political liberal claim that consensus on the good can be achieved only through illegitimate use of force. (MacGilvray 2004, 147)

Indeed, the concept of growth, which underpins Dewey’s conception of democracy, is moral. But we can give this idea an interpretation that makes this prerequisite not a thick condition, so that it might even be acceptable to the critics of Deweyan democracy.4 Let me first clarify how not to interpret the idea of growth. What drops out of this interpretation of the idea of growth is an aspect that seemed to have been of great importance to Dewey himself. It is the communitarian view about the value of positive liberty that for Dewey is conceivable through this idea. In The Public and Its Problems (Dewey 1927, LW 2) he contends that from the standpoint of the individual, it [democracy as a social ideal] consists in having a responsible share according to capacity in forming and directing the activities of the groups to which one belongs and in participating according to need in the values which the groups sustain. From the standpoint of the groups, it demands liberation of the potentialities of members of a group in harmony with the interests and goods which are common. (ibid., 327–28)

We can interpret this passage in a way that makes Dewey an unduly paternalistic thinker. This is the interpretation that the critics of Dewey’s ideal of democracy are using to accuse him of submitting a potentially authoritarian ideal that has oppressive consequences. This interpretation is highly questionable, partly because it contradicts many other elements of Dewey’s philosophy and of  his conception of democracy. Before we question this interpretation, let’s pursue it further. According to this interpretation, Dewey says that only democracy can facilitate a full liberation of human potential. Individuality is something that human beings can achieve only by means of participation in democratic practices. Only through the collective exercise of communication and deliberation as a cooperative enterprise does the individual emerge as an individual, and thus social inquiry is a constitutive part of the individual good. Viewed this way, the ideal of growth does seem overly dogmatic and even potentially oppressive. It then could be said that this aspect of individual liberation, which is built into the moral idea of growth, is not far from subjecting a plurality of individual ends to politics and thus subjecting individual wills to a general will, which leads to coercive and oppressive results. Hence this aspect of the idea of growth is vulnerable to the objection, at least from the perspective of a hostile interpretation of the growth-ideal, that it makes individual liberty dependent upon collective governance, and that this dependence is inherently oppressive. It is oppressive because it assumes that individuals can only become free and self-governing beings when they subordinate their individual wills to the general will.

4  Talisse (2003, 1) characterizes “Deweyan democracy” as thick and substantive, “a style of … democratic theory which emphasizes citizen participation in the shared cooperative undertaking of self-government at all levels of social association.”

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I am not suggesting that this is what Dewey actually aimed at (I highly doubt it), but the problem is that he does not answer to this objection explicitly—which makes his conception of democracy susceptible to the harsh criticisms. However, this interpretation of the moral ideal of growth—involving the idea that individual liberty is only achievable in community and ultimately leading to the notion of a general will—certainly stands in contradiction to other important tenets of Dewey’s pragmatism, like that inquiry is fallible and open to revision, or that democratic institutions are to be seen as part of an ongoing project that should never be understood as finished. But without offering the resources to this objection the idea of growth can be interpreted the way I just presented. An alternative interpretation of the growth ideal, on the one hand shows that the paternalistic interpretation is  insufficient, and on the other hand foregrounds the fundamental normative prerequisites of both Dewey’s ideal of democracy and the Deweyan epistemic argument for democracy. This interpretation refers to growth as the moral standard of moral and political inquiry processes. This interpretation of the concept of growth as the moral standard of political inquiry processes understands the idea of democracy as the ideal form of association. Such ideal form of association, however, is not identical to the before-­ mentioned paternalistic interpretation of growth, leveled against Dewey by some of his critics. It does not mean that human beings can achieve their individuality and full potential only by means of participation in democratic practices, it rather means that individuality requires the preconditions of equality and social justice as necessary background-conditions of their individual lives: For democracy signifies, on one side, that every individual is to share in the duties and rights belonging to control of social affairs, and on the other side, that social arrangements are to eliminate those external arrangements of status, birth, wealth, sex, etc. which restrict the opportunity of each individual for full development of himself. (Dewey 1932, LW 7, 348f.)

What this means, in a nutshell, is that growth denotes the human flourishing of the individual and at the same time it requires egalitarian terms: everybody should be able to grow. According to this interpretation (c.f. Festenstein 2019, 231), the Deweyan conception of individual growth in democratic communities is indeed not morally neutral but is framed in terms of this ideal. For a democratic person to “grow” herself requires that she has a “sympathetic regard for the intelligence of others, even if they hold views opposed to ours” (Dewey 1932, LW 7, 329) and that she strives for the “integration of […] divided purposes and conflicts of belief” (Dewey 1929, LW 4, 201). In other words, the idea of individuality and individual freedom is partially constituted by the normative demand of having a regard for material and intellectual conditions that shape the possibilities of other citizens to freely employ their own imaginative and reflective powers. Insofar as the idea of self-development at the expense of others is reasonably conceivable, this demand has to be understood as normative and as inscribed in the ideal of democracy itself for Dewey. This is to say that it is conceivable to think of self-development or individual growth without this normative demand, but it is not conceivable to think of it in terms of the ideal of democracy without the demand.

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Hence, the meaning of growth is both individual as well as social; individual, insofar as growth relates to the individual development and realization of individual potentials, and social, insofar as it demands that individual self-development minimally recognizes and fosters the equal opportunity for self-development for all other members of the community. Dewey’s conception of individual growth thus has to be understood both as individual self-development and as self-development under democratic conditions of equality. It neither means laissez-faire individualism nor does it imply a paternalistic vision of an ideal coalescence of individual wills to a general will. To sum up, it is one thing to claim (as I do) that democratic institutions and practices, in order to work properly, are reliant on the critical habits and customs and the egalitarian sentiments of every single individual, and that democratic theory needs to articulate how habits and customs can be built and sustained in the individual so that they accord with the requirements of democracy, which can be summed up by the term democratic culture; and it is another thing to claim (as I do not) that only through the participation in associations, groups and social cooperation individuals can fully liberate their true interests and concerns and thus be can be fully free. Democracy, underpinned by the ideal of growth, then means that individuality and individual freedom are partially constituted by the normative demand of having a regard for material and intellectual conditions that shape the possibilities of other citizens to freely employ their own imaginative and reflective powers—and this demand has to be understood as normative and as inscribed in the ideal of democracy itself for Dewey. As we saw above (elements [i] and [ii]), one argument that Dewey offers for this claim is epistemic in nature: Denying some individuals the material and immaterial possibilities for self-development, for one, causes the epistemic failure of impeding the way of tapping citizens’ experiences, perspectives and judgments about a procedure-­independent common interest, insofar as epistemically better outcomes are likely to arise from procedures of inclusive contestation, debate and communication. For the other, denying other people the possibilities of self-development constitutes an obstacle in accessing a comprehensive idea of the common good itself (Festenstein 2019, 231): There is a moral tragedy inherent in efforts to further the common good which prevent the result from being either good or common—not good, because it is at the expense of the active growth of those to be helped, and not common because these have no share in bringing the result about. The social welfare can be advanced only by means which enlist the positive interest and active energy of those to be benefitted of ‘improved.’ […] Without active cooperation both in forming aims and in carrying them out there is not possibility of a common good. (Dewey 1932, LW 7, 347)

What Dewey is implying here is, first, that a procedure-independent normative standard for political decisions needs to be the common good, and second that the common good is measured against and accrues from both epistemic-procedural and

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moral-substantial considerations.5 In the context of political and social institutions this will mean that all members of society need to be able to participate and need to have decision-making power (direct or indirect) on equal terms, and it means that the outputs or policies that emerge from these procedures have to be good in the sense of being common. The latter means that the quality or the substance of the outputs largely depend on the quantity and quality of the in- and throughput, because what is good politically cannot merely be good for one individual or for one part of a community, but has to be a common good. If a common good is both truly common and good is measured for Dewey by the degree of individual growth it approximates. In other words, growth is a substantial normative ideal for Dewey that specifies the common good in cooperative terms, and the inquiry-conception is the procedural specification of growth. We can now link this conclusion to Dewey’s overall argument for democracy. As growth specifies the common good for Dewey, and as his conception of cooperative inquiry specifies the ideal of growth, the first two elements (i) and (ii) of Dewey’s argument for democracy are comprised in the notion of growth. In this way, then, the moral ideal of growth, when specified in procedural terms, relates to the idea of epistemic democracy, as it conditions the epistemic elements (i) and (ii) of the argument for democracy. In other words, social problem solving-processes and social organizational practices that are oriented towards this ideal necessarily need to be organized around the principles of horizontal and vertical equality (insofar as growth viz. self-development has to be thought in democratic terms). Growth points to a political-philosophical outlook that foregrounds the significance of organizing our practices and social-political structures so as to recognize and promote diversity and to include sidelined perspectives. But even in cases where the first two elements of the argument would not hold up is it  a moral imperative for Dewey that social and political inquiry-processes are organized around the principle of growth, which is to say that if there is a tradeoff between moral and epistemic considerations in democracy, in case of doubt, moral considerations (democracy’s equal respect for citizen’s judgments) take precedence over epistemic considerations. Good political judgment does not always require democratic conditions—democracy is not in all situations a prerequisite for successful social and political experimentalism, certainly in cases where expert knowledge takes precedence over laypeople’s beliefs. While democracy is the most inclusive and egalitarian form of social and political organization, successful experimentation does not always demand broad inclusion. But note that the epistemic  claim  for democracy here is that good political judgment tends to require democratic conditions. This is why a comprehensive justification of democracy cannot rely on epistemic considerations alone (on vertical equality) but also requires a moral foundation 5  Compare with recent publications that describe Dewey’s notion of growth as a “pluralistic notion of human flourishing” (Medina 2017, 204) and as an “ideal of human association” (Pappas 2017, 25). These apt descriptions point to the fact that, for Dewey, growth is not a fixed individual state, but rather a process that involves both the individual as well as material and non-material resources that enable social relationships with others.

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(horizontal equality). Expert judgment, for Dewey, sometimes justifiably should influence the judgments of ordinary citizens,6 but expert judgment can never replace ordinary citizens’ judgments, even when this comes at certain epistemic costs. In other words, in Dewey’s argument for democracy, it is permissible to relax the principle of vertical equality in favor of inequalities in epistemic authority, but never to the extent that the principle of horizontal equality would be given up. While expert-­ knowledge has a significant role in democracy for Dewey, there can never by—by virtue of the moral ideal of growth—expert rule.

6.2  T  he Advantages of Dewey’s Argument for Democracy Over the Neo-Peircean Argument In the remainder of this chapter I contrast Dewey’s epistemic argument for democracy with an alternative pragmatist defense of epistemic democracy by Cheryl Misak and Robert Talisse, which is based on some elements of Charles Sanders Peirce’s pragmatist philosophy.7 Misak’s and Talisse’s neo-Peircean epistemic arguments for democracy have both received their fair share of critical comments over the last decade (e.g. Schwartzberg 2015; MacGilvray 2014; Frega 2012; Bacon 2010; Festenstein 2009). My ensuing discussion of the neo-Peircean epistemic justification of democracy is informed by these critics and aligns with most of their criticisms. The justification for discussing the Neo-Peircean epistemic justification of democracy in the face of these existing criticisms is that it gives me the opportunity to carve out the similarities and differences between the here developed Deweyan theory of democracy and the neo-Peircean argument, in a way that both builds on and adds to the already existing critical literature. I will now first outline the neo-Peircean argument for democracy in its basic form. This will then allow me to discuss some of the shortcomings of the neo-Peircean argument along the lines of its reductionism and contrast it with the non-reductionist Deweyan argument for democracy.

6.2.1  The Neo-Peircean Epistemic Argument for Democracy There are two neo-pragmatist thinkers who draw on the work of Charles S. Peirce for epistemological justifications of democracy: Cheryl Misak (2000; 2004; 2008) and Robert Talisse (2004, 2007). What Misak and Talisse argue is, in a nutshell,

6  In chapter nine I touch upon how Dewey ideally saw the relationship between expert knowledge and ordinary citizen’s judgments. 7  See primarily Misak (2000) and Talisse (2007).

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that in order to be a believer one has to be committed to certain epistemic norms (public reasoning, sincerity, truth-tracking) and that being committed to these norms amounts to being “fallibilist,” that is, being ready to change beliefs if we are presented new evidence or new reasons that prove our held believes to be wrong. They infer therefrom that we have to be deliberative democrats in order to be reasonable believers. In its neo-Peircean shape, this line of argument is based on three related premises: first, that truth is the imaginary endpoint of inquiry where all inquirers ultimately agree on beliefs; second, that the most reliable method of inquiry consist in the methods of science, to which people who hold beliefs are committed, whether they realize it or not; and third, that such methods of inquiry are best conducted in democratic manner. Misak and Talisse contend that in morality and politics, as in science, we strive for the truth and that the optimal method for reaching this goal is one they refer to as the “scientific method.” To be sure, Peirce held that the method of science— which he championed in epistemic matters—had no application to political questions. He especially underlined the significance of keeping apart the quest for the good for society from the grasp at truth: I must confess that I belong to that class of scalawags who purpose, with God’s help, to look the truth in the face, whether doing so be conducive to the interests of society or not (Peirce 1958, vol. 8, 143)

He even portrayed himself as an “ultra-conservative,” “an old-fashioned Christian, a believer in the efficacy of prayer, an opponent of female suffrage and of universal male suffrage, in favor of letting business-methods develop without the interference of law, a disbeliever in democracy, etc. etc.” (ibid. 19). Despite the fact that Peirce never contributed anything to political philosophy, Misak and Talisse claim to have found in Peirce elements of an epistemological justification of democracy that in their eyes is superior to other justifications of democracy. More specifically, Talisse claims that non-Peircean accounts of deliberative democracy continue to presuppose “atomized individualism” by regarding individuals as pre-social beings with a set of beliefs, needs, and desires acquired prior to their entry into society: Despite their ostensible turn from aggregation toward deliberation, liberal theorists of deliberative democracy have retained precisely the element which rendered the adversarial model unsatisfactory, namely, the view that citizens come into the political arena distinct, independent entities with competing and irreconcilable fixed interests. (Talisse 2004, 89f.)

In contrast, the neo-Peircean account of deliberation claims that we should give up the liberal assumption of a self existing prior to socialization, and instead recognize ourselves to be formed socially. As Misak writes, the self will only be formed through thinking and decision-making. It is only in the midst of inquiry that we discover who and what we are, what we want, and what fits best with the evidence and argument. (Misak 2000, 108)

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The neo-Peircean version of deliberation, Talisse claims, is both substantively normative and at the same time respectful of what Rawls calls “the fact of reasonable pluralism” (Rawls 1993, 144). As Talisse writes: The Peircean claim is that, no matter what one thinks about Big Questions concerning, say, human nature, the good life, the nature of evil, or man’s place in the cosmos, one must recognize a prevailing epistemic interest in getting one’s answers to Big Questions right. And getting right answers to such questions requires that one have access to the kind of epistemic processes that can exist only under democratic conditions. (Talisse 2007, 86)

The neo-Peircean image of a community of inquirers meets certain democratic demands, insofar as inquiry does imply a radical fallibilism, hence a readiness to engage in the process of argument and reasoning, the openness to disagreement and to other arguments, and readiness to regard others as fellow inquirers and equal participants (ibid., 66; see also Misak 2000). Misak’s and Talisse’s central contention is that only in a democratic political order can one be an epistemically responsible inquirer and a sensible believer. On this neo-Peircean view, the very fact that we hold beliefs leads to the emergence of certain epistemic norms, and these norms prescribe a mode of epistemic agency that requires an eagerness to listen carefully to opposing views and dissenting arguments, a preparedness to revise one’s own view in light of such arguments, and, most importantly, a continuous orientation towards truth. This view, then, holds that democratic politics is a collective expression and manifestation of our individual epistemic commitments. Both Talisse and Misak base this line of argument on an interpretation of Peirce’s essay “The Fixation of Belief”, which interprets Peirce to say that only the scientific method can be rationally and consistently adopted in our practices of forming beliefs. For both Misak and Talisse, the implication for democracy of this Peircean line of argument is that in order to be a believer one necessarily has to be a democrat simply by virtue of one’s desire to assert one’s beliefs as beliefs. Those who refuse to take others’ experience seriously or, worse, choose to exclude others’ experience from consideration altogether, disqualify their own beliefs as beliefs by not allowing them to answer to reason in an inclusive process of deliberation. Even the opponents of democracy, by virtue of having beliefs, themselves implicitly rely on democratic norms. As Misak writes, the opponent of democracy “is committed to having her beliefs governed by reasons, so any opponent is committed, whether he acknowledges it or not, to debate and deliberation” (Misak 2000, 106). Misak moreover maintains that her account of deliberative democracy involves epistemic norms and values that are fundamental to inquiry. She writes: “Once it is acknowledged that we have beliefs, then we can say that qua believers, we must abide by certain principles” (ibid., 46). These include the principle that one must listen carefully to the reasons of other people, consider them, and either provide reasons against them or revise one’s own beliefs in order to meet their challenge. The argument Misak presents for her claim that believing transcendentally implies a commitment to the pursuit of truth is basically the same as the above- mentioned interpretation of Peirce as expressing the view that the nonscientific methods necessarily violate a constitutive norm of belief itself.

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6.2.2  T  he Limits of the Neo-Peircean Argument and the Advantages of Dewey’s Argument As I have mentioned above, many critics have raised some serious doubts about this neo-Peircean argument. It has been criticized as being too reductionist with regard to a political epistemology, because it reduces political inquiry to scientific inquiry and thereby reduces democratic citizenship and democratic politics to a matter of tracking the truth. But surely scientific inquiry cannot be a literal model for political inquiry. Even an  idealized community of scientific inquirers would  not take the views of everyone to be worthy of consideration. Scientists willfully and intentionally preclude “theories” from their consideration, which they see as irrelevant or distracting in their work. Scientific inquiry is not fully democratic, as it is not fully inclusive and not egalitarian. Only few highly skilled experts have access to real scientific inquiry and are considered worthy of engaging with. These scientific communities of experts are remarkably hierarchic. Misak and Talisse take a direct shortcut from scientific inquiry directly to (deliberative) democracy, but no such direct path exists.8 Because of this move, they also reduce democratic citizenship and democratic politics to a matter of tracking the truth. The problem with the neo-­ Peircean picture of democratic citizens as serious inquirers is that it implies the idea that the political is by and large identical with the epistemic. Democracy is restricted to the epistemic when we presuppose the neo-Peircean normative picture of what a believer is, namely a person that conforms to the epistemic norms the neo-Peirceans identify. But this picture gives us a misleading image of democratic politics and its epistemic dimension. It presupposes a too narrow understanding of the concept of democratic citizenship on the part of Misak and Talisse, insofar as they derive their justification of democracy solely from individual’s epistemic agency, instead of seeing the epistemic dimension as being only one element of democratic citizenship that is closely tied up with a moral dimension of recognizing each other as equals, and with an aesthetic dimension of political existence that registers on an affective level rather than on a cognitive level. Furthermore, the neo-Peircean epistemic argument for democracy is particularly problematic, because it relies on a reductionist account of cognition and human conduct. The problem is that the argument is based on a (implicit) transcendental account of belief-assertion, and that it is grounded in a too cognitivist and intellectualistic account of what it means to pragmatically form a doubt, which renders the argument rather non-pragmatic. A pivotal point of Talisse’s and Misak’s justification of democracy is their claim that citizens as believers are committed to the deliberative norms the two neo-Peirceans identify. In other words, the fact of pluralism according to them applies to moral and political issues, but not to the most basic 8  As I have shown in the previous chapters, Dewey insisted that all forms of successful inquiry, including scientific and political inquiry, ought to follow roughly the same pattern, but this pattern is not modelled according to science and, other than the neo-Peircean notion of inquiry, does not have scientistic undercurrents.

