Epistemic Proceduralism and Democratic Authority

There is, somewhat surprisingly, controversy as to whether any of democracy's value rests on its applying intelligence to the problem of what, politically, should be done. In this chapter, I sketch some main elements of a longer argument to the effect that it does.1 Many approaches to democracy try to avoid this ‘epistemic’ ingredient, and for serious reasons. For one thing, some people wonder if there really are correct and incorrect answers to political questions. But even if there are correct answers why should we think the unwashed masses would be any good at discovering them? If we need an epistemic dimension in politics then won't we be led to empower a wise elite, contrary to our deep democratic convictions? I believe these and other challenges to an epistemic approach to democracy can be met in a view I call epistemic proceduralism.

There is no hope of making democracy some supreme epistemic device for solving political problems. Some approaches try this by appealing to a fascinating mathematical result — Condorcet's ‘jury theorem’ — but there are fatal obstacles to applying that result to the case of democracy, as I will argue. Epistemic procedural-ism, as we will see, only requires modest epistemic value, not the extreme kind promised by the jury theorem. This is an advantage over other epistemic approaches. Still, something needs to be said about how democracy might have even modest epistemic value. The key, I will suggest, is the perfectly familiar application of intelligence through discussion and interpersonal reasoning. Obviously, that is no panacea. There are ways in which it can go wrong, and they certainly occur in political discussions to some degree. My suggestion is not that political discussion would typically resemble an edifying discussion, but that we can start with that ideal and propose strategies for remedying — or as I will suggest, countervailing — the epistemic damage when actual discussion diverges in certain ways from an ideal discussion. I'll say a little more about this below.