KNOWING DEMOCRACY - A PRAGMATIST ACCOUNT OF THE EPISTEMIC DI IBD

Sinopsis

How can we justify democracyâÇÖs trust in the political judgments of ordinary people?áInáKnowing Democracy, Michael RÃñberásituates this 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 ArendtâÇÖs aesthetic conception of political judgment. By foregrounding the concept ofápolitical judgment in democracies, the book showsáthat a democratic theory of political judgments based on John DeweyâÇÖs 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 forádemocracyâÇÖs trust in ordinary peopleâÇÖs political judgments, RÃñber argues, resides in an egalitarian conception of democratic inquiry that blends the epistemic and the aesthetic aspects of the making of political judgments.By offering a rigorous scholarly analysisáof the epistemic and aesthetic foundations of democracyáfrom a pragmatistáperspective,áKnowing Democracyácontributes to the current debates in political epistemology and aesthetics and politics, both ofáwhich ask about the appropriate reflective and experiential circumstances of democratic politics.áThe bookábrings together for the first time debates on epistemic democracy, aesthetic judgment and those on pragmatist social epistemology, and establishes an original pragmatist conception of epistemic democracy.