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epistemic commitments. And, they infer, since the bearers of diverse and competing comprehensive doctrines as holders of corresponding beliefs are committed to the same epistemic norms and values, this commitment yields a persuasive epistemic justification of (deliberative) democracy. Only in democracies do we find the conditions under which we as believers can comply with the epistemic norms we implicitly are committed to. Hence, according to this argument, for two parties in deliberation to reasonably disagree is conceptually only possible if they have adopted the epistemic norms Misak and Talisse identify, which necessarily have to accompany deliberation, if deliberation lives up to its own standards of being able to produce true beliefs on the part of its participants. My opposition to such a view is structurally the same as the one put forward against how Rawls “subordinates democracy to his own comprehensive conception of justice” (Cheneval 2013, 261; see also e.g. Waldron 1999; Cohen 2003; Reidy 2007). Rawls’s conception of justice predetermines the conditions of the debate about justice as a comprehensive doctrine just as much as the neo-Peircean conception of reasonable epistemic norms for debates predetermines the condition of the debate about epistemic norms. Since Rawls’s conception of justice leaves no room for fundamental disagreement about justice—because “all the fundamental work has been done in the Original Position”—the ensuing deliberation seems to be “conducted in the shadow, so to speak, of substantive conclusions about justice that have somehow already been reached” (Waldron 1999, 72). Curtailing political deliberation in a Rawlsian or neo-­ Peircean manner certainly has its advantages: it helps political views to be more consensual and less penetrated by disagreement, but at the price of leaving out issues from deliberation that are relevant to the participants (Besson 2005), and— most importantly for epistemic considerations—at the price of prematurely silencing disagreement and excluding diversity. Another way of putting this criticism is this: The neo-Peircean outlook ultimately puts forward a transcendental argument. This applies to Talisse more than to Misak. The fact that we share the same epistemic norms in our practices of holding and stating beliefs is not a contingent attachment to our social intercourses in their view; rather, it is the condition of the possibility of holding beliefs at all: The Peircean view identifies and draws upon epistemic norms and commitments that are internal to all reasonable comprehensive doctrines. It claims that only within a democratic framework can one satisfy one’s own view of epistemic responsibility. (Talisse 2007, 86)

In other words, the necessary condition for the possibility of rationally and consistently held beliefs about comprehensive doctrines is the preexistence of a set of epistemic principles and values that surround the implicit commitment to holding these beliefs to be true. The key value is that asserting a (genuine) belief requires us to expose the belief to all sorts of objections and challenges from all conceivable origins, which is to say that all such objections and challenges are sufficient reasons for doubting the belief. However, sometimes people see themselves as attaining truth while self-­ consciously living by epistemic principles that do not necessarily coincide with the

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neo-Peircean epistemic norms. Think of people who reach their conclusions and beliefs using a method Peirce discredited, namely the method of authority—this is, for example, the method of a religious dogmatist who avoids any form of deliberation that would contest her beliefs, because she fears that engaging in deliberation could lead her away from what she believes to be the truth (Bacon 2010, 1083 ff.). Misak and Talisse could argue that in avoiding the discussion with non-dogmatists, the dogmatist is irrational in failing to meet her implicit commitment to the method of inquiry as a holder of beliefs, namely the commitment to the method of constant belief correction or self-correction. In other words, this means that Misak’s and Talisse’s argument regarding the dogmatist case is that a dogmatist who arrives at her beliefs trough the method of authority is not a conscious and consistent believer—this is the transcendental moment of their argument. Talisse writes: The Peircean view can of course recognize that there are brutal tyrants in the world and that there are devoted enemies of democracy. But the Peircean view recognizes that when a tyrant sets about terrorizing or propagandizing or oppressing his people, he seeks after the best or most effective means to his tyrannical ends; he wants the truth about potential conspiracies against him, the truth about how best to eliminate opposition, and the truth about how best to keep people in line. The Peircean point is that even the tyrant must rely upon and engage in processes of proper inquiry in order to get these truths. If he is to succeed, the tyrant cannot be a tyrant all the way down; he must, even if only in these limited cases, recognize that reasons, evidence, and argument matter, and brute force, will, and terror do not. (Talisse 2007, 68)

Even if both the tyrant’s and the dogmatist’s appeals to truth are motivated by anti-­ deliberative and anti-democratic ends, and their methods of acquiring beliefs are anti-fallibilistic, anti-deliberative, and marked by indoctrination, Talisse’s reasoning goes, they cannot but defer to epistemically reliable sources of belief. In other words, the tyrant and the dogmatist are believers, but they are believers on a small scale—they are not reasonable believers, where reasonable is defined as conscious and constant willingness to give, and listen to, reasons. Talisse’s reasoning about the tyrant necessarily being committed to scientific inquiry as the best way of coming to his beliefs and hence being committed to democratic epistemic norms, resembles Plato’s reasoning that a band of robbers necessarily needs to be just in order to enable collective action towards a common goal, and that thus robbers actually would aspire justice (Plato 2003, 351c). But the problem with both the reasoning of Talisse and of Plato is that the band of robbers and the tyrant only selectively apply the virtues of justice or epistemic virtues to the very group they belong to, and not to those outside the group. The tyrant, or the band of robbers, may very well adhere to these virtues when it comes to their own interests, but not when it comes to the interests of others. Hence from a selective application of epistemic virtues, a general implicit commitment to these virtues cannot be inferred. In connection with the transcendental move, which narrows down human cognition to highly selective epistemic virtues and principles, there is another problem with  the neo-Peircean account that has to do with its  rather un-pragmatic

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conceptualization of what it means to doubt (and to engage in inquiry). MacGilvray, in his comprehensive crique of Misak and Talisse in the article “Democratic Doubts: Pragmatism and the Epistemic Defense of Democracy” (MacGilvray 2014), correctly remindes us that for the pragmatists, inquiry starts with doubt, not with belief, and that the neo-Peirceans’ account of doubt is rather un-pragmatic and un-Peircean. I want to follow up on MacGilvray’s argument by adding some elements to it that grow out of my Deweyan theory of political judgments. For Peirce, MacGilvray urges, a belief constitutes a habit or rule of action. To belief a proposition for Peirce is to be ready to act on it, and beliefs are different insofar as they give rise to different modes of action. MacGilvray infers from these assumptions about belief, that “the mere assertion of a belief does not, pace Misak and Talisse, commit one to further inquiry on its behalf, because belief is, as Peirce puts it, ‘thought at rest.’” (ibid., 113). As long as thought rests (as long as our habits and rules for action are stable), we are not moved to inquire, which is to say that we are not moved to doubt. Hence doubt, rather than belief, is the origin of inquiry: As long as our habits, or rules of action, reliably serve our purposes […] then we need not, and will not, conduct further inquiry into their validity. […] Indeed, Peirce urges us not to pretend to doubt what we do not, in fact, doubt. This injunction provides the basis for his rejection of Cartesian skepticism […]. (ibid.)

In other words, real pragmatic inquiry starts with real doubt and not just with any conceivable doubt. What MacGilvray says about Peirce also applies to Dewey. Dewey’s conception of inquiry understands doubt in similar terms. Inquiry for Dewey starts with unstable situations (when our habits become doubtful) and ends with judgment. Here lies the most obvious difference in how neo-Peirceans and a Deweyan theory of judgment understand epistemic activity and conduct: while the former understand it as primarily a matter of individual epistemic commitments that ultimately find their expression in true or false propositions (as the basis of beliefs), Dewey insistend on a significant difference between propositions and judgments in his conception of inquiry: propositions are mere auxiliary means of a process that leads to judgments that are syntehtic and transformative in character. The tranformative character originates from an initially unstable and problematic situation that casts doubt on establisehd habits and customs. Hence, from Dewey’s point of view we have to agree with MacGilvray’s claim that the pragmatist doubt-belief theory implies the anti-­ skeptic stance that a belief is “thought at rest” (Peirce), and that a pragmatist does not think that we should constantly undertake inquiry and submit all our beliefs to a stress test. For Peirce and for Dewey inquiry does not begin with belief but with doubt, and doubt does not consist in doubting believers but consists in unstable habits. A habit is unstable if our habits and customs on the one hand, and our environment on the other hand, are not consistent anymore. Hence, MacGilvray is right when he argues against the neo-Peircean epistemic argument of democracy that inquiry starts with real doubts and not with artificial paper-doubts, and that the pragmatist therefore does not recommend constantly testing our beliefs. However, If I understand Dewey correctly, he also says that really doubting (instead of pretending to doubt) demands attentiveness to our own and other

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people’s experiences and curiosity and a willingness to explore those experiences, which goes beyond the mere satisfaction with habits and customs that have been proven to be stable. Pragmatic action is not simply the satisfaction with the proven, but also consists in an explorative element of discovering and imagining something new. It is indeed entrenched habits and customs that might stand in the way of braking with ossified ways of acting. However, I agree with MacGilvray that we are moved to pragmatic doubt not by way of a philosophical-Cartesian scepticism (the rejection of which pragmatists are  ultimately concerned with) that doubts everything possible and coceivable. Pragmatic doubt rather emerges from an incoherence regarding our habits with our environment. Real doubt, we can say, is caused by some sort of incoherence, and no such incoherence takes route from artificially considering skeptical scenarios. It is not so much a direct matter of finding contradictions between beliefs or rules, but rather consists in an experientially felt incoherence of rules of action (habits) and an organism’s environment; it is a matter of a qualitative feeling that for this situation my established habits or our established customs are not fully apt anymore. Such feeling of incoherence initiates Deweyan inquiry: we sense that a situation is “unstable” and not coherent with our rules of action.9 But the feeling of incoherence is only the first step of moving towards doubt in Dewey’s conception of inquiry. In order to arrive at a state where doubt leads to the formulation of a problem, the feeling of incoherence has to be submitted to an evaluative judgment about the inadequacy of old habits and ways of dealing with this situation. Such evaluative judgment is an active engagement with the qualities of experience through a process of meaning-making that can either rely on a rather mechanic application of concepts and rules of interpretation and action, or a creative exploration of new possible meanings and actions. Only the latter reaction will initiate inquiry through a process of abduction by inventing or adopting new hypotheses and ideas, as the former, the application of given rules, relies on already existing rules of action (habits) which do not give cause for doubt and therefore also not for inquiry. In other words, doubt originates from a subjective sensibility with regard to the incoherence and instability of a situation (between current habits and customs of a subject and its environment), but in order to become part of an inquiry (in order to be justifiably considered “problematic”), such subjective sensibility has to be articulated and expressed in symbols and requires social conditions that go beyond the mere fact of a subjective sensibility. MacGilvray argues against Misak and Talisse that for Peirce we only have to conduct inquiry “if one of my existing beliefs has been placed into doubt as far as I am concerned […]”(MacGilvray 2014, 114). From Dewey’s point of view, it is true that doubt starts with an incoherence of habits and customs “as far as I am concerned”. However, inquiry—the process of identifying and defining a problematic situation and the most adequate solution by coming 9  Both Peirce and Dewey urge us to acknowledge a dimension of experience and perception that is qualitative and that we do not (yet) account for conceptually at present. Compare my discussion of Peirce’s category of firstness and Dewey’s notion of “quality” in chapters three and four.

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to a judgment about these matters—is social and normative, insofar as it cannot sufficiently rely on these subjective sensibilities, but requires other people’s accounts of experiences, and a social experimental and communicative process. Thus, a doubt that becomes part of an inquiry is not only a subjective feeling of incoherence, but has also to rest on social interaction for Dewey. In other words, what moves us towards doubt and inquiry pragmatically is not the skeptical concern that our beliefs would withstand all conceivable objections and contradictions, but rather a holistic sense of incoherence of our habits for a particular situation—doubt is based in a subjective feeling that moves us to inquiry. Inquiry, however, is something super-­ subjective and social and then also linguistic and cognitive, resulting in a judgment about the existence of a problem and a judgment about the best comparable solution. Hence “as far as I am concerned” is not sufficient to establish a doubt that deserves inquiry. Because pragmatism has a doubt-centered and not a belief-centered approach to inquiry, MacGilvray concludes, with reference to Knight and Johnson (2011), that political institutions should be maximally inclusive not because this maximizes our chances of holding true beliefs—indeed, we may retreat from democracy if this is our aim—but rather because we believe that political institutions should advance the interests of everyone who is subject to them, and that everyone should therefore have a say in judging their performance. (MacGilvray 2014, 117)

But a Deweyan theory of political judgment goes beyond the claim that democratic inclusion can be justified uniquely on moral grounds (the equal advancement of all interests). In democratic politics, the question which doubts are adequate—which sensibilities deserve further public attention and thus are to be framed as “problematic” and in need of a political solution—constitutes a large junk of what democratic politics is about. We have prima facie epistemic reasons for the inclusion of all citizens, without at the same time having a principled reason to tell us how much inclusion and diversity is enough. Indeed, Dewey did say that “[t]he man who wears the shoe knows best that it pinches and where it pinches, even if the expert shoemaker is the best judge of how the trouble is remedied” (Dewey 1927, LW 2, 364). But political and social problems like racism, family-policies, or welfare-redistributions are certainly not in the same way “technical” as pinching shoes are. Dewey is not implying that political problems are best tackled by way of a clear-cut division of labor between citizens (those who’s shoes pinch) and experts (those who possess the necessary knowledge and expertise to solve the problem efficiently), where the epistemic value of including laypeople is confined to expressing a feeling of that “there is something wrong” and where experts could accurately identify and define what is wrong, and then go on to find the best solution.10 What social and political problems are, and why citizens should acknowledge them as problems is not just a function of specialist expertise, but partially derives from the experiences and perspectives of

 Compare my discussion of the relationship between experts and ordinary citizens that this Deweyan argument for democracy implies in chapter nine.

10

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all those who—directly or indirectly—are affected by them. Insofar as Dewey was right with his saying that a problem well put is half solved, the equal inclusion of all citizens’ judgments about social and political problems in a democratic polity can be partially justified on epistemic grounds, and not only on moral grounds. But in contrast to the neo-Peircean epistemic argument for democracy, the Deweyan argument for democracy does no allow for a justification of democracy in epistemic terms alone. His argument for democracy can be mapped in terms of a horizontal axis (equal respect) and a vertical axis (epistemic authority), and the epistemic part of the argument is that promoting equality on both axes tends to promote the epistemic quality of democracy. But the epistemic part of the argument, elements (i) and (ii), are not sufficient to guarantee or justify democracy from the Deweyan point of view, because social, political and economic inequalities do not always come with epistemic costs, which is to say that good political judgment not always requires democratic conditions. Where this is the case, the broad inclusion and equality of ordinary citizens cannot be justified on epistemic grounds alone, but the justification needs to rely on moral reasons too. Dewey’s argument does not provide clear-cut criteria for identifying when this would be the case. All it implies is that we should expect cases where the broad inclusion of ordinary citizens for identifying or solving of political problems cannot be justified on epistemic grounds alone. This is why Dewey’s argument for democracy also involves a horizontal axis—the idea of growth as a moral ideal that extends beyond epistemic considerations. But it also says that because there are no clear-cut criteria, elements (i) and (ii) of the argument both provide prima facie epistemic reasons for vertical equality. Because elements (i) and (ii) of Dewey’s argument for democracy only provide prima facie reasons for vertical equality (equality of epistemic authority), the argument for democracy cannot exclusively rely on epistemic considerations alone, but needs to rely on the moral ideal of growth (iii) as well. The upshot of this argument is not that the tension between the ideal of equal respect for citizens’ judgments and the correctness-ideal can be dissolved completely, but rather that we should assume trade-offs between those ideals to persist. Dewey’s argument for democracy furthermore carries two important implications. The first implication is that our collective efforts as a society should be directed towards seeking a democratic culture and democratic institutions that make such compromises less often—this would certainly require some fundamental reforms to our democratic institutions and culture.11 The second implication is that Dewey’s theory of judgment and his conception of inquiry suggest that there are no definite and principled clear-cut criteria in the abstract for judging when, where and how such trade-offs should be made, because we cannot give a principled answer to the question of where the necessary and relevant knowledge for defining and solving problems in politics should come from, or what it consists in.12 This is why elements

11 12

 I will touch upon institutional questions in the second part of the book.  I expand on this idea in chapter nine.

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(i) and (ii) of Dewey’s argument for democracy provide (only) prima facie reasons for justifying democracy in epistemic terms and why element (iii) needs to be part of a comprehensive justification of democracy.

References Aikin, Scott, and Robert Talisse. 2017. Pragmatism, Pluralism, and the Nature of Philosophy. New York: Routledge. Bacon, Michael. 2010. The Politics of Truth: A Critique of Peircean Deliberative Democracy. Philosophy & Social Criticism 36 (9): 1075–1091. Cheneval, Francis. 2013. Property-owning democracy and the circumstances of politics. Analyse & Kritik 35 (1): 255–269. Cohen, Joshua. 2003. For a democratic society. In Samuel Freeman, ed., The Cambridge companion to Rawls. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 86–138. Dewey, John. 1917. The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy. In The Middle Works, 1899-1924, 10, 3–48. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. ———. 1927. The Public and Its Problems. The Later Works, 1925-1953, 2. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. ———. 1929. The Quest for Certainty. The Later Works, 1925-1953, 4. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. ———. 1932. Ethics. The Later Works, 1924-1953, 7. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Festenstein, Matthew. 2008. John Dewey: Inquiry, Ethics, and Democracy. In The Oxford Handbook of American Philosophy, 87–109. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2009. Unravelling the Reasonable: Comment on Talisse. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 45 (1): 55–59. ———. 2019. Does Dewey Have an ‘Epistemic Argument’ for Democracy? Contemporary Pragmatism 16 (2–3): 217–241. Frega, Roberto. 2012. Practice, Judgment, and the Challenge of Moral and Political Disagreement: A Pragmatist Account. Lanham: Lexington. Honneth, Axel. 1998. Democracy as Reflexive Cooperation: John Dewey and the Theory of Democracy Today. Political Theory 26 (6): 763–783. Knight, Jack, and James Johnson. 2011. The Priority of Democracy: Political Consequences of Pragmatism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. MacGilvray, Eric. 2004. Reconstructing Public Reason. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2014. Democratic Doubts: Pragmatism and the Epistemic Defense of Democracy. Journal of Political Philosophy 22 (1): 105–123. Medina, José. 2017. Pragmatism, Racial Injustice, and Epistemic Insurrection: Toward an Insurrectionist Pragmatism. In Pragmatism and Justice, ed. Susan Dielemann and Christopher Voparil, 197–213. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Misak, Cheryl. 2000. Truth, Politics, Morality: Pragmatism and Deliberation. New  York: Routledge. Pappas, Gregory. 2017. The Centrality of Dewey’s Lectures in China to His Socio-Political Philosophy. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 53 (1): 7. Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1958. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Vol. 7–8. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Plato. 2003. The Republic, ed. Henry Desmond Pritchard Lee. London: Penguin. Reidy, David. 2007. Reciprocity and reasonable disagreement: From Liberal to democratic legitimacy. Philosophical Studies 132 (2): 243–291. Rawls, John. 1993. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Schwartzberg, Melissa. 2015. Epistemic Democracy and Its Challenges. Annual Review of Political Science 18: 187–203. Talisse, Robert. 2003. Can Democracy Be a Way of Life? Deweyan Democracy and the Problem of Pluralism. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 39 (1): 1–21. ———. 2004. Democracy After Liberalism: Pragmatism and Deliberative Politics. New  York: Routledge. ———. 2007. A Pragmatist Philosophy of Democracy. New York: Routledge. Talisse, Robert, and Scott Aikin. 2016. Pragmatism and Pluralism Revisited. Political Studies Review 14 (1): 17–26. Waldron, Jeremy. 1999. The dignity of legislation. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Part II

Pragmatist Political Judgment and the Circumstances of Democratic Politics

Chapter 7

The Epistemic Value of Diversity in Democratic Publics

Abstract  Diversity is a key term that does a major part of the “epistemic work” in this Deweyan account of democratic judgment. This chapter clarifies how this account understands diversity and how the account contrasts and overlaps with deliberative and other epistemic theories of democracy that assign diversity a central role in democratic procedures. I present the idea of thinking about the epistemic benefit of diversity in connection with social inquiry in terms of reducing the risk of cognitive distortions and injustices, insofar as diverse perspectives and judgments potentially work as corrective or compensating sources. In the second part of the chapter I address the question how the positive epistemic effects of diversity in social and political inquiry can get a hold in a fragmented polity and under contemporary political circumstances of global politics. I take up Dewey’s suggestion in The Public and its Problems that the “Great Community” should be seen as the entity that can best coordinate democratic interaction in a way that brings about the learning effects in political inquiry; this interaction should arise on the basis of the inclusion of experimental and perspectival diversity, according to Dewey’s social epistemology and to his conception of social and political inquiry. However, I suggest that Dewey’s notion of “publics”—the basic collective units of democratic interaction—is a more adequate way of conceptualizing democratic interaction than his own favored way of theorizing it, which gives priority to the local community over other forms of dispersed and diverse political associations. Keywords  Diversity · Epistemic democracy · John Dewey · Publics · Diversity Trumps Ability. Diversity is a key term that does a major part of the “epistemic work” in this Deweyan account of democratic judgment. This chapter clarifies how this account understands diversity and how the account contrasts and overlaps with deliberative and other epistemic theories of democracy that assign diversity  a central role in democratic procedures. I present the idea of thinking about the epistemic benefit of diversity in connection with social inquiry in terms of reducing the risk of cognitive distortions and injustices, insofar as diverse perspectives and judgments potentially © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 M. I. Räber, Knowing Democracy – A Pragmatist Account of the Epistemic Dimension in Democratic Politics, Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations 14, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53258-1_7

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work as corrective or compensating sources. In the second part of the chapter I address the question how the positive epistemic effects of diversity in social and political inquiry can get a hold in a fragmented polity and under contemporary political circumstances of global politics. If good political judgments in Deweyan-­ pragmatist terms hinge on a process of democratic organization that is inclusive of citizen’s diversity of experiences and perspectives by means of forms of social interaction between individuals and groups that are simultaneously attentive to and expressive of those experiences and perspectives, how should we then conceptulize democratic organization, and how should we think of these means of forms of social interaction in more detail? In other words, how do we need to model democratic public spheres and democratic communication so that the ideal characteristics of social and political inquiry, as discussed in the previous chapter, come to bear? In order to answer these questions, I take up Dewey’s suggestion in The Public and its Problems (Dewey 1927, LW 2) that the “Great Community” should be seen as the entity that can best coordinate democratic interaction in a way that brings about the learning effects in political inquiry; this interaction should arise on the basis of the inclusion of experimental and perspectival diversity, according to Dewey’s social epistemology and to his conception of social and political inquiry. However, I suggest that Dewey’s notion of “publics”—the basic collective units of democratic interaction—is a more adequate way of conceptualizing democratic interaction than his own favored way of theorizing it, which gives priority to the local community over other forms of dispersed and diverse political associations.

7.1  “Diversity Trumps Ability” in Democracy and Its Discontents We can treat social and political inquiry, properly functioning, as a tool that incorporates diversity in a way that prevents pluralistic societies from drifting into more extreme and adversarial positions, because it can channel and relate diverse experiences and perspectives in a way that improves, directly or indirectly, the epistemic quality of citizen’s judgments in democratic policy-making procedures, and hence also improves the overall aggregate epistemic quality of these judgments. Diversity is a descriptive term that denotes non-unity or non-identity and hence refers to differences between entities of a group of things. Instead of “diversity” we could use the concept of difference, as it gives meaning to the concept of diversity in a quantitative sense (not being the same thing) and in a qualitative sense (not sharing the same quality). When “diversity” is used colloquially, for example in the context of corporate advertising (“Diversity makes us who we are,” as an American Airlines advertisement from 2016 wants us to believe), it is used primarily in order to vaguely refer to differences between humans without specifying in what regards and to what extent they differ. In the context of biological evolutionary theory, the term diversity is used in a qualitative sense, as in “genetic diversity,” where diversity

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is used to refer to the total number of traits in the genetic makeup of a species— diversity here refers to different genetic characteristics of a genetic makeup of a species that belong to the same and identical species. In non-biological context, when we look at the makeup of a society, for example, we can differentiate between the members of a society by registering the ways in which they are diverse with regard to, for example, age, cultural identities, ethnicity, training, expertise, gender, opinions, beliefs, cognitive abilities, etc. Throughout the book I have been using the term diversity in connection with the notions  experience and perspective to refer to the differences in “situatedness” between individuals and groups in society. Diversity is an important variable in the Deweyan theory of democratic  judgment, because the theory is premised on the assumption that humans are social beings that are differently situated in society with regard to various characteristics, and that the differently situatedness bears on the kind and on the quality of their experiences, which in turn shape their perspectives on social and political realities and values. One of the arguments for the epistemic value of diversity in social and political inquiry that I alluded to in the previous chapters referred to the potential corrective learning-effects that can occur when citizens are confronted with the flaws and limits of their own perspectives. A similar argument about the positive epistemic effects of diversity in democracy has been used in the literature on epistemic democracy in the recent years (primarily by Landemore 2012). This argument relies on the “Diversity Trumps Ability” theorem. I will now discuss both the theorem and the argument in detail and show why the argument ultimately is insufficient, and why the pragmatist argument for the epistemic value of diversity in democracies is more defensible. In recent economic and psychology literature about aggregation of information in groups, and also within the discussion about epistemic democracy, the idea has attracted growing attention that groups, in the right circumstances, are often smarter than the smartest people in them due to the group’s diversity. It was notably Jim Surowiecki’s Wisdom of Crowds (2005) together with Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs (2002) which popularized the idea that a collective of people tend to perform better at finding the right solutions to problems than individuals on their own. Lu Hong and Scott Page in a series of articles and books further developed this idea by formalizing it in mathematical theorems and showing how cognitive diversity and differences between people can be epistemically valuable (Page 2007; Hong and Page 2001, 2004, 2009). In what follows in this sect. I am presenting the argument of Hong and Page in a condensed form.1 Hong and Page loosely define “diversity in a group of people” as differences in their demographic makeup, cultural identity, ethnicity, training, expertise, or gender. This seems to reflect the way I have been using diversity for the Deweyan epistemic argument for democracy. However, Page uses the term diversity in a much narrower, because purely cognitive, sense. He focuses exclusively on what he calls 1  I will leave out the specifics of the mathematical proofs, the soundness of which have been questioned primarily by Thompson (2014) but have recently been defended against Thompson by Singer (2019).

