Citizens in Search of Facts: A Case Study from the Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review on Measure 82

ABSTRACT

Accounts of public deliberation often refer to the notion of ‘facts’ or ‘accurate information.’ These epistemological notions, however, lack a stable, reliable definition used in research across disciplines or in practical politics across ideological fault lines. We consider realist definitions of fact within the analytical philosophy of language, specifically recent proposals to distinguish between facts of nature and socially constructed facts (Searle), and pragmatist definitions of fact (Peirce, Dewey). We argue that a pragmatist approach to facts as agreed upon circumstances that define a problem, i.e., consistent social constructivism, is more suitable for deliberative theory and practice. We use a case of The Citizens’ Initiative Review, where participants are explicitly asked to agree on a set of factual statements about the legislation at stake, as a clear example of cognitive difficulties that people experience when facts are treated as atomistic units with a context-independent truth value. We propose that in contexts of ideological pluralism facts can be defined as key parameters of problem situations that are consistently brought up in competing opinions. In such contexts, agreeing on facts will involve a complex syntactic pattern that brings these parameters into a coherent description of disagreement.

KEYWORDS:

• public deliberation
• facts
• values
• scenarios
• pragmatism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ekaterina Lukianova

Ekaterina Lukianova is a program officer at the Kettering Foundation in the United States. She is interested in developing tools for analyzing public deliberation. She is involved in experiments with deliberative pedagogy in higher education, as well as in informal adult learning. Prior to this, she taught in the Department of English Philology and Cultural Studies at Saint Petersburg State University in Russia.

Igor Tolochin

Igor Tolochin is a professor in the Department of English Philology and Cultural Studies at Saint Petersburg State University in Russia. His research agenda encompasses a broad spectrum of linguistic studies ranging from lexical semantics to textual meaning in different speech genres.