Re-Engaging Normative and Empirical Democratic Theory: Or, Why Normative Democratic Theory Is Empirical All the Way Down

IF 0.4 3区社会学 Q4 POLITICAL SCIENCE

Critical Review Pub Date : 2022-04-03 DOI:10.1080/08913811.2022.2054612

Quinlan Bowman

引用次数: 0

Abstract

ABSTRACT Historically, many philosophers and social scientists have sharply distinguished between “normative” and “empirical” forms of inquiry. In response, some have called for a re-engagement of these forms of inquiry. Here I offer a novel way of justifying such re-engagement in democratic theory. Drawing on classical pragmatism, I argue that normative democratic theory is a form of practical reasoning, hence inevitably involves empirical inquiry. Thus, in reasoning about what democratic processes ought to look like, we should avoid sharply distinguishing normative from empirical forms of reasoning, just as we should avoid sharply distinguishing theoretical from practical forms of reasoning.

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重新参与规范和经验民主理论:或者，为什么规范民主理论一直是经验的

摘要历史上，许多哲学家和社会科学家都对“规范”和“实证”的探究形式进行了尖锐的区分。作为回应，一些人呼吁重新进行这些形式的调查。在这里，我提供了一种新颖的方式来证明这种重新参与民主理论的合理性。借鉴古典实用主义，我认为规范民主理论是一种实践推理形式，因此不可避免地涉及实证探究。因此，在对民主进程应该是什么样子进行推理时，我们应该避免将规范推理形式与经验推理形式区分开来，就像我们应该避免区分理论推理形式与实践推理形式一样。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Critical Review POLITICAL SCIENCE-

CiteScore

1.30

自引率

12.50%

发文量

期刊介绍： Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society is a political-science journal dedicated to advancing political theory with an epistemological bent. Recurrent questions discussed in our pages include: How can political actors know what they need to know to effect positive social change? What are the sources of political actors’ beliefs? Are these sources reliable? Critical Review is the only journal in which the ideational determinants of political behavior are investigated empirically as well as being assessed for their normative implications. Thus, while normative political theorists are the main contributors to Critical Review, we also publish scholarship on the realities of public opinion, the media, technocratic decision making, ideological reasoning, and other empirical phenomena.