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“functional diversity,” that is people’s perspectives—how they represent and interpret situations and problems—and their heuristics—how they try to solve those problems and how they infer cause and effect (Page 2007, 7). According to Page’s terminology, he calls the combination of people’s perspectives and heuristics their “individual mapping” (ibid.) of possible heuristics through which they work out solutions to a problem that the cognitively represent trough their perspective. According to this terminology, a group is functionally diverse iff the individuals’ mappings are diverse. Based on this conceptualization of diversity, Hong and Page in their papers make the rather counterintuitive claim that a functionally diverse group whose members are of average ability to represent and solve problems does better than a homogenous group of people with high ability—for which the use the catchphrase “Diversity Trumps Ability” (DTA). DTA, however, applies only under restrictive conditions, according to Hong and Page: First, agents have to meet a certain threshold of cognitive ability, which Hong and Page identify with the ability to find a slightly better solution to any given starting point (of the problem-solving process). Second, the problem to be solved has to be difficult, meaning that no agent should always be able to find the best solution on his or her own. If one person alone were able to give us the best solution to a problem, we would not need to ask a diverse group of problem-solvers. Third, agents need to be functionally different, so that there is at least one problem solver who can make a small improvement. This condition implies that, given any non-optimal solution to a problem, there is a problem solver who has a perspective or heuristic that allows him or her to find an improvement in that solution. Fourth, the group has to be bigger than two or three, and group members need to be chosen from a large population. This becomes clear if we look at a small group of, say, only twelve people, because then the eight best would easily outperform a random eight. There is no specific threshold the group size has to have, but the more functionally diverse the problem solvers are, the smaller the group can be. DTA means that under these conditions, as the number of problem-solvers rises, the functional diversity of a group’s most competent problem-solvers tends to become insignificant, relative to the group size. Further, Hong and Page’s reasoning goes, the negative effect that the addition of less competent problem-solvers has on the group’s average problem-solving capacity is more than outweighed by the functional diversity of a group of people (given the before mentioned conditions). The reason for this is that highly capable people in a functionally uniform body will grind to a halt on their highest local optimum, whereas a more functionally diverse group has the likelihood of pushing each other past that local optimum. “Local optimum” is a technical term they use to refer to the solutions to the problem that each member arrives at. As the total of members in a group rises, the chance of them sharing local optima converges to zero, and the best problem-solvers, as I said, all tend to become similar in the way they cognitively represent problems and find solutions. Their individual cognitive diversity does not change, of course, but compared to the less able problem-solvers their perspectives and heuristics are similar.

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In other words, while the best problem solvers get stuck at fewer local optima, these local optima tend to have higher value, and less able individual problem solvers on the other hand have more local optima, but many of these may have lower values. The idea of diversity trumps ability theorem means that, although the best problem solvers’ local optima have high value, those optima tend to be similar, and it follows that they do not perform much better as a collection than they do individually. Another way of expressing this conclusion is to say that shared perspectives and shared heuristics tend to translate into shared solutions. In contrast, the diverse problem solvers with lower local optima values are much more functionally different, and this diversity allows them to collectively perform better than they do individually. This alone, of course, is not sufficient for them to outperform the best. All the aforementioned four conditions must hold. Hélène Landemore (2012, ch. 4) applied the claims of the DTA to the question about the epistemic circumstances of democracy. Based on the claims of the DTA, she argues that democratic representation, via the aggregation of votes, and democratic deliberation could tap the positive epistemic effects of functional diversity in large groups. In democratic deliberative settings, she suggests, diversity-inclusive deliberation tends to have greater epistemic value than less diversity-inclusive deliberation—this holds true, for example, in an assembly of elected representatives, which is able the bring in a wide array of cognitive diversity. She argues that the DTA is a model allowing us to interpret democratic deliberation as a mechanism suited to problem solving. One example she gives is a real-life case of solving the problem of preventing muggings on a bridge in New Haven, CT.  She relates the story of how a diverse group of police, citizens, engineers, and accountants started out with the obvious but unsatisfactory solution of placing a police vehicle close to the bridge. By means of a process of collective deliberation, all participating actors were able to come to the “less obvious and more compelling solution” of installing solar-powered lamps on the bridge (ibid., 101). Deliberation’s epistemic function here was to bring the group to see what in hindsight seemed obvious, even though no individual participant had reached the conclusion on their own outside of the collective deliberation-process. Hence, Landemore contends, the value of a cognitively diverse group within deliberation is that it safeguards a deliberative collective against prematurely arriving at a sub-optimal judgment about the best solution. As persuasive this reasoning is, there are certain critical limitations to her model of inclusive, diverse democratic problem solving: (a) positivism and instrumentalism; (b) a-political democracy; and (c) a too narrow conceptualization of diversity. (a) Positivism and Instrumentalism Landemore’s epistemic argument for democracy—as well as the DTA, on which the argument is partially based—has positivistic undercurrents that do damage to her project of modeling democratic politics as a problem-solving process. The claim of DTA seems to rely—both with Landemore and Hong and Page—on the assumption that the problem-solving process is all about finding the best and most suitable means to predetermined ends. In the case of Hong and Page, it is understandable that they make this assumption, because the idea of DTA only speaks to the process

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of solution finding and hence presupposes an external reality of, and an established consensus about, problems to which the diverse group attempts at finding the best solutions to. This assumption is not problematic for their model since they are only interested in showing that functionally diverse groups perform epistemically better than less diverse groups in finding the best means (solutions) to given problems. For Landemore’s argument about the epistemic merits of democratic representation and deliberation, however, this assumption is problematic, as her argument is concerned about political processes and political problems that defy purely instrumental reasoning: what constitutes a political problem in the first place cannot be left out of democratic processes of solving problems.2 The epistemic function of democratic politics consists not only in crafting efficient laws and policies, but over and above in determining which problems require a solution in the first place. How do functionally diverse groups perform with the latter task? The DTA model does not help here, as it does not tell us anything about the process of establishing and judging problems. The Deweyan theory of inquiry and democratic judgment, in contrast, takes into account the importance of sensing, identifying, defining, framing and debating problems for the whole process of making judgments about solutions to these problems. The DTA theorem might be applicable to judicial political judgments, though. Lay juries, the subject of my conceptualization of the epistemic dimension of judicial political judgments in chapter five, comply by and large with the four requirements of the DTA and hence is exemplary for the application of the DTA to the circumstances of democratic politics: Jury members can be taken to meet a minimal threshold of cognitive competence; the problem of finding a just verdict about the guilt of a defendant is sufficiently difficult; the group is functionally different, guaranteed by the principle of representativeness; and the group is bigger than two or three and is representative of the larger population in society. But while the DTA might be applicable to lay juries, it is not applicable to the task of identifying and defining what political problems are. In contrast, the Deweyan theory of political judgment provides a conceptualization of the hermeneutical and deliberative processes leading to a type of judgment (normative political judgment) that captures this task, and it  explains how and where diversity is epistemically expedient. (b) A-Political Democracy A second limitation to Landemore’s epistemic argument for democracy is connected to the first limitation (its instrumentalism). It models the epistemic properties of democratic politics in terms of democratic deliberations as face-to-face communication in small-group settings (Landemore 2017). As we saw in chapter five, the 2  Stich (2014, 177) furthermore raised the legitimate concern that, even provided that there is a background-consensus over an issue, there is no guarantee that deliberators will agree on the best solution to a problem. This is the case where a shared set of values is outweighed by other values for some deliberators, which will abort the deliberative search for the optimal solutions prematurely—for example when a widely shared consensus about the right to bodily integrity is outweighed by pro-lifers’ values that come into play about the question of abortion.

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lay jury is such an example of the epistemic strengths of small-group deliberations. But modelling democratic politics, public communication and political judgment according to highly idealized face-to-face deliberation in micro-groups cannot do justice to the importance of participation of ordinary citizens in democratic politics on a large scale. What gets bracketed in Landemore’s model is democracy’s epistemic function when it comes to such politically significant instances of participation—like demonstrations, strikes, and other non-institutional forms of political resistance and expression—that do not occur in mini-publics or other deliberative venues, but are part of broader and much more messy participatory arenas that are also epistemically significant for democracy. By focusing on idealized group-­ deliberations she is also (intentionally) bracketing various real-life costs of diversity that could undermine its purely epistemic value in idealized micro-group settings. Too much diversity across perspectives might inhibit both coordination and communication, and this potential threat is especially relevant in larger democratic polities, where the prevalent mode of communication is not a face-to-face dialog but rather resembles a polyphonic network of monologues that have to be transmitted by intermediary communicative channels. In contrast, pragmatist social epistemology suggests that resistance and, in general, non-discursive practices of political expression have a function with regard to the inclusion of marginalized voices and experiences and thus have positive effects on a collective process of identifying and defining public problems. (c) Cognitive Diversity and Experiential Diversity A third limitation of her argument is closely related to the first two limitations: In her model she too narrowly focuses on cognitive (functional) diversity. She does neither consider the diversity that exists in a democratic polity with regard to citizen’s experiences, nor the causality between experiential diversity and the diversity of perspectives. If we assume a causal correlation between cognitive diversity and people’s diversity in terms of the values they hold, the experiences they make, and the identities they have, we might be faced with a trade-off within the DTA-model between cognitive diversity and the ability to achieve consensus on a good local optimum. Deliberators might be unable to achieve a desired optimal solution if there is too much diversity in terms of their experiential diversity. On the other hand, if citizens make experiences that are too much alike and form perspectives based on these experiences that are too much alike, there might not be enough cognitive diversity to meet the conditions of the DTA and of Landemore’s model. While such a trade-off indeed might be problematic in her model, I suggest that when we look at less idealized political circumstances of inclusive democratic participation trough the lens of Dewey’s theory of social and political inquiry, diversity in experience is an epistemic resource rather than a threat to democracy. The logic of this claim—as pragmatist social epistemology assumes—is that people’s differences in race, geography, gender, age, training, profession, etc. will lead to experiential differences, which are valuable sources when it comes to constituting and solving public problems. There is a link between having a certain situational experience and obtaining

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a certain perspective. What this means is that in any complex and pluralistic society there is inevitably a diversity of perspectives, interpretations, and judgments, and this diversity is partially traceable to the different situational (social) positions people are in and the experiences these positions offer to them.

7.2  Diversity, Consensus and Democratic Pluralism Let me go back to the first limitation of Landemore’s epistemic argument (it’s instrumentalist-positivist undercurrents) for the sake of making a point about a tendency in deliberative theories of democracy more generally. Such theories are premised on the assumption that the normative aim of democratic communicative interaction is to track a moral or factual reality by virtue of argument and reason. For example, Martí (2006, 29 n.3) stated that the claim that “an ideal deliberative procedure always reaches rational and reasonable consensus can only be rejected by holding some sort of ontological pluralism of values” (emphasis added). He presupposes that an account of deliberative democracy that does not have the ideal of rational consensus at the center of its account will collapse into some sort of dangerous—because relativistic—“ontological pluralism of values” and thus cannot rightfully claim to be deliberative. His view suggests that for truly deliberative theories of democracy, real-world democratic interaction and communication is a surrogate for, and an approximation of, an ideal rational process of deliberation, which would be able to track the truth about factual and moral realities, because there would be no constraints on time and costs, and because participants would be perfectly rational and would be engaged in an ongoing deliberation about political and moral issues. This view about democratic deliberation implies that it is only because of such real-world limitations on human rationality and political organization that actual political deliberations do not reach consensus and no not overcome pluralism. However, it remains unclear what Martí exactly means when he claims that non-­ deliberative theories of democracy need to presuppose “some sort of ontological pluralism of values.” I suppose he means that by presupposing an ontological pluralism of values, those who are not true deliberative democrats are obliged to also presuppose that conflicts in some degree always persist, and that (even as an ideal) it will never be possible to completely resolve conflicting beliefs. By way of an excursion, let me try to spell out the implications of Martí’s view. The world as we know it is a place where people hold false beliefs, a world for which Deweyan pragmatism offers an aptly crafted fallibilist epistemology that takes into account both the pervasive uncertainty and cognitive limitations that are ever present in human conduct and the pluralistic possibilities of qualitative experience. A conception of democratic deliberation in the spirit of Martí,3 however, rests

3  And Habermas; compare with my discussion of the Habermasian deliberative paradigm in chapter two.

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on the assumption about an ideal political order of democratic interaction that necessarily aims at rational consensus. To understand the implications of this conception, consider the following thought experiment. Imagine a world in which everyone knows all truths that can be known—let’s call this the “Truth-World.” The people living in the Truth-World have found ways of designing a communicative environment in which no one holds false beliefs or makes wrong judgments any longer. As a consequence, would they have enhanced deliberative democracy substantially? We are inclined to answer with Martí, of course, deliberative democracy would have been enhanced substantially, because the conceived communicative environment could make it easier to reach a true consensus or agreement on any issue. However, the answer for Martí should be, no, we would not have enhanced deliberative democracy substantially, because deliberative institutions would no longer be needed, at least not for epistemic reasons. Science, the processes of collective inquiry, and competition over true hypotheses, certainly would no longer be needed. Similarly, in an imagined ideal world where people do not hold false beliefs and do not make unwarranted judgments, democratic institutions would be, to a large extent, superfluous. What is the point of deliberation in a world where there are no differences in beliefs and judgments? Democracy certainly would still be needed, since cyclical elections prevent the misuse of power: a person holding only true beliefs is not necessarily incorruptible. Yet the remaining democracy  would consist in a mere election of the most trustworthy people—democratic politicians as representatives of a certain group with certain beliefs would no longer be necessary when everybody shares the same true beliefs and judgments. Indeed, such a world would be an outlandish place to live in, a world where truth would be a surrogate for politics as we know it. The inhabitants of this world would not only have to share truths about facts, but also truths about values and norms, and consequently they would share judgments about the existence of problems, the best solutions to these problems, and the best means of collective action based on these solutions. The representatives they would elect would no longer be politicians but would resemble assembly line workers who execute a predetermined plan reliably and accurately. I am not sure whether this world would be a desirable place to live in (I highly doubt it), but it is certainly not the world we live in now. In contrast to such monistic and consensus-oriented theories of deliberative democracy, the Deweyan-pragmatist conception of democratic inquiry and judgment views democratic problem-solving procedures as tools for dealing with diverse and pluralistic experiences and perspectives that form people’s judgments in a way that steers these judgments beyond the fact of pluralism. In other words, the process of social and political inquiry yield judgments that do only partially and transiently reduce the plurality and diversity of citizen’s perspectives, as it is guided by a regulative ideal to get these judgments right. But the epistemic force of inquiry and the epistemic quality of the resulting judgments, for Deweyan pragmatism, does not hinge on the process’ ability of producing true judgments that reflect singular best solutions to problems. An inquiry that does not produce one singular correct and clearly epistemically superior judgment, is still epistemically valuable and so are the judgments that emerge from it—the process can yield multiple judgments that are epistemically better than

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comparable alternative judgments. Hence, for Deweyan pragmatism, pluralism in judgment does not imply irrationality on the part of the inquirers or epistemic “blindness” on the part of the process. To hold that there is no way to ever completely reconcile incommensurable perspectives is not the same as to say that no disagreements can ever be rationally resolved, but rather that, to some degree, some disagreements will always persist. For many political theorists and political philosophers, the “fact of pluralism”— the recurring emergence of moral and political pluralism in the form of fundamental disagreements—is an insurmountable obstacle to an epistemic argument for democracy and to a cognitive account of political judgment. Democratic politics, they say, is about negotiating pluralistic interests, and about dealing with power and conflicts non-violently. They are right. Any theory of democracy, and hence any epistemic conception of democracy, has to take account of these vital functions of democratic politics. However, the Deweyan conception of political judgment in democracies compels a strong caveat to such a power- and interest-centered view of democratic politics. While democratic politics may be about containing interest and power non-­ violently, democracy is not merely about that. Democratic politics is also melioristic and corrective through its responsiveness to the diversity of its citizen’s experiences and perspectives and through its fallibilistic and dynamic feedback-­ mechanisms. In other words, while the normative horizon of democratic politics does not merely consist in negotiating pluralistic interests and containing violence for Deweyan pragmatism, it also does not consists in an ideal procedure that is expected to completely transcend this pluralism by guiding participants to true beliefs. To sum up, the Deweyan-pragmatist model of democracy evaluates diversity differently, both from consensus-oriented deliberative models of democracy and from models that cannot imagine that democratic processes would be able to go beyond “the fact of pluralism” (viz. diversity). For latter models, diversity is something to be contained and managed within a framework of rights and principles of liberty and equality for the sake of sorting out politically differing interests and conflict non-violently. In contrast, the consensus-oriented deliberative model of democracy—certainly as Landemore applies it—welcomes “cognitive diversity” (Landemore 2013) as a source of epistemic improvement of people’s political views and beliefs, but only to the extent that cognitive diversity functions as a driving factor in a deliberative process that ideally strives for the convergence on the singular belief or judgment about what is true. Ultimately, then, consensus-oriented deliberative democracy aims at the overcoming of diversity. A Deweyan theory of political judgment shares the assumption with Landemore’s epistemic theory of democracy that diversity is a source of epistemic melioration of people’s judgments. But it models the epistemic benefit of diversity in connection with social and political inquiry in terms of reducing the risk of mistakes and injustices, insofar as diverse perspectives ideally work as corrective or compensating sources for distortions. In the next section, I will reconstruct a Deweyan pluralistic-constructivist framework of democratic publics, through which it will become clear how collective

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processes of social and political inquiry can be modelled in the context of democratic political systems.

7.3  Diversity and Democratic Self-Organization in Publics4 Dewey conceived of democracy in two ways: democracy as a form of government and democracy as a way of life. The former denotes formalized and institutionalized forms of politics—the political mechanics as we know them (decision-making procedures, voting rights, elections, parliaments, governments, etc.). The latter refers to democracy as a social ideal in terms of the ideal of growth—inclusion, equality, non-coercion, etc. Dewey clearly thought that democracy as a social ideal is more fundamental to the idea of democracy than democracy as a form of government. He feared that democracy as a form of government is only a collection of empty forms and rules, devoid of a lively democratic culture that gives meaning and purpose to these forms and rules. Hence, democracy as a form of government is only meaningful on the basis of democracy as a social ideal, and thus the former is dependent on the latter. Understanding democracy primarily as a social ideal implies that for Dewey democracy carries the traits of social interactions between humans that structure the diverse sections of communal life, from everyday social interactions to social institutions based on habitual action. What matters for Dewey in these social interactions politically is that they take the form of self-organization. Self-organization is key for Dewey, because only through self-organization within publics the individual can avoid being captive of social relationships and social structures that render the individual a passive, alienated, and subordinate entity. In that sense, democracy refers to principles and rules that enable environments and practices that are necessary for the self-organization of publics, by means of which the public can participate in the coping with problems that it identifies. This point about the importance of self-organization for Dewey reinforces the importance for him of the ideal of growth in connection with the concept of democracy. The possibility of individual growth is dependent on and occurs within the self-organization of a community of inquirers. Hence the key component of democracy as a social ideal and as a way of life, for Dewey, is the self-organization of publics, which presupposes the empowerment of individuals in their ability to act as members of publics. This suggests that even in terms of democracy as a form of government, Dewey had something in mind that rather resembles direct democracy than representative democracy, because locally situated forms of deliberation and will-formation seem better suited to realize the principle of self-­ organization than political representation would be able to do.

4  This part is adapted from  an  article of  mine: Räber, Michael. 2019. “Political Representation from a Pragmatist Perspective: Aesthetic Democratic Representation,” Contemporary Pragmatism 16 (1): 84–103.

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The local community, the victim of industrialization in The Public and Its Problems (Dewey 1927, LW 2), was at the same time the entity that Dewey saw as the redeeming seed, out of which something like the Great Community could emerge. Later, advocating a Jeffersonian republican ideal of small, self-governing communities by suggesting to sub-divide counties into small ward republics, Dewey again reinforced the importance of local communities. Such wards for Dewey would be deliberative associations with certain organizational powers on the model of the New England town meeting, with its confidence in direct participation of citizens and rejection of representation (Westbrook 1993, 454 f.). The idea of self-organization is important for democratic life, for Dewey, but it also relates to his epistemology. As we saw, cognition and intelligent conduct for him are not the fruits of a detached mind and body, but rather consist in an active engagement with our environment—cognition is not a passive notarization of the world but rather consists in actively intervening in it. As much as for Dewey the idea of active intervention is key in the context of epistemology, it becomes even more import for him in the context of politics. The analogue of the spectator theory of knowledge in politics is the Enlightenment ideal of democratic politics, which ideally pictures governments’ actions and their consequences to be transparent to critical, democratic citizens. The problem with this ideal is that it envisages democracy’s critical functions to reside with the right conceptualization of the relationship between politicians and the broader citizenry.5 Its normative core consists in its promise to realize the idea of legitimacy of political authority through transparency and accountability on the part of the powerful vis-à-vis an observing citizenry. But for Dewey this ideal of the public as an observing agency is not only hopelessly naïve in light of the real circumstances of modern mass democracies, but also it ultimately remains normatively undesirable. It is naïve, because the institutions of modern democracies cannot respect the ideal of perfect transparency. This was not only evident to Dewey, but also to Walter Lippmann in The Phantom Public (2017 [1925]), where Lippmann analyzed the hiatus that factually exists between those privy to insider information unavailable to outsiders and all others, who are distantly positioned and for which the actual workings of government are not fully transparent. The best thing outsiders can do, for Lippmann, is to surmise what is actually going on inside of government by judging the external perceivable appearances of the actions and words of the insiders. Given these conditions, a government completely observable by the public does not mean that the factual-instrumental consequences of the representatives’ actions are transparent to the observing citizens, but rather that the gestural, theatrical, and in general aesthetic aspects of

5  Jeffrey Green’s The Eyes of the People (2011) is a contemporary theory of democracy that models democracy around this enlightenment ideal. Green argues for a plebiscitary theory of empowering the people by means of empowering their gaze (of the powerful) through a variety of aesthetic measures. While his theory is refreshingly different from mainstream deliberative theories of democracy, it certainly cannot accommodate Dewey’s insistence on the priority of democracy as a social ideal over democracy as a form of government. In fact, Green’s theory reduces democracy to a form of government.

