The Epistemic Value of Democratic Deliberation

Abstract

Recently, some normative approaches to democracy have emphasized its actual or aspirational epistemic value—a tendency to make good or correct decisions. While some accounts explain how such value might arise in a broadly statistical and probabilistic way, other accounts emphasize ways in which interpersonal political deliberation might have epistemic value of the right kind. Epistemic democratic deliberation plays a role in some traditional approaches, but it has been more prominent in recent decades. In this chapter we explain and discuss approaches which consider mechanisms by which democratic deliberation might have epistemic value, and also approaches which focus on the role that such a hypothesized epistemic value might play in an account of the authority or justification of democratic arrangements.