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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Susanna Schellenberg, "The Unity of Perception: Content, Consciousness, and Evidence" (Oxford UP, 2018)
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Camisha Russell, "The Assisted Reproduction of Race" (Indiana UP, 2018)
Nicholas Shea, "Representation in Cognitive Science" (Oxford UP, 2018)
Mary Kate McGowan, "Just Words: On Speech and Hidden Harm" (Oxford UP, 2019)
James Doyle, "No Morality, No Self: Anscombe's Radical Skepticism" (Harvard UP, 2018)
Mollie Gerver, "The Ethics and Practice of Refugee Repatriation" (U Edinburgh Press, 2018)
Jill Stauffer, "Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard" (Columbia UP, 2015)
T. J. Kasperbauer, "Subhuman: The Moral Psychology of Human Attitudes Towards Animals" (Oxford UP, 2018)
Michael Hannon, "What is the Point of Knowledge? A Function-First Epistemology" (Oxford UP, 2019)
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Elizabeth Schechter, "Self-Consciousness and Split Brains: The Mind's I" (Oxford UP, 2018)
Guy Axtell, "Problems of Religious Luck: Assessing the Limits of Reasonable Religious Disagreement" (Lexington, 2019)
Ethan Mills, "Three Pillars of Skepticism in Classical India: Nagarjuna, Jayarasi, and Sri Harsa" (Lexington Books, 2018)
Jonathan Birch, "The Philosophy of Social Evolution" (Oxford UP, 2017)
Henry S. Richardson, "Articulating the Moral Community: Toward a Constructive Ethical Pragmatism" (Oxford UP, 2018)
Maria Kronfeldner, "What's Left of Human Nature? A Post-Essentialist, Pluralist, and Interactive Account of a Contested Concept" (MIT Press, 2018)
Samuel Schindler, "Theoretical Virtues in Science: Discovering Reality Through Theory" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
Carrie Figdor, "Pieces of Mind: The Proper Domain of Psychological Predicates" (Oxford UP, 2018)
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