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appearing in politics are much more important to the images of political actors than that the connections between public actions and their consequences would be visible to the public. The problem of modern democracy for Dewey was that it suffered from an “eclipse of the public” (Dewey 1927, LW 2, ch. 4), a fact that cannot simply be fixed by removing the veils that hide power from seeing it. The problem of modern democracy (and postmodern or contemporary democracy) is not the problem of not having power clearly in view, the problem is that we today still imagine democracy in terms of the metaphor of the eye only. Seeing understood in terms of observation alone clearly has only very limited normative democratic power for Dewey, and hence democracy cannot depend on the belief in the power of the gaze to uphold the relations between government and their citizens. Against the background of this, we can understand that Dewey’s cure for what he considered as the decline of the democratic public into a mere phantom public was not more of the same medicine. That would be for him to correct the failures of the Enlightenment ideal by ensuring more transparency, more accountability, and more visibility. The intellectual and practical work that was needed to correct the eclipse of the public for Dewey was not reformatory, but rather revolutionary: rather than correcting the Enlightenment ideal, we should get rid of it. We should replace it with a conception of democratic politics that relies on the sense of hearing instead of relying on the sense of seeing. Dewey considered the remedy for the eclipse of the public to consist in the power deliberations between individuals in small publics, as he made clear in The Public and Its Problems: Vision is a spectator; hearing is a participator. […] There is no limit to the liberal expansion and confirmation of limited personal intellectual endowment which may proceed from the flow of social intelligence when that circulates by word of mouth from on to another in the communications of the local community. That and that only gives reality of public opinion. (ibid., 271f.)

At this point I want to suggest that when Dewey comments here on the vital role of oral communication and persuasion in the context of local communities for the emergence of a democratic public and the evolvement of collective intelligence, he overlooks at least two different points.6 The first point is that contemporary social and political circumstances of increased scale, complexity and distance make the value of the ideal of small, local deliberative publics questionable—circumstances that were already a reality in

6  With Ezrahi (1997, 333) we can add a third critical point, namely that speech is as much prone to distortions as vision is. Recall what the problem of vision is for Dewey. The problem of the theory of vision that underlies the Enlightenment ideal of democracy is that is causes citizens to become only individual spectators that become part of a passive audience and thus renders impossible a more authentic form of self-organization, which ultimately will force the public to disintegrate. But how can oral communication provide a remedy for this? Can’t oral communication be corrupted just as visual communication can? How are sounds different from pictures in this respect? Sounds and words can just the same be manipulated and be deceptive as visual manifestations can.

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Dewey’s times. These circumstances suggest that the fringes of communities vary corresponding to occurrences that are external to their own power, especially because under contemporary circumstances of globalization individuals living at far geographical distance are increasingly affected by the same events and occurrences. Dewey was correct in his view that the detached, elevated, and controlling eye cannot be democratic on its own. But at least the Enlightenment ocular ideal of controlling power tried to answer the challenge of how to secure democracy in mass societies in which local democracy is only a very limited practical possibility. Dewey retreated to an outdated and anachronistic ideal of local communal deliberations, which ultimately offers only a partially compelling answer to this challenge. The second point is that Dewey’s insistence on the importance of local communities for regaining democracy is at odds with his own reconstructive argument for democracy that is condensed in his conception of the “Public”. While Dewey’s retreat to a conception of local communal deliberations is no answer to contemporary circumstances of democratic politics, his notion of “publics” is.7 He conceptualized a “public” as “all those who are affected by the indirect consequences of transactions to such an extent that it is deemed necessary to have those consequences systematically cared for” (ibid. 245). To simplify, a public is defined by two elements: (a) common affectedness; and (b) shared awareness of that condition. While the first element, common affectedness, is situated in causes external to the public itself, the second element is dependent on the self-attribution or the self-­ knowledge on the part of the public.8 At least what regards the first element, common affectedness, direct participation in a public is not necessary. Defining publics in terms of common affectedness has the advantage that publics can form around any form of practices in which decisions are made with indirect consequences that affect the specific public. Neither the nation state nor other formal political institutions are necessary frameworks for publics to constitute. As such, the Deweyan conception of publics provides a theoretical framework that allows going beyond the framework of the nation-state to conceptualize democratic interaction in a way that grasps the contemporary circumstances of globalized politics in terms of spatially dispersed democratic activities in a variety of non-state and non-territorial venues.9 The process of constituting a public and of taking public action occurs against a background of social exchanges that involve all forms of communication (including visual communication). Again, this process need not be directly participatory in order to be democratic. A dispersed, decentralized process of formatting and 7  James Bohman (Bohman 2010) convincingly argued that “publics” in the plural and not “the public” are the best basis for Dewey’s call for a reconstruction of democracy, despite Dewey’s belief that the very scale of modern societies necessitates integration by a unitary public. 8  Italo Testa thus calls Dewey’s concept of publics aptly “a kind of collective intentionality which is not defined either formally or substantially, but rather in a reactive way, since the public is identified by a sort of all-affected principle” (Testa 2017, 53). 9  On that see Frega (2017), where he discusses the advantages of a Deweyan theory of democratic politics over democratic theories that rely on what he calls „methodological nationalism“.

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tapping experience and perspective does not favor any public in principle over any other. Whereas the Enlightenment ideal of democratic politics conceptualizes democracy as a hierarchical structure, in which the public or civil society is opposed to formal political institutions (including government), Dewey tries to dissolve this hierarchy. The decentralized model of acting and interacting politically allows Dewey to conceive processes of democratic self-government as a collection of dispersed multidimensional and open-ended adaptations. Hence, defining the basic elements of democratic politics in terms of “publics”, which together constitute a network of decentralized and temporally existing publics, needs not necessarily to imply the idea of local deliberative communities. A network of decentralized and temporally existing publics can exist outside of local deliberative communities and at the same time it allows for forms of political self-organization. However, if we take seriously the contemporary conditions of international politics, the second element of Dewey’s definition of a public, the shared recognition of publics as being mutually affected, becomes increasingly burdensome. And such recognition of itself is the primary problem of the public, as Dewey did himself recognize in The Public and Its Problems.10 But he did not offer an answer to this problem that could meet the requirements of the transformations in social and political circumstances that were going on in his times and are still in progress today. In order to accommodate the variety of publics democratic politics today is filled with, democratic theory should think about diverse and multileveled forms of political organization, and this involves thinking about political representation. James Bohman expressed this well when he said in the essay “Participation through Publics: Did Dewey answer Lippman?” (Bohman 2010, 66): The “problem” is not that publics do not recognize themselves as the Public, but rather one of representation: how it is that diverse publics will be able to represent the experiences and perspectives of all those affected once we give up the congruence of the unitary public?

The basic call on democracy will not provide a satisfactory answer to this question, which is why also a Deweyan-inspired framework of international democratic politics should say something constructive about political representation and about how we can imagine that epistemically valuable interaction and communication in and between dispersed and diverse publics occurs. Hence, the second condition of “publics”, namely the shared awareness of the first condition of common affectedness, demands a theory of political representation—which I provide in Räber (2019). In the next chapter I will focus on the unanswered question of how the epistemic properties of social and political inquiry and political judgment, as I have outlined them in the previous chapters, can take effect in this publics-based framework of democratic politics under contemporary circumstances of fragmented mass-societies and globalized politics.

 Midtgarden recently argued that Dewey’s mature conception of democracy understands democratic participation primarily in terms of membership in voluntary political associations, which not only include local assemblies, but more broadly social movements (see Midtgarden 2015).

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References Bohman, James. 2010. Participation through Publics: Did Dewey Answer Lippmann? Contemporary Pragmatism 7 (1): 49–68. Dewey, John. 1927. The Public and Its Problems. The Later Works, 1925–1953, 2. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Ezrahi, Yaron. 1997. Dewey’s Critique of Democratic Visual Culture and Its Political Implications. In Sites of Vision - The Discursive Construction of Sight in the History of Philosophy, ed. David Michael Levin, 315–336. Cambridge; London: MIT Press. Frega, Roberto. 2017. Pragmatism and Democracy in a Global World. Review of International Studies 43 (4): 720–741. Green, Jeffrey Edward. 2011. The Eyes of the People: Democracy in an Age of Spectatorship. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hong, Lu, and Scott Page. 2001. Problem Solving by Heterogeneous Agents. Journal of Economic Theory 97 (1): 123–163. ———. 2004. Groups of Diverse Problem Solvers Can Outperform Groups of High-Ability Problem Solvers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 101 (46): 16385–16389. ———. 2009. Interpreted and Generated Signals. Journal of Economic Theory 144 (5): 2174–2196. Landemore, Hélène. 2012. Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2013. Deliberation, Cognitive Diversity, and Democratic Inclusiveness: An Epistemic Argument for the Random Selection of Representatives. Synthese 190 (7): 1209–1231. ———. 2017. Deliberative Democracy as Open, Not (Just) Representative Democracy. Daedalus 146 (3): 51–63. Lippmann, Walter. 2017. The Phantom Public. New York: Routledge. Martí, Jose Luis. 2006. The Epistemic Conception of Deliberative Democracy Defended: Reasons, Rightness and Equal Political Autonomy. In Deliberative Democracy and Its Discontents, ed. Jose Luis Martí and Samantha Besson, 27–56. Farnham: Ashgate. Page, Scott. 2007. The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Räber, Michael. 2019. Political Representation from a Pragmatist Perspective: Aesthetic Democratic Representation. Contemporary Pragmatism 16 (1): 84–103. Rheingold, Howard. 2002. Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. New York: Basic Books. Singer, Daniel J. 2019. Diversity, Not Randomness, Trumps Ability. Philosophy of Science 86 (1): 178–191. Stich, Stephen. 2014. When Democracy Meets Pluralism: Landemore’s Epistemic Argument for Democracy and the Problem of Value Diversity. Critical Review 26 (1–2): 170–183. Surowiecki, James. 2005. The Wisdom of Crowds. New York: Random House. Testa, Italo. 2017. Dewey’s Social Ontology: A Pragmatist Alternative to Searle’s Approach to Social Reality. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 25 (1): 40–62. Thompson, Abigail. 2014. Does Diversity Trump Ability? Notices of the American Mathematical Society 61 (09): 1024–1030. Westbrook, Robert. 1993. John Dewey and American Democracy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Chapter 8

Diversity, Democratic Systems and Epistemic Quality

Abstract  The neo-Deweyan conception of political judgment and the arguments on pragmatist epistemology and Deweyan  democracy theory developed so far in the book seem to align with the recent so-called systemic turn in deliberative democracy. One key implication of the systemic turn is that deliberative democracy needs to include a diversity of types of communication and practices that was previously dismissed by classical accounts. This implication seems like a natural extension of the argument, developed in the previous chapters, that a diversity of perspectives in democratic inquiries has positive epistemic effects on the quality of problem formulations and problem-solving proposals. Moreover, Dewey’s concept of fragmented “publics” seems to capture the idea of the systemic turn of thinking about deliberation on the level of societies as a whole as a process of communication between decentralized parts of an overarching deliberative system. In trying to develop a model of how successful deliberation could be possible on the macro-level of mass democracies, the systemic turn also promises an answer to Dewey’s basic question in The Public and its Problems, namely how to establish a culture of democratic interaction that has a strong ability to identify and solve public problems in the face of a factual fragmentation of the public sphere in dispersed publics within mass democracies. By way of discussing three problems internal to the systemic turn itself, and the applicability of this turn to Deweyan democracy, I conclude that it does not provide a good answer. Keywords  Deliberative systems · Deliberative democracy · John Dewey As I have explained in the previous chapter, democratic political interaction for Dewey is channeled ideal-typically through publics, the basic organizational entities of democratic politics, and publics are essentially marked by common affectedness by causes external to the public itself and the shared awareness of that condition. A reconstruction of the concept of publics in these terms allows for an interpretation of democratic interaction that models public interaction and political action as a decentralized process of dispersed multidimensional and open-ended adaptations that can be either directly participatory, or representative, or both at the same time. As neither the nation state nor other formal political institutions are necessary © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 M. I. Räber, Knowing Democracy – A Pragmatist Account of the Epistemic Dimension in Democratic Politics, Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations 14, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53258-1_8

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frameworks for publics to constitute themselves, the concept of publics hence captures the importance of diversity of experiences and of perspectives for democratic politics. In chapter five I furthermore argued that what makes good normative political judgment epistemically possible is a process of social and political inquiry that essentially consists of a threefold progression that involves attentiveness to, articulation of and exchange between individuals’ perspectives on social and political problems. We can now say that the problem-based constitution of publics, defined by common affectedness and shared awareness of common affectedness, needs to roughly follow this threefold process if publics are to be considered sites of social and political inquiry. This requires coordination and communicative exchange. Ideally, through such interactions in publics, participants would reexamine their individual or collective interests and perspectives. Such interaction takes place in a context of imperfect knowledge, and the outcomes of these interactions are fallible and only on rare occasions unanimous. What is important for democratic politics is not unanimous consensus in its outcomes, but rather  the preceding processes of discussion and persuasion. Disagreement essentially belongs to democratic politics, as long as it is accompanied with openness and persuasion, which will only be the case if participants developed critical habits of social interactions with others in a democratic culture. This neo-Deweyan conception of political judgment and the arguments on pragmatist epistemology and Deweyan democracy theory developed so far in the book seem to align with the recent so-called systemic turn in deliberative democracy. One key implication of the systemic turn is that deliberative democracy needs to include a diversity of types of communication and practices that was previously dismissed by classical accounts. This implication seems like a natural extension of the argument, developed in the previous chapters, that a diversity of perspectives in democratic inquiries has positive epistemic effects on the quality of problem formulations and problem-solving proposals. Moreover, Dewey’s concept of fragmented “publics” seems to capture the idea of the systemic turn of thinking about deliberation on the level of societies as a whole as a process of communication between decentralized parts of an overarching deliberative system. In trying to develop a model of how successful deliberation could be possible on the macro-level of mass democracies, the systemic turn also promises an answer to Dewey’s basic question in The Public and its Problems (Dewey 1927, LW 2), namely how to establish a culture of democratic interaction that has a strong ability to identify and solve public problems in the face of a factual fragmentation of the public sphere in dispersed publics within mass democracies. By way of discussing three problems internal to the systemic turn itself, and the applicability of this turn to Deweyan democracy, I conclude that it does not provide a good answer. The chapter is divided into four sections. The first section outlines what the systemic turn entails in general and, more specifically, what it means in connection with the epistemic dimension of deliberative theories of democracy. Section two identifies a lacuna in existing accounts of systemic theories, namely precise analytical tools by which it would become possible to evaluate the deliberative quality of deliberative systems and their parts. In section three I suggest that systemic theories of deliberative democracy, as they stand, are faced with (at least) three challenges:

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the first concerns problems of power; the second concerns the epistemic difficulties in measuring second-order epistemic effects; the third point is a general one: it concerns new findings in risk research, which suggest that complex systems—natural, biological, or social—are prone to hyper-exponential endogenous effects that lead to extreme events (“crises”) within the system that render the system highly instable (and may ultimately lead to the collapse of the system itself). In the fourth and concluding sect. I relate the deliberative systems-paradigm to the Deweyan ideal of democracy and provide some preliminary reasons for why I think that the former does not offer a satisfactory answer to Dewey’s basic question in The Public and Its Problems.

8.1  Deliberative Systems and Epistemic Quality Deliberative democracy theory has been undergoing a “systemic turn” (Dryzek 2012, 7) in the past several years. This turn is based on the premise that deliberative theory’s micro focus on ideal deliberation was too restrictive, and that we should scale up deliberation to broader political systems. Such scaling- up also means that systemic accounts consider as legitimate deliberative contributions certain types of communication and practices previously dismissed by classical accounts. So that they may remain deliberative (and hence have an epistemic dimension), systemic accounts of democratic deliberation introduce the idea that non-deliberative parts of a system can serve a deliberative function if they lead to systemic effects in other parts of the system. But when are we justified to speak of an “epistemic effect” within the system? How far can we go with such a functionalistic view and still be in a position to claim that deliberative systems generate epistemic value? To answer these questions we need analytical tools helping us to assess whether the systemenhancing effects of non-deliberative inputs into the system outweigh the negative effects that the sometimes- aggressive tenor of non-deliberative inputs can have on the overall deliberative atmosphere. Do we need a minimal threshold at the level of parts or does anything go (Owen and Smith 2013)? In other words, how deflated should the notion of “deliberative” become? Can we locate a moment in the deliberative process where an input into the deliberative system that is of low deliberative quality becomes acceptable thanks to its broader systemic impact? To interpret democracy as a deliberative system from a macro-perspective shifts the focus from the ideal functioning of political deliberation within a smaller group or institution to the question under what conditions the interplay between political institutions and societal discourses can be interpreted as a deliberative decision-­ making procedure. The “systemic turn” extends the conception of deliberative democracy—thereby emphasizing the democratic aspect of the conception—to take into account the interactions between informational networks, the media, organized advocacy groups, schools, foundations, private and non-profit institutions, legislatures, executive agencies, the courts, etc. Mansbridge et  al. (2012, 4–5) define a

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deliberative system as an aggregate of distinct but mutually dependent parts.1 These parts together constitute a complex web of relations, in which they fulfill different deliberative functions and where a “division of labor” (ibid.) ensures that some parts make up for the deliberative shortcomings of other parts. Since is it called deliberative system, the approach designs public communication upon persuasion, expression, demonstration and arguing rather than suppression, oppression, and neglect. The deliberative quality of the system is to be judged not on the level of parts but as a whole. Advocates of the systems-theory see two possible ways of defining the boundaries of a democratic deliberative system: either institutionally or by reference to a particular issue. Either way, the boundaries of a deliberative system are not set by the nation states, but “include international, transnational, and supranational institutions, and extends as well to societal and institutional (e.g., corporate) decisions that do not involve the state” (ibid., 9). While the systemic approach to deliberative democracy does not define where the boundaries of a system are to be set up, it holds that deliberative systems are required to include the following four main arenas: (i) the binding decisions of the state; (ii) activities directly related to designing those decisions; (iii) arenas of informal political talk; and (iv) arenas of formal and informal talk related to decisions on issues of common concern that are not intended for binding decisions by the state (ibid.). Such system, furthermore, has three main functions (ibid., 10ff.): an epistemic function (generating informed preferences, opinions, and political decisions that are informed by facts, logic, and reason); an ethical function (promoting mutual respect); and a democratic function (securing political equality by means of an inclusionary political process). These functions can be performed not only by parliamentary legislatives and by sophisticated argument-based communication, the systemic account holds, but also by, prima facie, all forms of communication including “argument, rhetoric, humor, testimony or storytelling, and gossip” (Dryzek 2000, 48), while the “identification of reasonable public debate with polite, orderly, dispassionate, gentlemanly argument” (Young 2002, 49) seems an overly narrow and elitist view of deliberation. Demanding that those who are endowed with lesser or less perfect communicative skills set their interests and concerns aside also means sidelining their habitually preferred forms of communication, particularly the recounting of personal narratives (Young 1996, 126). In a similar vein, Mark Warren suggested that we should not so much look at how suitable the inputs of deliberation are for distinguished deliberation, but that we should rather be interested in the deliberative functions of such inputs and of the institutional norms and rules which guide them: If angry demonstration is necessary to persuade others that they should notice unpleasant facts, that is a contribution to deliberation—although the initial intentions may not be ‘deliberative,’” and by that “communicative utterances that are not necessarily deliberative in intention are captured to produce dynamics that are deliberative in function” (Warren 2007, 278; see also Mansbridge et al. 2010).  A good overview of the literature provide Owen and Smith (2015).

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On these grounds, for communicative action to exert a deliberative function it may suffice to stimulate debate. The best way to make sense of the epistemic function within the deliberative systems approach may be understand it in the following way: In order for an intervention within the deliberative system to have an epistemic function (to have a deliberative effect,) it must add knowledge to the system, or must lead to actual opinion or will-formation. An important assumption of the systemic account is the “two-tier approach to evaluation” (Mansbridge et al. 2012, 13), which means that the evaluation of the quality of the whole system does not hinge on the functions to be fully realized in all the parts. We might find that there is an “ecological niche” in the system for non-ideal deliberative practices such as partisanship, which can have indirect positive impact in terms of the three functions by, for example, sharpening public debate or (nevertheless) asserting a coherent public position. An ideal deliberative system, thus, should be “self-correcting” (ibid., 7). This seems to imply that the system needs to have parts that could adopt such a corrective function. However, the self-correcting function of deliberative systems does not consist in the direct policing, rectification or translation of the inputs of one part by other, “corrective,” parts. They illustrate what they mean by “self-correcting” with examples of how partisan behavior, which undermines deliberation at a micro-level, may have positive deliberative effects at the macro-level: partisan heckling in the British House of Commons has the effect of framing and sharpening the broader public deliberations by poking holes in the government’s rhetoric; and partisan media enlarge the pool of perspectives, information, and policy suggestions, which otherwise would have never come to the fore, by performing the function of “vigilant watchdogs over power, representatives of citizens and communities, knowledge translators, educators of citizens, and public advocates, among others” (ibid., 20). Thus it is not the evaluation of individual contributions to deliberation in singular arenas that is paramount, but the functions and effects of both deliberative and non-­ deliberative inputs on the system as a whole. Prima facie, the systemic turn in deliberative theory fits the argument of this book, namely that democratic interaction should not only be inclusive but also allow for the diversity of perspectives and beliefs to interact—in short, that diversity has instrumental epistemic value in connection with communication in democracies. The systemic approach to deliberation indirectly offers the following view about diversity in democratic deliberative systems: Fruitful interaction between a diversity of perspectives and beliefs is not guaranteed if we conceive deliberation along the lines of impartiality. It is only guaranteed when participants in deliberation can employ views that grow out of their distinct perspective on issues and people. Ideal deliberation is a communicative setting in which almost all participate and propose their best assessments from their own perspective. The deliberation of the many is epistemically desirable because it allows for diverse perspectives and diverse communicative styles, which implies that the positive epistemic effects of diversity can only evolve in a communicative system that permits diverse modes of deliberation.

