For better or worse, democracy and epistemology are intertwined. For one thing, politics is partly a matter of gathering, assessing, and applying information. And this can be done responsibly or incompetently. At least since Plato, a leading critique of democracy has focused on the ignorance of ordinary citizens. Historically, this kind of critique has supplied the basis for several nondemocratic proposals. Yet it has also worked in the background of a range of views within democratic theory. Among these are views that have relied on markets as mechanisms for sharing and distributing information.
But there are hazards to market-based thinking about democracy. In Citizen Knowledge: Markets, Experts, and the Infrastructure of Democracy (Oxford UP, 2023), Lisa Herzog explores three conceptually distinct sites where democracy interfaces with epistemology: markets, expert communities, and public deliberation. The result is an integrated political epistemology for democracy.
Robert Talisse is the W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University.
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Karen Neander, “A Mark of the Mental: In Defense of Informational Teleosemantics” (MIT Press, 2017)
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Kristina Musholt, “Thinking About Oneself: From Nonconceptual Content to the Concept of a Self” (MIT Press, 2015)
Alejandra Mancilla, “The Right of Necessity: Moral Cosmopolitanism and Global Poverty” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016)
Gualtiero Piccinini, “Physical Computation: A Mechanistic Account” (Oxford UP, 2016)
Justin Snedegar, “Contrastive Reasons” (Oxford UP, 2017)
Bongrae Seok, “Moral Psychology of Confucian Shame: Shame of Shamelessness” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017)
Peter Balint, “Respecting Toleration: Traditional Liberalism and Contemporary Diversity” (Oxford University Press, 2017)
David Danks, “Unifying the Mind: Cognitive Representations as Graphical Models” (MIT Press, 2014)
Linda Zagzebski, “Exemplarist Moral Theory” (Oxford UP, 2017)
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