Assessing the epistemic quality of democratic decision-making in terms of adequate support for conclusions

Abstract

How can we assess the epistemic quality of democratic decision-making? Sceptics doubt such assessments are possible, as they must rely on controversial substantive standards of truth and rightness. Challenging that scepticism, this paper suggests a procedure-independent standard for assessing the epistemic quality of democratic decision-making by evaluating whether it is adequately supported by reasons. Adequate support for conclusion is a necessary (but insufficient on its own) aspect of epistemic quality for any epistemic justification of democracy, though particularly relevant to theories that emphasize public deliberation. Finding existing methods for measuring the quality of public discourse to fall short, we draw on an epistemological theory of argumentation to provide a more sophisticated approach to evaluating the epistemic quality of democratic decision-making, illustrate how the approach can be used, and demonstrate its relevance for the epistemic turn in democratic theory.

Keywords:

• Epistemic democracy
• deliberative democracy
• epistemological theory of argumentation
• argument schemes
• support adequacy
• discourse quality

Acknowledgements

For their comments on earlier versions of this paper, we thank Svenja Ahlhaus, Sveinung Arnesen, Simone Chambers, Felix Gerlsbeck, Peter Hallberg, Andrew Knops, Helene Landemore, Olof Leffler, Peter Niesen, Valeria Ottonelli, Markus Patberg, Sean Sinclair and Daniele Santoro. We have also benefited greatly from discussing some of these ideas with Christoph Lumer and Douglas Walton.