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8.2  H  ow to Measure the Positive Epistemic Effects of Diversity in Deliberative Systems? The key tenet of the systemic account of democratic deliberation is that we should permit non-deliberative communication within our models of democratic deliberation, because such communication can generate valuable deliberative effects. Such an account needs further to address the following questions: When are we justified to speak of an “epistemic effect” within the system? How can we claim that deliberative systems have an epistemic dimension and at the same time allow false beliefs, illegitimate claims, strategic behavior, distorted communication, or the advancement of purely subjective perspectives to freely interplay? Mansbridge and colleagues acknowledge the challenge posed by the functionalist view of judgments of deliberative quality in deliberative systems. They recognize that such a systemic analysis must be able to make judgments and must have the analytic tools to do so. Without criteria to evaluate when non-deliberative, weakly deliberative, or even anti-­ deliberative behavior nevertheless enhances the deliberative system, one risks failing into the blind spot of old style functionalism: everything can be seen as, in one way or another, contributing to the system. (Mansbridge et al. 2012, 19)

In other words, we need analytical tools with which to assess whether the system-­ enhancing effects of non-deliberative inputs outweigh the negative effects of the aggressive tenor of non-deliberative inputs on the overall deliberative atmosphere. It would then be possible to make a simple calculation: we subtract the overall negative effects from the overall positive effects, and if the result remains positive, we should accept the input as a valuable contribution to deliberation. However, the authors neither provide such analytical tools, nor do they say anything substantial about how to judge the tradeoff between practices that are poorly performing and their wider systemic contribution. Much of what the authors are doing in the essay is discussing examples in which a particular institution contributes to the overall deliberative quality despite its deliberative deficits when taken in isolation (partisan rhetoric in the House of Commons or partisan media; or EU elite-­ level deliberations). They do not say what those analytical tools might look like and the critical issues remain unclear.2 Do we need a minimal threshold at the level of parts or does anything go (in other words, how “deflated” should the notion of “deliberative” become)? Can we locate a moment in the deliberative process where an input into the deliberative system that is of low deliberative quality becomes acceptable thanks to its broader systemic impact? According to John Dryzek (2010) we have two options here: either we introduce a minimal threshold at the level of parts—what he calls the “categorical test”—or we find a test that can measure and evaluate the systematic desired effects of certain types of interventions into the deliberative system—what he calls the “systemic 2  To be fair, the article has programmatic character and does not claim to provide these analytical tools, but calls for future inquiry about them.

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test.” The systemic test would thus involve measuring and evaluating the effects of any intervention (deliberative or non- deliberative in intention) in the deliberative system. The question as to how permissive we should be, according to this test, hinges entirely on the actual effects of the interventions. The categorical test, in turn, would allow us to differentiate between types of interventions that are deliberative enough and those that are not.

8.2.1  T  he Categorical Test: Towards Minimal Requirements for Interventions in Deliberative Systems The systemic turn in deliberative theory is almost naturally accompanied by a “narrative turn” or “rhetorical turn” in political theory. Systemic views about deliberation involve the spatial and temporal widening of deliberative instances, which result in a move from a dialogical understanding of deliberation to a monological relationship between the different parts of a system (Chambers 2009). The dissipated nature of a deliberative system means that communicative connections need to be made across “differently situated actors, and can both establish and maintain deliberative systems” (Dryzek 2010, 320). The shift from conceiving deliberation as a dialogic process within a single space and time to the perspective of deliberation as essentially monologic and occurring in and between different spatial venues at different times highlights the importance of integrating an account of an especially relevant type of communication into the systemic account, namely rhetoric. As it happens, we find the two different ways of evaluating interventions in deliberative systems—the systemic test and the categorical test—mirrored in somewhat different terms in the literature about rhetoric and deliberation. We find authors who have been stressing the positive effects rhetoric in democracies as well as authors who insist on categorical considerations to ward off the latent dangers of destabilizing forms of rhetoric in democratic politics. The rhetoric turn in political theory (including democratic theory) has been influenced by various authors (e.g. Boswell 2015; Garsten 2011; Dryzek 2010; Chambers 2009; Black 2008; Young 2002; Mansbridge 1999; Gutmann and Thompson 1996). Many of them highlight the positive effects rhetoric may have on deliberation, and which have long been neglected in the deliberative literature. Many good reasons have been put forward for why deliberative democrats should value rhetoric. Rhetoric can introduce and motivate people to deliberation; it is capable of structuring deliberation by reducing the complexity of arguments and knowledge and by selecting what is relevant to deliberation; it is a type of communication that is widely shared and understood across different social classes, and as such has an integrative function; it can help turn people’s beliefs and judgments into concrete action and policies; it can unmask false judgments by using “irony, jokes, metaphors and other jarring ways of expressing something” (Bohman 2000, 205) rather

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than reasoned argument; it can serve relatively disenfranchised groups as a tool to promote their issues, because it enables the communicatively disadvantaged to express their voices (Young 2002, 53ff.); and, lastly, it is a tool of transmission between different parts of a deliberative system, allowing to scale up from a small face-to-face venue to communication in the larger democratic system (Chambers 2009; Dryzek 2000), and—especially in the case of narratives—it can help to reach dialogical understanding between parties that differ fundamentally in their beliefs or experiences. We can add the reasons why rhetoric deserves a central place in any conception of deliberative democracy to the list of the positive deliberative effects highlighted by systemic accounts of democratic deliberation. All these reasons are based on a view that sees rhetoric as a communicative tool to keep reasoned debate open. Garsten (2011, 163) observed that such a functionalistic view of rhetoric is based on a fundamental distinction between rhetoric and reasoning, which ultimately disrespects the very meaning of “rhetoric.” He suggests treating rhetoric and deliberation as closely related activities, rather than as two mutually exclusive alternatives. In examining rhetoric and deliberation together, we should not, he urges, go to the other extreme and take on a “deflationary rhetorical perspective” (O’Neill 2002, 255), which holds that all discourse is an exercise in power. Such a view would understand “rhetoric” as synonymous with and representative of all forms of merely strategic communication, including scientific communication. We should rather follow Ronald Beiner’s Aristotle-inspired account of rhetoric as the most apt communicative mode of political judgment, because it inherently combines the aesthetic and the epistemic, very much like Dewey’s theory of political judgment and his conception of social and political inquiry (including the idea of deliberation as “dramatic rehearsal”) does3: Political judgment must be aesthetic and teleological: it must encompass formal-­ transcendental features of the faculty of judgment, as well as orient itself to rationally desirable human ends” (Beiner 2010, 102).

Indeed, according to the Aristotelian view, rhetoric is communicative persuasion that ideally combines logos, ethos, and pathos—that is, logical argument, the building of the audience’s trust toward the speaker’s character, and affect. Hence an understanding of public reasoning as a rhetorical activity combines argument, trust, and emotion, and sees rhetoric as a sense-making mechanism. This means that reasoned rhetoric arranges and stages disparate entities of experience, perspective, knowledge, feeling, values, common sense, political sensibility, etc., in a manner that synthesizes them into a meaningful whole, and as such is part of a reasoned discussion within a larger deliberative system. For rhetoric to combine words and gestures into a synthetic meaningful whole and thus to be epistemically valuable, it not only matters how logos, pathos and ethos relate to each other and become intertwined (through form, rhythm, etc.), it also matters how they relate to an audience. In Art as Experience (Dewey 1934, LW  Compare with chapter three.

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10), Dewey distinguished between artful and non-artful activities and ways of human interaction. While he has many ways of expressing this distinction (on this see Stroud 2008), the basic difference between artful and non-artful is that the former results in meaningful interactions between subjects through artifacts, symbols or some other type of medium to empower spectators and listeners to become a meaningful part of the interaction, while the latter renders the audience powerless. And artful interactions are marked by the actor’s anticipation of the audience: “The artist embodies in himself the attitude of the perceiver while he works” (ibid., 55). Plato attacked rhetoric for its monologic character, condemning it as anticipating no reflection and no critical response (in contrast to rational philosophical dialogue). We don’t have to agree with Plato that we should see rhetoric as being opposed to reflection and reason per se, but based on Dewey’s distinction between artful and non-artful human interaction we can acknowledge a distinction between a type of rhetoric and communication that is monologic and one that is rather dialogic, as Dewey’s distinction seems to track a distinction between monologic and dialogic communication. The monologic type of rhetoric treats its recipients not as an audience consisting of diverse individuals, but as a single mass and as a means to power only, with which the rhetorician is not trying to establish a dialogical connection. As an illustration of monologic rhetoric and its corrosive effects, consider Hitler’s rhetoric. He summarized his monologic approach to rhetoric in the following way: At a mass meeting thought is eliminated. And because this is the state of mind I require, because it secures me the best sounding-board for my speeches, I order everyone to attend the meetings, where they become part of the mass whether they like it or not, “intellectuals” and bourgeois as well as workers. I mingle the people. I speak to them as the mass. (Rauschning 2010, 210)

Hitler’s overriding purpose in his speeches was not to persuade his listeners, but to overwhelm them.4 He avoided addressing the audience as an aggregation of individuals, inasmuch as his rhetoric is not expecting any (imagined) dialogical counterpart. He spoke being aware that nobody will answer or challenge him. This found expression in the way his rhetoric was structured. In his speeches he almost never used adverbs with a graduated or relativizing character, which would indicate that the speaker also has such an attitude towards what is been said. Expressions like “actually,” “possibly” of “perhaps,” “in this respect,” or “to my mind” he disdained. He saw rhetoric and verbal action as a fight for survival, which allows for no compromises. Relativizing expressions offer the audience opinions, which are presented as up for discussion, and Hitler consequentially avoided such wordings, preferring the commanding tone. The National Socialist’s strong intention to overpower the audience by using monumental forms of expression is moreover reflected in their inflationary utilization of superlatives, like “the deepest fundaments,” “of highest importance,” “a series of most vital [lebenswichtigster] territories,” “with most enormous [ungeheuerstem] efforts” (Volmert 1989, 151). This rhetoric leaves out

4  See Volmert (1989) for a comprehensive description of the political rhetoric of Hitler and the National Socialist elite.

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any nuance, casting the debate in black and white. There is no room here for either doubt or hesitation; only an apodictic claim and condescending rejection. In other words, Hitler’s rhetoric does not address the audience as a collection of individuals and as imagined dialogic opponents from whom the speaker expects either consent or challenge. The perspective of an imagined dialog manifests itself in a type of rhetoric that respects the individual member’s of the audience capacity for judgment. This is what it means to pass the categorical test, then: The categorical test requires that an input into a deliberative system come from a perspective that imagines a dialogic opponent, for which the input is designed, and to which it speaks. Imagining a dialogic opponent requires that the speaker offer a compelling perspective to the imagined opponent to which they can relate and that the input is itself structured in a way that it exhibits reflexivity (and hence may induce reflexivity)— which means that the structure needs to be such that it “rehearses” different perspectives and judgments and that it leaves the ultimate judgment to those who are listening and treats them as competent judges. Note that the notion of “deliberative effects” that democratic systems are supposed to generate, according to the systemic turn, implies that such effects, if taken again as inputs into the system, need to pass the categorical test, which means that to successfully pass the systemic test for an input presupposes that the effect(s) passes the categorical test. In other words, the concept of “deliberative effects” implies the necessity that non-deliberative interventions cause positive deliberative effects (which would pass the categorical test) in other parts of the system simultaneously or at a different time. The effects themselves are again instantiated as separate interventions into the system, which need to be deliberative and cannot be non-deliberative. That is to say, the concept of “deliberative effects,” which is part of the concept of a “deliberative system,” is conceptually reliant on the existence of interventions (that are effects of some prior interventions), which are of deliberative quality not because of their effects, but because they exhibit an internal deliberative quality. The second-order epistemic effects of non-deliberative interventions only exist because other parts within the deliberative system absorb such non- deliberative inputs and transform and react to them in a way of communicative action that has a deliberative quality in itself.

8.2.2  T  he Systemic Test Applied: The (Nut)Case of Conspiracy Theories I will now turn to the systemic test. Consider conspiracy theories and the effects that they have in a deliberative system. Conspiracy theories are epistemically pernicious for democracies, which many studies confirm in one way or another.5 They are said

5  We can define a “conspiracy theory” as a view that a “small group of powerful people combine together in secret to deliberatively plan and carry out an illegal or improper act, particularly one that alters the course of events.” (Knight 2003, 15)

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to push groups to greater extremes in deliberation (Sunstein 2009, 99–126). Sunstein argues that groups of like-minded people end up clustering around more and more extreme positions due to their involuntary habit to pick out evidence and arguments that back up their beliefs. It’s not that conspiracy theorists would be irrational, the failure of the whole group arises as an effect of a “crippled epistemology,” that is a highly restricted information environment (ibid., 121). They are furthermore held responsible for contributing to an overall distrust in government and politics (Bartlett and Miller 2010, 5; Critchlow et al. 2008, xi; Goldberg 2008, 260). In the case of medical conspiracy, theories about vaccinations, for example, undermine the trust in the government by recommending non-compliance with public policies (Oliver and Wood 2014). Conspiracy theories furthermore have been identified as “radicalizing multipliers” in extremist political violence (Bartlett and Miller 2010, 4); cases like Anders Breivik in 2011 or the Christchurch mosque shootings of 2019 confirm this finding. Maybe then Heins is correct in claiming that conspiracy theories “may become a vehicle for the rise of totalitarian forms of rule” and “a threat to the survival of liberal democracy” itself (Heins 2007, 789). Conspiracy theories can be said to embody serious cognitive failures, as such theories exemplify pathologies of individual reasoning and public deliberation insofar as they are “self- sealing” (Sunstein and Vermeule 2009, 1), that is they are eminently unaffected by any piece of argument or evidence that would falsify the theory. Conspiracy theorists use cognitive strategies that allow them to either work into their theory a certain piece of argument or evidence that purportedly contradicts their theory, or to treat the attempt at falsifying their theories as another proof of the conspiracy their theory claims to have uncovered. In the former case, conspiracy theorists are susceptible to the “confirmation bias,” the disposition of people to twist arguments or evidence in a way that supports what they already believe. And conspiracy theorists seem to be especially prone to the common “backfire effect” (Nyhan and Reifler 2010), whereby arguments or evidence explicitly debunking a deeply held belief only solidify it further. Therefore it seems that from the point of view of (epistemic) democracy we should find ways to we could stop conspiracy theorists from adopting twisted perceptions and disseminating misinformation or false theories, or at least find mechanisms by which their opinions can be neutralized and marginalized. However, we should not jump to conclusions. We should not exclude the principal possibility that there is epistemic value in disagreement and dissent even under conditions where reasonable people agree on a reasonable consensus (that is, where there exists a consensus about well-tested knowledge according to widely shared epistemic standards). Dissent and disagreement, even unreasonable ones, keep the political debate open. Conspiracy theorists haven been (for the most part and despite recent shifts from the fringes of politics to the political mainstream) small tenacious and willful minorities that are neurotically occupied with the statements of their adversaries, and they are reluctant to accept what is portrayed as a reasonable consensus. Consensus potentially runs the risk of being the result of, or provoking, “silencing-effects.” Such “silencing-effects” occur when consensus threatens to deliberately mask disagreement, or when a group of people has inadvertently come to a unified stance by which individuals hold back their own perspectives and

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instead support (what they believe is) the majority perspective. Both scenarios can lead to a premature silencing, or even the demise, of minority views. Hence it is epistemically desirable that not everyone conforms in deliberation: “The minority improves public judgment by activating a validation process in the otherwise conformist majority. Respecting the minority discourages deluded consensus […].” (Mackie 2006, 298) Seen that way, consensus is valuable only as long as there is a context of expressed dissent, of which the refusal of some to accept the consensus view is part. Furthermore, systemic theories of democratic deliberation would have to suggest that conspiracy theories do have second-order epistemic effects of indirectly strengthening the epistemic quality of non-conspiratorial debate in parts of the overall deliberative system. Do conspiracy theories bring about second-order epistemic effects of enhancing the evidential and argumentative strength of the non-­ conspiratorial political debate? In theory, they could pressure authorities to restate, improve, or alter the arguments underlying their policies and justifying their actions. While conspiracy theorists may never be satisfied with any argument or justification coming from a political authority that they suspect is involved in the conspiracy, the arguments or justifications might raise the qualitative level of the debate of the reasonable participants. While there might be no individual epistemic benefit of conspiracy theories that rely on false beliefs, these can be of collective benefit: they contribute to the diversity of a pool of information, arguments, and perspectives to which the deliberative public is being exposed. Even if the pooled information, arguments, and perspectives are wrong or distorted, they could have the side effect of bringing to the table heuristics that might be relevant to the public judgment. Conspiracy theories moreover could have second-order effects of enhancing deliberative accountability, which in turn increases the overall trustworthiness of both proponents of mainstream positions and mainstream positions themselves. By challenging established political discourses and narratives or holding political authorities accountable they could serve the valuable function of a check on mainstream positions. The epistemic quality of their views is not important in this logic, because conspiracy theories are marked less by positive arguments than occupied with finding failures or inconsistencies in more accepted accounts. Demanding deliberative accountability helps to keep those in a majority position from lying to and betraying the public. It is a peculiarity of democracies in general that the trustworthiness of political authorities is partially dependent on repeated acts of distrust (Warren 1996, 1999).

8.3  T  hree Problems of Systemic Theories of Democratic Deliberation Does this mean that conspiracy theories in general can pass the systemic test? I suspect it does not. To pass the systemic test requires that one can compellingly show that certain types of non-deliberative intervention systematically lead to

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deliberative effects, and that these positive effects outweigh the negative effects. The above-mentioned reasons why conspiracy theories could in principle have deliberative effects are entirely general, and they don’t prove that they systematically have positive deliberative effects. Besides, an overly optimistic depiction of positive second-order epistemic effects within deliberative systems is potentially misleading, as it neglects several concerns, which I will now discuss in turn. First, two of the most salient characteristics of the systemic account are both its spatial and its temporal enlargement of arenas and occasions of communicative exchange within such a system (Boswell 2016). The spatial widening is a consequence of the theoretical move from micro-deliberative situations to a network of differentiated deliberative sites. The temporal widening is a consequence of the theoretical move from deliberation that occurs in one continuous process to deliberations that take place in a dynamic, interrupted process. These theoretical moves have the effect of amplifying already existing power-inequalities. One of the concerns, thus, is that both deliberation and the agreements or compromises reached in deliberation remain disparate and incomplete, and result in gaps and ambiguity when it comes to translating outcomes or deliberations of reached decisions into political action, where both the ambiguity and the gaps may be used by actors with greater financial resources, and access to and influence over policymakers to advance only their own interests and preferences. Spatial dislocation of formal and informal sites of deliberation generates problems of interaction between these dislocated sites. This may lead to distortions in discursive transmissions in practice. On the one hand, the transmissions perform a vital deliberative function insofar as they may launder ideas and claims or can be made more “user-­ friendly,” which facilitates both the construction of corresponding political action and the public comprehensibility of the ideas and claims themselves. On the other hand, however, they invite established and powerful policy actors to influence these transmission processes in a way that again serves their own interests and favors the status quo. By referring to claims of feasibility within the status quo, they are able to suppress the critical claims of less influential and powerful actors. Temporal dislocation is a double-edged sword too. Democratic decision-making processes are not linear, but typically dynamic, recursive processes. Such dynamic and recursion may have the positive effects of learning over time throughout the policy process through building trustworthy relationships with epistemic peers (as the  Deweyan model of democratic inquiry suggests), allocating new arguments and new information. In turn, however, because the process is temporally heavily extended, powerful interests have ample opportunities to slow down or accelerate reform, thereby neutralizing inconvenient concerns or issues. Together, these potential problems of power are especially pernicious to a purely deliberative account (that systemic accounts of democracy are). Then again, the systemic turn implies the claim that there is no escape from power in deliberative settings (even in micro-deliberative settings), and hence that we have to deal with power in democratic interaction and communication somehow. The critical question is to ask is how power structures political interaction and communication (Shapiro 1999): Whose interests and perspectives are ignored in the debate? Who has the capacity to evade the negative

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effects of agreements and decisions? Who has the power to set the agenda? How inclusive and binding are decisions on those who made them? The systemic account should have an interest in theorizing about potential possibilities to contain threats of power to the deliberative systems account and advance the positive effects of power to entail institutional provisions to help the less powerful actors reexamining and revising agreements and decisions made in other parts of the system. A second concern with the systemic account is that the spatial and the temporal stretching of deliberation create difficulties in tracking epistemic effects. This stretching not only causes practical problems of aggravated communication and coordination across different deliberative venues and at different times, but it also creates the problem of how to judge the impact of any intervention due to the increased complexity and interdependency in a system. This problem is the other side of the coin of the systemic account: the contingencies and complexities of the deliberative system may cause desirable outcomes (this is what the adherents of the systemic account highlight), but they may also create undesirable consequences. The idea of “unanticipated consequences” (Merton 1936) captures this problem. It holds that social action often leads to consequences that are unintended, and that the consequences can be desirable or undesirable (or both), and that it might be hard to control such consequences. Examples of positive unexpected benefits are found in science as part of serendipitous discoveries (e.g. penicillin), or as part of medicinal practices (e.g. Aspirin), or in sunken ships that became artificial coral reefs, etc. In cases like the discovery of penicillin or the discovery that an added benefit of Aspirin is that it prevents heart attacks or strokes, the experimental reproducing in a controlled (scientific) environment allowed for a generalization of the causality between the specific intervention and the correlating effects. The controllability of unintended consequences in deliberative systems, however, is much weaker. In isolated cases we might successfully establish a causal relationship between effect and intervention by showing how the effect can be reliably traced back to the intervention, despite complexity, interdependence, and uncertainty within the whole deliberative system. The question if we can reliably judge whether a certain intervention in a deliberative system actually does yield the desired systemic effects may be answered positively in isolated cases, but is much harder to answer in systematizing and generalizing terms. A third concern with the systemic account of deliberative democracy is that the permissive systemic test provides no answer to types of interventions that are repellent and that might systematically undermine the deliberative quality of the system in the long run, even though they might pass the systemic test now. Even in cases where interventions have short-term deliberative effects and contribute to the overall epistemic success, and even if we were able to show that the overall “net deliberative profit” is positive, there are forms of interventions that have harmful long-term consequences, because they systematically undermine a broader deliberative climate. Such indirect and long-term effects of non-deliberative interventions create a toxic climate of communicative action, in which non-deliberative interventions into the system increase and consequently transform the deliberative system into a non-deliberative system by degrees. A competitive partisan media

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system, for example, creates a climate of accountability by urging the opponents to justify themselves and to be coherent, consistent and truthful, but it also creates a climate of fear, hate, and one-sidedness, and it distracts from the politically relevant issues in favor of shallow infotainment. Consequently, in order for a deliberative system to be self-sustainable, some of its parts need to be able to compensate for the non-deliberative parts by transforming and translating the non-deliberative interventions of such parts into deliberative quality. Yet the sustainability of deliberative systems not only hinges on compensating effects but on the absence of extreme events (such as conspiracy theories). New findings in risk research suggest that complex systems—natural, biological, or social—are prone to hyper-exponential endogenous effects that lead to extreme events (“crises”) within the system and renders the system highly instable—and may ultimately lead to the collapse of the system itself. The systemic account of democratic deliberation depicts a system made up of complementary parts—“two wrongs can make a right” (Mansbridge et al. 2012, 3)—which allows for a division of labor among the parts of the system. As appealing as this depiction looks, the problem with it is that it does not adequately address the pernicious dynamics systems can take on that are hard to tame (if ever). True, Mansbridge et al. (2012) discuss possible defects of the deliberative system, such as the well-known (potential) pathologies that occur in deliberative groups in general (like polarization) or the problem that one part of a system dominates all of the others—in which case the self-correcting function of deliberative systems would not be effective anymore. However, such defects of the system potentially pose a greater threat to the system than theorists of systemic deliberation are willing to acknowledge. The problem is that in complex systems sometimes effects do not neatly grow linearly but grow non-linearly, and not even exponentially, but “super-exponentially” (Sornette 2009)—due to endogenous causes, by which the system scoops itself up and leads to huge instabilities in complex systems. Sornette for example assumes that (and statistically shows how) extreme events in a system come into existence due to the activation of “sleeping” feedbackloops. For example, if one looks at the statistical distribution of French city sizes, Paris is an extreme outlier (it is by far the largest city). How can we explain its exceptional position? Sornette suggests that the outlier status stems from the presence of positive feedbacks (e.g., the centralized organization of French governments), which—in this case—have amplified the role of Paris as an important city over the course of history. This is a general explanatory variable for outliers in complex systems: systems can be interpreted to change their behavior as response to positive feedbacks, which amplify the role of certain events. According to this, outliers in a system are not just infrequently occurring values in a statistical distribution. Rather they belong to a second distribution, which however is normally not operative. Located upstream from the extreme event or outlier, so to speak, the system switches its behavior. This may also explain how financial bubbles and crashes have endogenous origins. The explanation of a financial crash lies in the volatile pace of stock market price growth based on self-reinforcing over-optimistic anticipation, which arises out of investors’ behavioral patterns in stock markets like imitation and crowd-behavior (both positive feedback processes), which lets them

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develop a self-fulfilling enthusiasm. This theory is based on the assumption that traders mimic one another in their behavior, which leads to progressive piling of market behavior, frequently translated into a rapid growth in the market price over months and years preceding the crash. A crash happens because the market has entered a volatile period and any minor disruption may have sparked the instability. In this view, a crash has an endogenous origin. Now we should not confuse financial market systems with deliberative systems or investors with political agents. But political agents actually do sometimes exhibit market-like behavior, as do, for example, politicians who will say almost anything to get their voters’ attention and approval, because they want to get reelected, or certain medias that publish almost anything to generate high sales volumes, including factually and morally false beliefs. Such non-deliberative inputs are not a problem for the systemic theoretician, as long as they are compensated in another part of the system. If we look at the current (social-)media landscape, however, we see that such corrective effects might be lost. The dissemination of unproven, wrong or misleading material can quickly generate positive feedback mechanisms, by such material becomes widely shared (it “goes viral). If these beliefs are nationalistic or xenophobic or are couched in aggressive or disrespectful rhetoric, for example, they create effects that are pernicious to the deliberative climate and render the system dysfunctional in the long run. The problem, then, is not only that democratic deliberative systems might not neatly operate the epistemically positive self-correcting function (that is, compensating the failures in one part of the system in another part), but that it can have the described endogenous effects, which lead to a fundamental instability of the whole deliberative system.

8.4  Conclusion: Deweyan Democracy and the Systemic Turn Dewey’s conception of democracy as a form of life and as a social ideal conceives of citizens who participate in inquiry as having an intentionally cooperative attitude towards other participants of political inquiry. These normative demands, by and large, coincide with the categorical test (speaking to an imagined dialogical opponent). At the same time, Dewey’s theory of political judgment not only tolerates but also invites forms of participation and interaction that are not directly representative of the requirements of the categorical test. As I have argued in chapter five, friction (Medina), contestation and disruption are epistemically valuable in the process of identifying and defining social and political problems and, to a certain extent, solutions in Deweyan social and political inquiry. In addition, a conception of dispersed and plural publics, in and across which directly cooperative communicative interaction is unrealistic, is part of Dewey’s ideal of democracy. In other words, a Deweyan democratic conception of political inquiry at least partially has to rely on inputs and forms of participation that do not comply with the requirements of the categorical test. Consequently, Dewey’s conception of democratic political inquiry is based on the assumption that the system or process of inquiry can absorb, coordinate and

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channel such disruptive inputs in a way that has positive epistemic effects overall. This assumption is also one of the central assumptions that systemic theories of democratic deliberation make. Could it be, then, that such theories offer a viable argument for this assumption and consequently could come in support of Dewey’s theory of democratic political inquiry? The answer is mainly “no”, they cannot sufficiently support Dewey’s theory of democratic political inquiry. Systemic theories of democratic deliberation are internally problematic for the three main problems that I have identified and discussed in this chapter: resulting inequalities of power, problems of measuring effects, and crises of social systems. With regard to the first problem, I discussed the question whether we can we locate a moment in the deliberative process where an input into the deliberative system that is of low deliberative quality becomes acceptable due to its broader systemic impact. The answer was that, yes, we can locate such moments, but potentially only in single cases and not as general rules or principles. I suggested on a general level that dissent and disagreement, in cases like conspiracy theories, could in principle enhance the factual and argumentative basis of a deliberative system and enhance deliberative accountability. But I also suggested that a substantive answer to the question whether they systematically lead to such enhancing effects depends on the situated context of specific cases, and that such contextual prerequisites are hard to generalize. With regard to the second problem, I discussed newer findings in risk research that suggest that any type of system, including deliberative systems, is potentially instable and fragile due to feedback-mechanisms of such negative inputs on the system as hate speech or toxic rhetoric that can endogenously accumulate and derail the whole system. A third mayor problem of systemic theories of democratic deliberation is that the problem that the spatial and temporal dispersion of democratic processes of deliberation potentially increase power-inequalities is not adequately addressed in these theories. Vis-à-vis these questions and problems, a Deweyan theory of democracy has no sufficient answers or solutions. The main reason for this is that the systemic theory has only limited applicability to Dewey’s conception of democratic judgment. When Dewey speaks about the importance of a democratic culture to the functioning of democracy as a form of government, his vision of democracy is not confined to deliberation and public reason. While it should be clear by now from my reconstruction of Dewey’s theory of political judgment in the previous chapters that what he thought of as political inquiry in democracies is not sufficiently captured with a deliberative framework of democratic interaction and communication, it is worth repeating this point here, because the “systemic turn” remains part of the deliberative paradigm in democratic theory.6 Democratic culture and politics involves deliberation and public reason, but more generally it involves the full variety of 6  On this point that Dewey is not a deliberative democrat see especially two newer publications, which premise their arguments on the non-deliberative aspects of Dewey’s political philosophy: Alexander Livingston’s “Between Means and Ends: Reconstructing Coercion in Dewey’s Democratic Theory” (2017) and Jeff Jackson’s Equality Beyond Debate: John Dewey’s Pragmatic Idea of Democracy (Jackson 2018).

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experience: the embodied emotions and learnt habits and customs of a culture that finds human expression in countless interactive forms. In contrast, the deliberative systems-paradigm operates with an implicit assumption of how the “system” performs its epistemic function of allocating, distributing and counter-balancing all inputs into the system such that it produces an overall positive net-balance of “deliberativeness”. Furthermore, democratic systems theories remain on the systemic level, but Dewey rightly insisted that a democratic way of life and the critical habits and customs of every single individual are needed “below” the institutional and systemic level, to keep democratic institutions alive and to reflexively absorb and include the divergence of this culture. In other words, Dewey’s social conception of democracy as a way of life does not necessitate the view of a superordinate coordinative system that functionally brings about desired epistemic outcomes, and neither does his political conception of democracy. Rather, both necessitate a picture of a decentralized experimental configuration of diverse and pluralistic publics that accrue from and build around issues and problems, and hence that they can be seen as the sites of diverse and pluralistic inquiries. Political democracy is not one system that coordinates all parts in a way that secures positive effects; it is constituted by many separate and diverse publics (and inquiries). Thus, the ideas of democracy and of political inquiry are not tied to a unitary territorial or institutional arrangement. Publics are not necessarily part of a territorially bound system, nor are they necessarily part of any system or institutional arrangement. Dewey offers a view of publics that assigns them the functions of political inquiry under the conditions of vertical and horizontal equality: identifying and defining a problem and jointly exploring solutions. These functions can be realized outside of existing institutional arrangements, thereby possibly undermining and circumventing existing institutional arrangements. Hence, democracy both as a social and as a political system does not provide an overarching structure that brings about epistemic success. Political and social democracy, rather, consist of a continuous series of inquiries in publics, within and between which good political judgment becomes possible.

References Bartlett, Jamie, and Carl Miller. 2010. The Power of Unreason: Conspiracy Theories, Extremism and Counter-Terrorism. London: Demos. Beiner, Ronald. 2010. Political Judgement. Routledge Library Editions: Political Science Vol. 20. New York: Routledge. Black, Laura. 2008. Listening to the City: Difference, Identity, and Storytelling in Online Deliberative Groups. Journal of Public Deliberation 5 (1): Article 4. Bohman, James. 2000. Public Deliberation: Pluralism, Complexity, and Democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Boswell, John. 2015. Toxic Narratives in the Deliberative System: How the Ghost of Nanny Stalks the Obesity Debate. Policy Studies 36 (3): 314–328. ———. 2016. Deliberating Downstream: Countering Democratic Distortions in the Policy Process. Perspectives on Politics 14 (3): 724–737.

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Chambers, Simone. 2009. Rhetoric and the Public Sphere: Has Deliberative Democracy Abandoned Mass Democracy? Political Theory 37 (3): 323–350. Critchlow, Donald, John Korasick, and Matthew Sherman. 2008. Political Conspiracies in America: A Reader. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Dewey, John. 1927. The Public and Its Problems. The Later Works, 1925–1953, 2. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. ———. 1934. Art as Experience. The Later Works, 1925–1953, 10. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dryzek, John. 2000. Deliberative Democracy and Beyond: Liberals, Critics, Contestations. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2010. Rhetoric in Democracy: A Systemic Appreciation. Political Theory 38 (3): 319–339. ———. 2012. Foundations and Frontiers of Deliberative Governance. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Garsten, Bryan. 2011. The Rhetoric Revival in Political Theory. Annual Review of Political Science 14 (1): 159–180. Goldberg, Robert Alan. 2008. Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America. New Haven: Yale University Press. Gutmann, Amy, and Dennis Thompson. 1996. Democracy and Disagreement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Heins, Volker. 2007. Critical Theory and the Traps of Conspiracy Thinking. Philosophy & Social Criticism 33 (7): 787–801. Jackson, Jeff. 2018. Equality Beyond Debate: John Dewey’s Pragmatic Idea of Democracy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Knight, Peter. 2003. Conspiracy Theories in American History. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO. Livingston, Alexander. 2017. Between Means and Ends: Reconstructing Coercion in Dewey’s Democratic Theory. American Political Science Review 111 (3): 522–534. Mackie, Gerry. 2006. Does Democratic Deliberation Change Minds? Politics, Philosophy & Economics 5 (3): 279–303. Mansbridge, Jane. 1999. Everyday Talk in the Deliberative System. In Deliberative Politics: Essays on Democracy and Disagreement, ed. Stephen Macedo, 211–242. New York: Oxford Univiversity Press. Mansbridge, Jane, James Bohman, Simone Chambers, David Estlund, Andreas Føllesdal, Archon Fung, Cristina Lafont, Bernard Manin, and José Luis Martí. 2010. The Place of Self-Interest and the Role of Power in Deliberative Democracy. Journal of Political Philosophy 18 (1): 64–100. Mansbridge, Jane, James Bohman, Simone Chambers, Thomas Christiano, Archon Fung, John R. Parkinson, Dennis Thompson, and Mark Warren. 2012. A Systemic Approach to Deliberative Democracy. In Deliberative Systems : Deliberative Democracy at the Large Scale, ed. John Parkinson and Jane Mansbridge, 1–26. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Merton, Robert K. 1936. The Unanticipated Consequences of Puroposive Social Action. American Sociological Review 1 (6): 894–904. Nyhan, Brendan, and Jason Reifler. 2010. When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions. Political Behavior 32 (2): 303–330. O’Neill, John. 2002. The Rhetoric of Deliberation: Some Problems in Kantian Theories of Deliberative Democracy. Res Publica 8 (3): 249–268. Oliver, Eric, and Thomas Wood. 2014. Medical Conspiracy Theories and Health Behaviors in the United States. JAMA Internal Medicine 174 (5): 817–818. Owen, D. and Smith, G. 2013. Two Types of Deliberative System. Paper presented at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, August 29–September 1, Chicago. Owen, David, and Graham Smith. 2015. Survey Article: Deliberation, Democracy, and the Systemic Turn. Journal of Political Philosophy 23 (2): 213–234. Rauschning, Hermann. 2010. Hitler Speaks: A Series Of Political Conversations With Adolf Hitler On His Real Aims. Whitefish: Kessinger Publishing.

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Shapiro, Ian. 1999. Enough of Deliberation—Politics Is about Interests and Power. In Deliberative Politics: Essays on Democracy and Disagreement, ed. Stephen Macedo, 28–38. New  York: Oxford University Press. Sornette, Didier. 2009. Dragon-Kings, Black Swans and the Prediction of Crises. International Journal of Terraspace Science and Engineering 2 (1): 1–18. Stroud, Scott. 2008. John Dewey and the Question of Artful Communication. Philosophy & Rhetoric 41 (2): 153–183. Sunstein, Cass. 2009. Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide. New York: Oxford University Press. Sunstein, Cass, and Adrian Vermeule. 2009. Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures. Journal of Political Philosophy 17 (2): 202–227. Volmert, Johannes. 1989. Politische Rhetorik Des Nationalsozialismus. In Sprache Im Faschismus, ed. Konrad Ehlich, 137–161. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Warren, Mark. 1996. Deliberative Democracy and Authority. The American Political Science Review 90 (1): 46–60. ———. 1999. Democracy and Trust. New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2007. Institutionalizing Deliberative Democracy. In Deliberation, Participation and Democracy, ed. Shawn Rosenberg, 272–288. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Young, Iris Marion. 1996. Communication and the Other: Beyond Deliberative Democracy. In Democracy and Difference. Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib, 120–135. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2002. Inclusion and Democracy. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.

Chapter 9

Which Types of Knower Should Democracies Include and Why?

Abstract  In this concluding chapter I discuss some institutional implications of Dewey’s argument for democracy. How can we think of institutionalizing social and political inquiry as the experimental collective activity Dewey imagined it to be? I discuss this question by outlining a typology of political knowers and a typology of what the inclusion of these knowers would ideally look like on the level of political institutions (policy-cycle), and I relate this to Dewey’s pattern of social and political inquiry. By tapping into Dewey’s pragmatist critical social epistemology developed in the previous chapters, this chapter sets out, more specifically, to answer the following questions: Who are the relevant knowers in a democracy? What are the differences between them, and what are their different roles and functions in the processes of democratic  inquiry and judgment? How do these knowers relate to each other? What, for example, is the right relationship between ordinary citizens and experts? And, most importantly, how can we square the view that democracies need to allow some inequalities in epistemic authority with the moral element of Dewey’s argument for democracy, which refers to the normative principle of the equal authority of citizens’ political judgments? Keywords  Social identity · Pragmatist social epistemology · Expert Knowledge · Democratic Policy-Cycles

Who should be considered a relevant epistemic source—somebody who knows or contributes to the production of knowledge—in a democracy? The answer we have to give against the background of the Deweyan argument for democracy outlined in this book has to be: all citizens should equally be considered valuable epistemic sources. But in the previous chapters I have pointed out the implausibility of this answer, if it is taken to mean that ordinary citizens are equally and sufficiently good epistemic sources, because  there are significant differences in competence and knowledge among citizens and because  certain people or professions do know

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 M. I. Räber, Knowing Democracy – A Pragmatist Account of the Epistemic Dimension in Democratic Politics, Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations 14, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53258-1_9

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certain politically relevant things better than others. It was clear to Dewey, for example, that the difference between democracy and science should not be completely denied or erased, and his argument for democracy acknowledges the limits of the democratic demand for the equal inclusion of all citizens on epistemic grounds by supporting it with a moral ideal (growth). In this concluding chapter I discuss some institutional implications of Dewey’s argument for democracy. How can we think of institutionalizing social and political inquiry as the experimental collective activity Dewey imagined it to be? I discuss this question by outlining a typology of political knowers and a typology of what the inclusion of these knowers would ideally look like on the level of political institutions (policy-cycle), and I relate this to Dewey’s pattern of social and political inquiry. By tapping into Dewey’s pragmatist critical social epistemology developed in previous chapters, this chapter seeks to answer the following questions in particular: Who are the relevant knowers in a democracy? What are the differences between them, and what are their different roles and functions in the process of political inquiry and political judging? How do these knowers relate to each other? And what is the right relationship between ordinary citizens and experts? I have organized the chapter in four sections. To begin with, I define “political problems” as problems of public interest, which democratic publics need to solve and which require joint political action by citizens. Political problems are typically marked by publicity, disagreement, complexity, and uncertainty. I also introduce the distinction between technical and non-technical political problems, that is the distinction between political problems that can be defined and resolved by scientific methods developed to cope with complexity and uncertainty and non-technical problems which, in addition to scientific methods, need other sources of knowledge, and which cannot be solved with a fixed methodology. Non-technical problems pertain to interpretation, meaning, and judgment, and to the experimental and social dimensions of experience and inquiry. Based on this understanding of political problems, in the second section, I propose an interpretative classification of political knowers. I take the findings of the previous chapters about the epistemic value of diversity in social and political inquiry and relate them to a concept of political knower, a concept that will give sharper contours to these findings, as it allows identifying the diverse sources for knowledge-claims in democracies that are dispersed across the population. The notion of political knowers serves as an umbrella term for the various types of knowers and knowledge-claims that should enter the political process of communication and experimentation of designing policies and making laws in democracies. This classification schematically distinguishes, for one, between categories of knowers who are required for solving political problems, and for the other between the conditions that constitute them as epistemic agents. I introduce three basic categories: ubiquitous knowers; situated knowers; and specialist knowers. I discuss why Dewey conceived of the ideal relationship between specialist knowers (experts) and ubiquitous knowers (ordinary citizens) not as one of division of labor but rather in terms of the integration of expert knowledge into society. Based on the critical

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pragmatist social epistemology that I have presented in the book, I then present a more in-depth argument, illustrated by examples, for why situated knowers should be considered indispensable epistemic sources in a democracy. Subsequently, I consider whether a specific form of being knowledgeable due to the “situatedness” in society, namely social identity, should be part of a political epistemology. I discuss and counter two objections to this idea: that the concept of social identity itself is not useful (or even pernicious) in political contexts; and that social identity has no epistemic significance. In section three, I analyze five stages of a typical policy cycle, which may be seen to characterize problem-solving and democratic decision-making in democratic publics, and I assign the knower-types needed at each stage: (1) problem identification and definition, (2) the shaping of policy options, (3) voting, (4) policy implementation, and (5) evaluation of the impact and outcomes of the decision made. The chapter concludes by highlighting the ways in which this analysis of political knowers in democracy relates to Dewey’s argument for democracy and to its trust in ordinary citizen’s judgments.

9.1  Political Problems: Technical and Non-Technical Exactly what kind of problems is democratic politics meant to solve? We cannot simply presuppose the existence of clear and well-defined problems, which the members of a public must accept. While the construction of problems in scientific inquiry often follows well-tested methodologies and specific patterns of experimentation, and often relies on a solid stock of proven results, the construction of political problems is a messier and more chaotic process. Still, we can identify a number of structural characteristics of political problems. Political problems in principle affect all members of a public, are of public interest and are openly contested. Some political problems are complex in a strictly technical sense, and democracies have developed useful informal norms, such as practices that ensure nuclear safety, within their political institutions so as to limit direct votes by citizens on issues where people and politicians cannot be informed properly. Yet with regard to non-technical complex political issues, such as if parents should get paid maternity or paternity leave or what law concerning foreigners should be applied, most of us are capable of thinking through complex implications—granted, sometimes with the influence and help of specialists. Hence we can draw a heuristic distinction between two general types of political problems: technical political problems, or those that are primarily and legitimately defined and solved by specialist knowledge and non-technical political problems, those that are not yet or never will be defined and solved by specialist knowledge. Technical political problems have methods of coping with complexities and uncertainties in an epistemically reliable way; they rest on a high degree of consensus within a particular scientific community (mostly in the natural sciences) but also within political bodies and bureaucracies. This

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species of problem mostly concerns routine decisions in such fields as health policies or in regulatory fields such as environmental or traffic regulation and they require specialized handling not only at the stages of identification, definition, and solution finding, but also at the stages of implementation and monitoring. Non-technical political problems by contrast will never be adequately definable and solvable by technical, scientific, or specialist knowledge alone. Such political problems refer to controversial political issues whereby part of the knowledge required to define and solve them is always relative to the experiences and interpretations of human beings as specific actors—the knowledge of situated knowers. This kind of knowledge requires an understanding of knowledge that allows us to capture both the quality of individual experience and the perspectives that grow out of it, which both fall outside the methods of scientific knowledge production (algorithmic modeling, reproducible and controlled experimentation, statistical coverage, etc.). In other words, the knowledge of situated knowers concerns those problems that have no natural or technical basis but are rather of a social or political nature; by this I do not only mean that the awareness of the problem is socially constructed but that the problem (and its solution) itself are.1 A list of types of political knowers, hence, should map those who help democracies to cope with these two types of problems.

9.2  Mapping Political Knowers I use the term “political knowers” to encapsulate the relevant knowers needed for democratic inquiry. In what follows, I discuss three analytically distinct categories of political knower: the ubiquitous knower, the situated knower, and the specialist knower. Fig. 9.1 offers an overview of these three categories of knowers. Ubiquitous Knower The top row in Fig.  9.1 addresses the most basic form of politically relevant knowledge: ubiquitous knowledge. This type of knowledge designates a pool of knowledge that is widely disseminated throughout society and is picked up naturally by individuals: A ubiquitous knower has the ability to speak his or her native language, has acquired the most prevalent common-sense values and norms of the society, and assimilated social customs most generally. In a democracy, a ubiquitous knower also possesses the ability to acquire politically relevant information from different popular sources and the ability to develop political reasoning from this information. The term “popular understanding” captures various ways whereby people acquire second-hand knowledge about politically relevant issues. People become ubiquitous knowers by gaining knowledge in a detached manner, that is, they are not directly 1  Many pressing political problems are of course both technical and non-technical according to this distinction.

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Widespread media and other popular sources of knowledge transmission Experiential Embeddedness

The experiential involvement in specific situations Situated Knower

Social Identity A group-specific lens through which experiences are interpreted

Scientific Methodology Specialist Knower Intentional knowledge production through well-tested methodologies

Fig. 9.1  Schematic matrix of political knowers. (This matrix is based on the table of scientific expertise that Collins and Evans (2007) in Rethinking Expertise invented. It differs from their table, however, in two important ways: it focuses on politics rather than science and addresses different types of knowledge)

involved, but have learned from reading stories or watching reports in the media about facts, the experiences of others, events, and opinions.2 There is a significant difference, however, between the origin and the public communication of the information about political circumstances and that of knowledge about science. While in the latter case these sources are scientists or journalists with a solid scientific background, in the case of designing information about political circumstances, the sources are journalists, bloggers, and commentators, sometimes better at selling a story than knowledgeable about the details. Specialist Knower The third category of knower, specialist knower, is what is commonly referred to as expert in a specific field of knowledge, be it relativity theory, marine life, or coal mining. A specialist political knower is somebody who possesses formalized and professionalized knowledge about scientific findings and models that are relevant to the typical operations of making, implementing and testing decisions. Such knowledge is the outcome of a knowledge system, which includes formal training and certification by means of methodologically guided research and its self-referential quality assurance peer review. The makers and transmitters (into politics) of such knowledge often do not speak and act as one. Often there is disagreement among scientists concerning the relative acceptability of theories

2  This is similar to how Collins (2014) uses the term, although he uses it for the purpose of describing the source of popular understanding of science (e.g., popular science books).

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and the problem-solving capability of scientific findings, and even more often in light of pending political decisions. The degree of consensus within particular scientific communities varies, most notably between the natural sciences and the social sciences. By that I do not mean that the natural sciences are principally free of value preferences or strong interests, as Dewey argued and relevant examples show (e.g. Irwin 2006; MacFarlane 2003; Wynne 1998), yet the degree of consensus within the natural sciences is in the majority of cases high. In the light of increasing demands relating to government control and a complex interdependence between different regulatory areas, the need for scientific expertise within the policy designing process that deals with technical political problems is substantial. The transfer of such knowledge into politics has a rationalizing effect on politics, as it allows ordinary citizens to make educated judgments, and it has the effect of enhancing the problem-solving capabilities of democratic politics in the face of narrow political problems. Dewey held that the relationship between experts and ordinary citizens in inquiry should not be imagined as a division of labor between competent experts and laypeople who’s primary function would be to express their consent or dissent through voting in sporadic elections. Rather, he held that expert and lay judgment should inform each other. The sciences should become an “effective possession of the members of the public” (Dewey 1927, LW 2, 348). What this means for Dewey is that ordinary citizens “need to learn to judge when and how expert knowledge might contribute to the resolution of public problems”, as Mark Brown has put this aptly (Brown 2009, 150). Dewey certainly was not sufficiently clear about how scientific knowledge ought to be supplied by those who possess it and how it out to be integrated into the judgments of ordinary citizens.3 The important point here is that Dewey does not believe that citizens have to become specialist experts themselves, rather they need “the ability to judge of the bearing of the knowledge supplied by others upon common concerns” (Dewey 1927, LW 2, 365). I take it Dewey wants to say that expert knowledge provides the necessary material for ordinary citizens to form a judgment, similar to how expert knowledge provides the necessary material for members of a jury to form their judgments in a jury process.4 Hence, expert knowledge is a relevant source for making good political judgments and decisions in democracies for him, but it is equally important—it is a normative prerequisite of his ideal of democracy—that societies provide the material and immaterial conditions that enable all citizens to develop sufficient competence to judge the relevance and import of expert knowledge given by others.

 Dewey made the suggestion to disseminate scientific knowledge in society by using the arts and more generally through an “aesthetic mode of communication” and an emotional appeal, as Brown notes (Brown 2009, 150). Dibner and Snow (2016) discuss this suggestion under the name of “science literacy”. 4  Compare my discussion of Dewey’s understanding of how propositional knowledge and judgment relate to each other in inquiry in chapter three. 3

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Situated Knower A situated knower5 is someone who has accrued knowhow, observations, and information from his or her unique perspective resulting from their social position and experiential embeddedness. The notion of situated knower defines people as competent knowers relying on their specific perspectives informed by their experience. What makes a situated knower competent? The following example should illustrate what makes a situated knower competent. The example addresses the political problem of designing the best policy to solve the problem of drug abuse. Up to the 1990s, the prevalent political position in Switzerland and the dominant guiding principle in Swiss healthcare were the development and implementation of measures aimed at achieving a drug-free society. In 1985 the cantonal physician in Zurich imposed a ban on issuing clean syringes to drug addicts. He was certain that supplying clean syringes would only encourage addiction as much as if physicians were directly prescribing methadone and heroin. His view was supported by established addiction medicine physicians in Zurich, the city doctor of the Zurich administration and—at the federal level—the consultative committee of the Federal Office of Public Health (Meili 2007). The policy solutions to the problem of widespread heroin abuse relied on repression and prevention. In the 1980s and 1990s, Zurich’s and Bern’s parks were notoriously packed with heroin addicts, many of them drug tourists coming from all over Europe, attracted by an ever-growing open drug scene. This led to further problems, not least the problem of shared syringes, which rapidly resulted in an HIV and hepatitis epidemic among addicts. What became infamously known as the “Needle Park” spiraled out of control, and was broken up by the police in February 1992. An iron gate was installed and the substance abusers were ordered to vacate the park; however, they received little medical or social care. Drug addicts did not disappear, but migrated to another district. The main pillar of the drug policy then, repression, did leave the police helpless when faced with the behavior of junkies and dealers and the conditions of an open drug scene. The policies pursued and the measures derived from them turned out to be unsuccessful in dealing with the behavior of the addicts. It would become apparent that both the general problem of heroin addiction and the related problem of the open drug scene were very complex and delicate and needed other, appropriate solutions, because the official policy had devastating effects and made the problems even worse.6

5  See chapter five of this book for a more detailed discussion of the concept and of its significance in pragmatist epistemology. See Collins (2012) for a fairly recent account of how pragmatist epistemology is connected to current debates in intersectionality theory and feminist standpoint theory via the idea that the social location of individuals and groups has epistemological implications. 6  A 2010 study shows that a rise in drug-related mortality coincided with more intense street- level law enforcement, and the number of drug-related deaths corresponded to the number of heroin possession offences two years later. Substitution treatment had a protective effect on drug-related mortality (Nordt and Stohler 2010). As a consequence, the number of consumers of heroin increased during the period from 1988 to 1992 from 3000 to more than 30,000. While up until around 1988 the annual number of drug-related deaths in Switzerland had stabilized around 200, it rose to around 420 deaths in 1992, and starting in 1994 it began to decline to pre-1998 figures (around 200) (Grob 2009). The same curve can be drawn for the number of newly diagnosed HIV infections (ibid.).

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By the time “Needle Park” was shut down in 1995, authorities had learned their lesson from the first attempt of closing it, which finally resulted in a more pragmatic drug policy that included offering methadone and heroin to heavy addicts. The closing was carefully planned this time: addicts had where to go to get medical, psychological, and/or social help (drop-ins, therapeutic communities, night shelters, accompanied housing, work programs, etc.), obtain clean syringes, and be administered either methadone or clean heroin under medical supervision in a hygienic environment. The exponents of the official drug policy hoped that (1) the problem of open drug scenes would be solved through repression tactics and policing, and that, as a result, (2) the problem of widespread heroin-addiction would solve itself. Reality proved to be more complex and fragile. In order to solve the first problem, a fine-grained network of measures needed to be introduced, which, while not directly solving the second problem in the short term, was able to address many of the effects generated by the first. Those measures further proved to be critical to the reduction in the numbers of heroin addicts. The long-term success of the policy was that a lot fewer people started taking heroin and hardly anyone died as a direct result of heroin use.7 When the authorities finally started to pay attention to the first-hand experience of addicts, physicians, social workers, and activists, they slowly learned about the complexity of the problem and how the separate issues (open drug scene, heroin addiction, infections, crime, neglect, physical and mental illnesses, social exclusion) affect one another, and also that only a simultaneous engagement on all fronts would mitigate the problems. Being attentive to those experiences pointed to a more adequate framing and definition of the problem. Such engagement was successfully realized with the introduction of the various measures (distribution of clean syringes and methadone, the prescription of heroin under medical supervision, housing and employment programs, and advocacy hubs) implemented as a result of direct interaction with addicts and dealers, based on a first-hand understanding of the mechanisms of heroin addiction, the open drug scene, and related issues. Involved were pioneers in the fight against drugs, as well as progressive legalists, all of them equipped with first-hand experience. While some of them were specialist knowers in medicine, psychiatry, law, economy, and social work, they were also situated knowers in the context of drug addiction in Swiss cities, because they accrued experientially embedded knowledge unavailable to centralized authorities and detached physicians. While medical knowledge was an important constituent of the partial solution to medicalize the drug problem, it was not sufficient. To be sure, some of the involved actors were scientists, by virtue of which they were in a position to systematically assess experiences with methadone programs and prescription of heroin, which provided practical knowledge and also rhetorical means for promoting a pragmatic drug policy. But what was also needed was first-hand experiences 7  After 1995 to this day there are fewer addicts, fewer HIV infections and deaths because of the addiction, there is a better reintegration of addicts (sometimes partial, sometimes full) into society, a decline of drug-related crime, better chances of survival, a general decline of infectious diseases (Nordt and Stohler 2009, 2010).

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and perspectives of addicts and dealers, and of the circumstances of the addiction. Awareness of this first-hand experience and perspectives finally helped officials to realize that measures needed to be introduced that were able address the needs and circumstances of the addicts. Once officials started listening to the situated knowers, their framings of and solutions to the drug problem had significant positive influence on the rate of new entrants, on drug-related crime, on chances of survival, on infectious diseases, and reintegration into society. And on the basis of the addicts’ and activists’ experientially embedded knowledge, officials were able to make reliable predictions about which solutions will work.

9.2.1  Social Identity as Source of Situated Knowers Social identity partially constitutes what it means to be a situated knower. To be a situated knower based on social identity is to possess epistemic authority with regard to knowledge-claims that I acquire due to my social identity.8 Social identity is the kind of identity one has in public space and by which one is categorized. It is the result of social customs, social mechanisms grouping individuals, and acquired perspectives and habits of seeing and interpreting. It is an identity that is mostly “external” to oneself, and thus only in a limited sense subject to one’s own control, but is used both by others and by oneself to interpret the meanings of one’s experiences, actions, and expressions. Within the matrix of political knowers, social identity generates a special kind of experiential embeddedness. In that sense, to know something due to one’s social identity is being somebody whose knowledge stems from the experiential embeddedness that the social identity provides. That is, the perspective from which the knowledge-claims originate from is tied to the knowers’ social identity. Insofar as everybody possesses one or multiple social identities, everybody is a situated individual based on social identity viz. social identities. Consider the following example of a situated knower based on social identity. The example shows the usefulness of the notion of the situated knower based on social identity and its epistemic relevance in the context of the problem of systemic racism. In February 2012, Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old African-American, was fatally shot. His death sparked a nationwide outcry. On April 2012, his shooter was accused of homicide. The case opened in June 2013. The suspect was found not guilty later in July. A short period after the judgment, President Barack Obama

8  When I claim that social identity has epistemic significance, I do not want to say that social identity lets us truly know something about the full personhood of individuals. Rather, I mean that social identity lets us know something about the relational and social structures between and across individuals and the social scripts and norms that manifest themselves in individual or group-related experiences. In other words, social identity is heavily shaped by society, institutions and habits and customs and hence reflects or tracks social relations and social settings. See Medina (2012, 209) for a pragmatist account of why social identity can be considered one of the critical sources for social and political change.

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delivered a spontaneous speech in which he emphasized the unique experience of the African-American community: I think it’s important to recognize that the African American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn’t go away. There are very few African American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me. There are very few African American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me—at least before I was a senator. There are very few African Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. That happens often. And I don’t want to exaggerate this, but those sets of experiences inform how the African American community interprets what happened one night in Florida. And it’s inescapable for people to bring those experiences to bear. The African American community is also knowledgeable that there is a history of racial disparities in the application of our criminal laws—everything from the death penalty to enforcement of our drug laws. And that ends up having an impact in terms of how people interpret the case.9

In his speech, Obama implicitly criticized gun laws and racial profiling, and pointed out that racism in the US is not a thing of the past. In his view, white privilege is not a myth, black pain should be acknowledged, and internalized biases should be taken seriously; the angle from which he and many other African-American people are looking at the Trayvon Martin case is informed by US history and personal experience that reflects some of the racial stereotypes in the US.  It is noticeable how Obama interprets this case through the lens of the experiences and history that the identity of belonging to the African-American community generates. This interpretation of the Trayvon Martin case has epistemic value, despite the fact that it is strongly group-specific. The reason for this lies in the interpretation’s connection to a real existing problem, which in its intensity and relevance can only come to light through the set of experiences that this outlook offers. More generally speaking, what Obama is saying is that identifying or being identified as belonging to the group of people called African-American leads to certain experiences. These experiences, along with the knowledge of US history, inform both the interpretation of and the judgments in the Trayvon Martin case, and other similar cases. And, the President goes on, African-American individuals couldn’t avoid these experiences. He not only offers an explanation of why the African-­ American community interprets the Martin case through the lens of their own experience and the racial history. He effectively legitimizes such an interpretation: in his view, it is legitimate to interpret the Martin case as an instance of existing racism, because it offers a visible example of the larger issue of racism in the US society. Thus, the legitimacy comes not only from the inescapability of interpreting the case from a certain perspective, but from the fact that the experiences Obama speaks of generate interpretations that grow out of the social identity, that is, experience and interpretations that are had and made by living in a society that itself does identify  https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2013/07/19/remarks-president-trayvonmartin (accessed December 11, 2019). Emphases added.

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people as belonging to this society and to its various sub-groups. We can thus call Obama in the context of racism against the African American population a situated knower qua having the experiences that belong to the social identity of being African-American in the United States and having the conscious knowledge of the history of racism in the US. This example illustrates a general point about social identity. To have a social identity is to inhabit a locus in society, out of which we form experiential and interpretative perspectives from which we try to know the social and political world. Hence, as the above example illustrates, the concept of identity knowers implies that there is a causal connection to be made between different experiences and interpretational habits that carry epistemic consequences. And these differences among knowers are not random or idiosyncratic, but are socially structured and systematic, because they are indicative of the social and political problem of systemic racism.

9.2.2  Two Objections to Social Identity as an Epistemic Source Before I go on to describe what I think is the appropriate place within a typical policy cycle for the kind of political knowers I have just mapped, let me first rehearse answers to two potential objections to the idea that social identity is epistemically valuable. The first objection concerns the utility of the concept of social identity itself, and the second—more fundamental—objection is that social identity has no epistemic significance whatsoever. Discussing these objections provides an additional angle on key elements of the Deweyan-pragmatist conception of social epistemology and its import for democratic theory. Objection 1: Social Identity Is Not a Useful Concept A first objection that could be raised against my suggestion that social identity is epistemically relevant can be summarized as follows. Social identities grounded in concepts of gender, race, ethnicity, or physical appearance unnecessarily and mistakenly constrict the variety of individual experience. Thus the concept of social identity is neither useful nor desirable as an analytical category. To pigeonhole the diverse experiences, perspectives, and interpretations of individuals who share a socially recognized category of identity, establishes new, or perpetuates existing, stereotypes and clichés. In short, the fear is that the concept of identity carries along domination, because it assumes an essential core of sameness where there is in fact difference and diversity. Many theorists are troubled by the implications of the claim that identity should make a political difference; identity is viewed as rather politically problematic or even pathological—identity politics, for example, seems to imply a homogenized conception of groups, radical separatism between different social identities, and makes unnecessary essentialist assumptions.

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It is true that the concept of social identity takes together what otherwise does not belong together: differing individuals without a shared essence or identical perspective. As the concept of identity is used in philosophy, to share an identity is to be indistinguishable or to share every trait. This is not how I use the term “social identity” here. I use it the way Linda Alcoff has been using it (Alcoff 1999, 2010), namely as pertaining to a group of individuals who are similarly situated in interactive and institutional relations that enable their experiences, perceptions, and interpretations. These individuals do not share an immutable essence, and even if they share the same experiences— by virtue of growing up in the same environment or developing the same habits and customs—they might interpret these supposedly identical events differently. Hence the logic of social groups should be construed as relational rather than substantial (Young 2002, 82). A substantial logic of social groups would look for essential attributes shared by all members of a group and thus constitutive of it. But hardly ever do all members share such attributes. Rather, individuals relate to a variety of social groups, and every social group has other social groups cutting across it. A man can belong to the social group of males and, of course, at the same time belong to the groups of forty-year-olds, Whites, Christians, etc., and the group “males” is heterogeneous in terms of age, religion, race, etc. “What makes a group a group is less some set of attributes its members share than the relations in which they stand to others” (ibid., 90). Thus, if we are careful not to homogenize or substantialize groups when we are conceptualizing social identity, I believe we can use the concept of social identity in an epistemic sense, which derives from the fact that those who share this identity are likely to share certain experiences, perceptions and interpretations that arise from these experiences. Objection 2: Social Identity Has no Epistemic Value A critic could agree that the concept of identity might be useful as a descriptive political or sociological category. But she could still contest the claim that identity has epistemic significance. Social identity in itself, she could say, does not provide general epistemic benefits of any kind and is not relevant epistemically; or she could say that it does have epistemic significance, but only in the sense that social identity has detrimental epistemic consequences: social identity constitutes unmerited privilege or it produces undeserved disadvantage. While social identity can establish unmerited privilege or undeserved disadvantage, it can also be epistemically valuable. Based on social identity individuals are structurally situated in society and this situatedness tends to give rise to experiences and perspectives that others do not necessarily share. In this sense, one should understand social identity as a tool for the process of meaning-making. Social identity is not just an assumed attribute of a group or an individual, but also an epistemological filter through which groups and individuals interpret their experiences. This does not mean that social identity categories should be seen as producing an

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identical interpretation-perspective or a collectively shared aggregate of beliefs. Rather, social identities provide the experiential background based on which individuals form their perspectives, and it is these experiential backgrounds that can be sensibly grouped. As the Trayvon Martin case shows, the shared experiential background is something unifying and homogenous among those who work through these experiences, namely an identical occurrence in prevailing perceptions as alleged hazards. The space we take up in the public sphere—our social situatedness—provides or hinders access to objects of knowledge by prompting us to have certain experiences and to interpret them in certain ways. And as social identity is a very powerful mode of such situatedness in society, we should attribute epistemic relevance to social identity. But we should not overestimate this epistemic relevance. Social identity does not determine the interpretation of events or information, and it does not in itself provide any comprehensive outlook; nor does it presuppose homogeneity of perspectives among individuals who share a given social identity. The argument for the epistemic relevance of social identity, then, is not that every individual has his or her own identity and thus sees the world differently, but that the differences in social identity are structural and that these structural differences generate similar experiences across a group of individuals. The correlation between social identities, experience, and epistemology can be put as follows. Social identities structure what we experience, the quality of our experience, and how we interpret these experiences. Together, these experiences constitute the background against which we habitually interpret and know social reality. Such epistemological background conditions are culturally and historically “learned,” which means that they can be changed or learned by others, and thus can also be subject to scrutiny and critical reflection and deliberation. If this claim about the correlation between social identities, experience, and epistemology is correct, what does this mean for democratic inquiry and communication? It would be unwarranted to bestow unqualified epistemological significance on knowledge claims merely based on the social identity of people making those claims. But knowledge claims based on social identity may be relevant as a basis for the critique of social conventions or the real cost of policies.

9.3  The Place of Political Knowers in Democracy We can loosely relate Dewey’s inquiry pattern and its five stages—as outlined in chapter three—to the five stages of a “policy cycle”, a concept that had been developed by Lasswell (1956). “Policy cycle” is a useful concept for compartmentalizing the dynamic policy process into roughly five stages: (1) problem identification, definition and agenda setting; (2) shaping policy options; (3) decision-making; (4) implementation (the decision put into practice); (5) evaluation of the impact and outcomes of a decision made (policy monitoring and review). In fact, Lasswell very

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much was influenced by Dewey’s experience-based epistemology and his problem-­ based political philosophy (Lasswell 1951, 1971; see also Torgerson 1995, 236) for his model of the policy-cycle. To be sure, the policy-cycle-framework is usually used for theorizing and modeling policy-making processes within established democratic institutions, while Dewey’s notion of political inquiry has a much broader focus, involving various cultural and social political forces and energies.10 Also, the policy-cycle model itself has been criticized for being a too compartmentalized and a too static representation of policy-making processes, which in practice are marked by constant feedback and adjustment at every stage, thereby generating great complexity (Turnbull 2006; other critical studies invovle Howlett, Perl, and Ramesh 2009 and Sabatier 1999). But if we uncouple the policy-cycle model from its focus on existing political institutions, and if we acknowledge the dynamism and complexity of policymaking processes (similar to what we said about Dewey’s dynamic and complex inquiry-pattern), we can relate it to the process of political inquiry and to Dewey’s notion of democratic publics. The first stage of the policy cycle (problem identification and definition; agenda-­ setting) is crucial to the success of problem-solving, and it is also anticipatory in that both the perception and the framing of the problem are influenced by whatever (implicit) solutions are conceived (sometimes habitually or ideologically) as appropriate. It starts with an indeterminate situation and a doubt that entrenched customs and habits, rules and practices are not up to the task of satisfactorily dealing with the situation at hand anymore. Such doubt registers on an affective level as a feeling of incoherence and rises to the level of consciousness through the articulation and explication in conceptual frameworks, which then has to be brought to public awareness and acceptance within a public as a problem in need of a political solution. As said before, the institutional focus that the policy cycle heuristic offers might neglect the contexts of open public spheres outside of established institutions that are not oriented towards decision-making. In such contexts, at all levels of a decentered society, intuitive or tacit or deliberate perceptions and identifications of problematic situations feed, ideally, into the formation of a public. These perceptions and interpretations are connected to situated knowers, for which the experiential involvement in specific situations and the social identity carry epistemic consequences as portrayed on the previous pages. Why is the category of situated knowers critical here? Take the problem of racism discussed before. In a society where racism is manifest in various realms of people’s lives, everyday experiences of individuals who are directly affected by racism become central epistemic resources, as they help make clear that

 This focus on institutions has been criticized in theories of policymaking, for example by Turnbull (2006), who called for the application of the policy-cycle model beyond institutional frameworks: “Obviously, institutions are an essential component of policy making. They play a crucial role in structuring the action and we must incorporate institutions into any theory of policymaking. However, if we separate institutions from culture we risk fragmentation. Substituting institutional structures for an epistemological framework tends to reify them, legitimising established political processes by putting them beyond question and limiting the scope of politics to the activities of players at the apex of those institutions” (ibid., 10).

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there is a problem and help to elucidate how this problems “feels”, how it looks and how it can best be defined and framed. They also help to shape public awareness about the problem’s existence, how it actually is structured and how it might be connected to institutional forms of racism. As we can expect public communication to be restrained by dominant discourses and mainstream political language and action as well as ossified habits of perception and interpretation, the innovatory value of experiential “knowledge” is especially high due to its mostly tacit nature. Gaining access to it is hard in contexts where the prerogative of interpretation and perception of language translates into dominant paradigms of discourse that overshadow alternative interpretations and perceptions. Hence, making the implicit situated knowledge of situated knowers explicit is essential to the epistemic quality of the framing of problems and of bringing it to public consciousness. In more structured political environments, when it comes to the political agenda-­ setting in institutional frameworks (such as legislatures where parties and interest groups are the main actors), situated knowledge might be lost because it does not directly translate from the public to the institutional level, and because the distribution of power and interests within the legislature naturally results in the neglect of certain epistemically relevant perspectives—a condition that might be reinforced by the fact that many legislatures are non-descriptive representational bodies (Swers and Rouse 2011). The identification and definition of a political problem on this level often does not result in a positive understanding of a problem; instead, it results in systematic ignoring of social problems by the political-administrative system. Either there are no stakeholders of the specific problem present in or at the boundaries of institutions, or the opponents are so powerful in determining how specific problems are perceived, discussed, and framed that the issue is not discussed on the political agenda (policy monopoly). For example, studies on gender discrimination in the 1970s and 1980s show that the decisions by political actors not to deal with this problem were the result of policy monopolies (Howlett et  al. 2009, 141). Similarly, in the “Needle Park” case cited earlier the existing policy monopoly made an adequate framing of the problem impossible. Only after the policy monopoly was broken and the voices of those with direct experiential knowledge about the circumstances of the problems were heard, the problem(s) could adequately defined and matching strategies that could deal with the problem could successfully be developed. In these examples, the influence of situated knowers on the definition of the problems was crucial. From such examples we can generalize by claiming that the epistemic quality of the definition of the problem will tend to be higher the more it relies on the participation of situated knowers. The important point here is that participation of situated knowers is key for identifying and defining a political problem. Dewey’s theory of judgment and its focus on transforming instable, indeterminate situations into stable, determinate situations by means of a process of inquiry that allows for the control of the consequences of our actions, stresses the importance of the role of normative political judgments in expressing and framing the perceived existence of such instable, indeterminate situations. These judgments do not so much strive at predictability and control of the action directly but are rather expressions of perceived social problems in light of

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value-based interpretations of experiences made. Such expressions should be taken to be claims to know something about social and political problems, and they take up an important epistemic role within the larger endeavor of political inquiry. Stage two of the policy cycle, shaping policy options, involves the examination of various solution proposals. Political actors identify options, determine which options are feasible and which are not, and filter and narrow down the number of viable policy alternatives. Specialist knowers will certainly have to be involved at this stage, because they support the important epistemic work of pre-selection that reduces—in consideration of political feasibility, consultation with influential interest groups, the legal framework, etc.—the various possible courses of action or possible laws to a binary yes/no choice to a certain policy. However, considerations about political feasibility that are guided by specialist knowers alone will occasionally result in inferior policy proposals, as the Needle-Park case exemplarily shows. Only when considerations also take into account the knowledge-claims of situated knowers will the policy proposals be successful potential solutions to the problem at hand. From an epistemic point of view, we can therefore state that policy proposals should necessarily be informed by the ends and means that are deemed relevant according to the situated knowers and specialist knowers. At stage three of the policy cycle, elected representatives or citizens themselves decide between two or more policy alternatives and as such issue a political judgment. The decision to adopt one alternative over another will ideally be guided by the knowledge that already informed the construction of the policy proposals. There is no new knowledge involved here, but rather a complex synthesis of the existing knowledge claims. In other words, this is the stage where the faculty of judgment comes into its own, where an overall assessment viz. evaluation of means and ends in relation to the problematic situation results in a final judgment. Through aggregation, the epistemic advantage of the diverse multitude in the formal political institutions of vote counting comes into play. Stage four of the policy cycle is about putting the policies into practice. In democratic institutions as we know them, the principal actors involved at this stage are bureaucrats. The role of the bureaucrat in implementing policies is not that of the construction worker who simply carries out a construction plan of the architect. That this view is too simplistic has been demonstrated by several empirical studies (e.g. Hill and Hupe 2014; Howlett et al. 2009). Analyses of implementation processes reveal that the initial policies often fail to transpose, which is partly due to the fact that detailed implementation instructions are not part of policies. This gives bureaucrats a considerable degree of autonomy in the implementation of policies. Such autonomy can be justified epistemically: If local—situated—bureaucrats are not allowed discretion with regard to the contextual situation of application, the policy will likely fail in the end: goals, strategies, and actions need to be set up with special consideration to the stakeholders of the policy, who will be directly affected by it, and local bureaucrats may be best placed to determine who will be affected by the implementation of policies and how. Thus, epistemic considerations indicate that the implementation praxis is best placed in the hands of “street-level bureaucrats” (Lipsky 2010), because they are the people who know what the special

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contextual requirements of application look like, and they know or will come to know what works and what does not work. Street level bureaucracies are the public services whose workers interact with and have wide discretion over the dispensation of benefits or allocation of public sanctions and through whom citizens experience directly the government they have implicitly constructed (Gilson 2015). Due to the inevitable local and situational circumstances of implementation, street-level bureaucrats can use their own contextually generated knowledge claims about the usefulness of certain practices, and this will increase the likelihood of the success of a program. We can expand the term street-level bureaucrats so that it includes not only actors that are formally bureaucrats but in general all actors that possess situated knowledge surrounding an implementation process. With regard to the Needle Park example this would include physicians, social workers, and activists who were sources or bearers of these types of political knowledge, in the process of implementation as an on-going process of learning. Hence, due to the situatedness of the principal actors and the situational circumstances of implementation at this stage of the policy process, implementation needs to rely on street-level knowledge that is by definition relative to specific contexts. Evaluating the implemented decisions, at stage five, is the phase where the implemented decisions are tested. It is the experimental phase, where knowledge about the consequences of the policies provides feedback that then can be used for the re-evaluation of the made decisions. This requires specialist knowers when the effects can be measured reliably (for example with statistic data about heroin addiction or HIV infections), or situated knowers when the effects can best be assessed by listening to those involved and affected by the decision. Thus, situated knowers should be given (at least) a principal possibility to vocalize their experiences and interpretations of how the decision affects them and how it affects the stabilization and resolution of the initial indeterminate and problematic situation. The upshot of this analysis of political knowledge is twofold. First, the analysis reinforces what Dewey’s pragmatist epistemology suggests about the positive function of diversity in democratic inquiry: The knowledge required to govern well remains not in the hands of the few knowledgeable experts but is to be found in the diverse knowers dispersed throughout society. This is not to deny that publicly acknowledged specialists are important, yet people who are actually or potentially affected by a public problem or by a decision potentially are valuable epistemic resources for the problem-solving attempts of democratic politics. In matters of non-technical political problems we cannot turn reliably to a unique class of “political experts” for the entire task of making better laws and solving social and political problems. For democratic politics it seems appropriate to put it in this way: Democratic Deweyan  publics are the “real experts”, since they are the scenes of social and political processes of inquiry, modeled in such a way that they tend to produce good judgments about social and political problems and solutions, as argued in this book. The second conclusion of this analysis concerns democratic institutions. As knowers who participate in making good laws and good political decisions are diverse and heterogeneous, democratic publics should mirror such diversity in the sense that they ought to enable these knowers to become operative

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in one or the other (here unspecified) way, which presupposes mechanisms of including them at the different stages of the policy cycle. In particular, it calls for inclusive procedures (involving all kinds of communicative means) and for bottomup feedback mechanisms. This requires focusing attention on establishing mechanisms and practices that are directed at scrutinizing the spatially and temporally stretched processes by which politically relevant knowledge claims are transferred into policy action and equipped with the ability to initiate or refresh debate and inquiry across the public. While policy advisers, consultative committees, commissions of enquiry, think tanks and academics, and other proprietors of specialist knowledge are well integrated into today’s democratic policy-making procedures (Verelli 2008; Panke, Hönnige, and Gollub 2015), the analysis presented here additionally calls for institutional arrangements which aim at providing situated knowers with opportunities to influence and review decisions made somewhere within the policy cycle, by which the democratic publics can exercise their function of coordinating the diverse categories of political knowers.

References Alcoff, Linda Martin. 1999. On Judging Epistemic Credibility: Is Social Identity Relevant? Philosophic Exchange 29 (1): Article 1. ———. 2010. Epistemic Identities. Episteme 7 (2): 128–137. Brown, Mark. 2009. Science in Democracy: Expertise, Institutions, and Representation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Collins, Patricia Hill. 2012. Social Inequality, Power, and Politics: Intersectionality and American Pragmatism in Dialogue. The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 26 (2): 442–457. Collins, Harry. 2014. Are We All Scientific Experts Now? Cambridge: Polity. Dewey, John. 1927. The Public and Its Problems. The Later Works, 1925–1953, 2. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dibner, Kenne, and Catherine Snow. 2016. Science Literacy: Concepts, Contexts, and Consequences. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. Gilson, Lucy. 2015. Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Service. In The Oxford Handbook of Classics in Public Policy and Administration. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grob, Peter. 2009. Zürcher “Needle-Park”: Ein Stück Drogengeschichte und -politik, 1968–2008. Zürich: Chronos Verlag. Hill, Michael, and Peter Hupe. 2014. Implementing Public Policy: An Introduction to the Study of Operational Governance. London: SAGE. Howlett, Michael, Anthony Perl, and M. Ramesh. 2009. Studying Public Policy: Policy Cycles & Policy Subsystems. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Irwin, Alan. 2006. The Politics of Talk Coming to Terms with the ‘New’ Scientific Governance. Social Studies of Science 36 (2): 299–320. Lasswell, Harold Dwight. 1951. The Policy Orientation. In The Policy Sciences; Recent Developments in Scope and Method, ed. Daniel Lerner and Harold Dwight Lasswell, 3–15. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1971. A Pre-View of Policy Sciences. In Amsterdam. New York: Elsevier. Lipsky, Michael. 2010. Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Service. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

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MacFarlane, Allison. 2003. Underlying Yucca Mountain The Interplay of Geology and Policy in Nuclear Waste Disposal. Social Studies of Science 33 (5): 783–807. Medina, José. 2012. The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations. In Oxford. New York: Oxford University Press. Meili, Daniel. 2007. Vom Zürcher Platzspitz zur Heroinverschreibung  - oder: Die progressive Drogenpolitik der Schweiz. Suchttherapie 8 (02): 50–56. Nordt, Carlos, and Rudolf Stohler. 2009. Low-Threshold Methadone Treatment, Heroin Price, Police Activity and Incidence of Heroin Use: The Zurich Experience. International Journal of Drug Policy 20 (6): 497–501. ———. 2010. Combined Effects of Law Enforcement and Substitution Treatment on Heroin Mortality. Drug and Alcohol Review 29 (5): 540–545. Sabatier, Paul. 1999. The Need for Better Theories. In Theories of the Policy Process, ed. Paul A. Sabatier, 3–17. Boulder: Westview Press. Swers, Michele L., and Stella M.  Rouse. 2011. Descriptive Representation: Understanding the Impact of Identity on Substantive Representation of Group Interests. In The Oxford Handbook of the American Congress, ed. George C.  Edwards III, Frances Lee, and Eric Schickler, 241–271. New York: Oxford University Press. Torgerson, Douglas. 1995. Policy Analysis and Public Life: The Restoration of Phronesis? In Political Science in History: Research Programs and Political Traditions, ed. James Farr, John S. Dryzek, and Stephen T. Leonard, 225–252. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Turnbull, Nick. 2006. How Should We Theorise Public Policy? Problem Solving and Problematicity. Policy and Society 25 (2): 3–22. Verelli, Nadia. 2008. The Role of the Policy Advisor. Queen’s University. Kingston: Institute of Intergovernmental Relations. Wynne, Brian. 1998. May the Sheep Safely Graze? A Reflexive View of the Expert–Lay Knowledge Divide. In Risk, Environment and Modernity: Towards a New Ecology, ed. Scott Lash, Bronislaw Szerszynski, and Brian Wynne, 44–84. London: SAGE. Young, Iris Marion. 2002. Inclusion and Democracy. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.

Index

A Affect, 69, 90, 115, 120, 164, 176, 191, 196, 205 Alcoff, L.M., 115, 200 Alexander, T.M., 119 Anderson, E., 15, 29, 44, 109, 113 Apel, K.-O., 29, 31–33 Arendt, H., 2, 4, 7–9, 11–13, 15, 16, 56, 71, 81, 85–101, 111, 114 Aristotle, 106, 176 Authority, 3, 4, 11, 14, 17, 19, 28, 29, 45, 50, 116, 136, 141, 145, 162, 180, 196, 197 B Beiner, R., 90, 176 Bernstein, R., 80 Bohman, J., 15, 44, 109, 164, 165, 175 Brandom, R., 40, 41, 94 Brennan, J., 4 Brown, M., 194 Brown, W., 2 C Chambers, S., 4, 32, 33, 175, 176 Cohen, J., 27, 140 Conant, J., 114 Condorcet Jury Theorem (CJT), 27–29 Consensus, 5, 27, 30, 32, 34, 47, 50, 132, 156–161, 170, 179, 180, 191, 194 D Democracy, 4

deliberative, 18, 26, 27, 30, 137–140, 158–160, 170–172, 175, 176, 182 direct, 161 epistemic, 4–10, 26–29, 34–37, 39, 49–51, 82, 135, 136, 153, 179 as a form of government, 44, 45, 49, 89, 161, 162, 185 representative, 4, 161 as a social ideal, 44, 46, 49, 131, 132, 161 systemic theories of, 170 way of life, 45, 96, 161, 186 Democratic citizenship, 2, 7–9, 15, 16, 26, 30, 139 Dewey, J., 2, 26, 55, 85, 103, 128, 152, 169, 190 Diversity cognitive, 153–155, 157, 160 experiential, 157 functional, 154, 155, 157 trumps ability, 152–158 Doubt, 12, 17, 42, 50, 57, 67, 78, 123, 128, 133, 135, 139, 142–144, 159, 178, 202 Dryzek, J., 171, 172, 174–176 E Epistemic injustice, 115 Epistemology critical social, 14, 19, 106, 190 of differentiated experiences, 113–117 political, 139, 191 pragmatist, 18, 35, 41–43, 49, 113, 170, 195, 205 social, 18, 35, 38, 42, 113, 152, 157, 191, 199

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 M. I. Räber, Knowing Democracy – A Pragmatist Account of the Epistemic Dimension in Democratic Politics, Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations 14, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53258-1

209

Index

210 Equality horizontal, 3–10, 17, 50, 99, 108, 128, 136, 186 vertical, 3–6, 17, 50, 108, 128, 135, 145 Estlund, D., 29, 37, 38 Experience aesthetic, 68, 69, 92–96 primary, 60, 66–71, 73, 75, 76, 82, 95 qualitative, 12, 67, 71, 87, 91, 93, 95, 100, 105, 118, 158 reflective, 11, 16, 55, 63, 66, 69, 93, 118 secondary, 66, 69–71, 118 Ezrahi, Y., 163 F Fallibilism, 76, 80, 100, 122, 123, 130, 138 Ferrara, A., 112 Fesmire, S., 63, 64 Festenstein, M., 11, 15, 44, 122, 127, 131, 133, 134, 136 Freedom, 3, 5, 7–9, 14, 45, 46, 71, 88, 92, 94, 96, 98–100, 133, 134 Frega, R., 15, 44, 45, 48, 77–81, 136, 164 Fricker, M., 115 G Gadamer, H.-G., 97 Growth, 11, 17, 47, 124, 128, 130–136, 145, 161, 183, 184, 190 H Habermas, J., 27, 29–34, 158 Habits, 10, 12, 45–47, 51, 57, 58, 60, 99, 100, 114, 119, 120, 129, 134, 142–144, 170, 179, 186, 197, 199, 200, 202, 203 Honneth, A., 34, 131 I Imagination, 5, 8, 43, 46, 63, 64, 74, 88, 89, 91 Immediacy, 10, 60, 66–70 Inquiry, 2, 26, 55, 85, 104, 128, 151, 170, 190 Instrumentalism, 50, 56, 57, 59, 75, 122, 155–156 J James, W., 40 Joas, H., 73 Judgment

aesthetic theory of, 9, 81 judicial, 12, 56, 85, 103–112 normative, 13, 16, 17, 88, 103–105, 122 political, 1, 39, 56, 85, 103, 128, 152, 170, 194 pragmatist theory of, 55–82, 100 problem of, 1–5, 16 reflective, 12, 86–88, 90, 105 value, 5, 17, 104, 121 K Kant, I., 12, 31, 40, 72, 85–87, 90, 91 Knight, J., 15, 44, 144 Knowledge expert, 135, 136, 190, 194 identity, 191 situated, 11, 192, 203–205 theory of, 41, 42, 119, 162 Koopman, C., 15, 44 L Landemore, H., 4, 26, 109, 153, 155–158, 160 Lasswell, H., 201 Lippmann, W., 162 Livingston, A., 15, 44, 185 M MacGilvray, E., 47, 131, 136, 142–144 Mansbridge, J., 171, 172, 174, 175, 183 Mead, G.H., 40 Medina, J., 15, 44, 116, 118, 135, 184, 197 Mills, C., 115, 116 Misak, C., 15, 17, 31, 40, 44, 80, 128, 136–143 O Objectivity, 77–79, 97–100, 114 Opinion, 3, 4, 8, 9, 31, 45, 48, 73, 97, 99, 111, 121, 130, 153, 163, 172, 173, 177, 179, 193 P Pappas, G., 15, 44, 48, 70, 71, 75, 135 Peirce, C.S., 17, 35, 40–44, 62, 68, 78, 92, 93, 119, 128, 136–138, 141–143 Perspective, 8, 26, 78, 91, 104, 128, 151, 170, 192 Peter, F., 34–36, 38

Index Plato, 41, 141, 177 Pluralism, 5–9, 14, 47, 78, 92, 94, 99, 131, 138, 139, 158–161 Policy cycle, 19, 191, 199, 201, 202, 204, 206 Posner, R., 40, 41, 44 Pragmatism, 2, 9–13, 15, 16, 26–51, 111–113, 118, 121, 133, 142, 144, 158–161 Proceduralism, 34–39, 50, 131 Przeworski, A., 2 Public reason, 5, 30, 79, 112, 137, 176, 185 Publics, 2, 30, 58, 87, 107, 130, 152, 169, 190 Putnam, H., 40, 121 Q Quality, 6, 8, 17, 18, 27, 31, 33, 35, 39, 59, 61, 65, 67–72, 82, 93, 95, 109, 113, 135, 143, 145, 152, 153, 159, 169–186, 192, 193, 201, 203 R Rawls, J., 5, 36, 109, 138, 140 Rhetoric, 172–177, 184, 185 Richardson, H., 3, 76, 80 Rogers, M., 48 Rorty, R., 15, 40, 44 S Schwartzberg, M., 4, 26, 106, 109, 136 Sellars, W., 40, 93

211 Social identity, 108, 191, 197–202 Steinberger, P., 7 Stroud, S., 177 Stuhr, J.J., 47 T Talisse, R., 15, 17, 44, 47, 80, 128, 131, 136–143 Truth political, 9, 14, 98 as a regulative ideal, 81 theory of, 80 U Urbinati, N., 2, 111, 112 W Warren, M., 172, 180 Westbrook, R., 15, 44, 48, 162 West, C., 40 Y Young, I.M., 115, 118, 172, 175, 200 Z Zamora, J.S., 15, 44, 48, 120 Zerilli, L., 5, 7, 9, 86–92, 97–100, 111, 114