Getting Democratic Priorities Straight: Pragmatism, Diversity, and the Role of Beliefs

ABSTRACT

Jack Knight and James Johnson argue in The Priority of Democracy that democracy should be theorized and justified pragmatically: Democratic deliberations should be given a central coordinating role in society not because they realize any particular abstract ideal, but because they would elicit the information needed to solve real-world problems. However, Knight and Johnson rely on a naïve economic understanding of knowledge that assumes implausibly that individuals know what they need to know and need only aggregate thier separate beliefs. It is precisely because we may not know what we need to know that we need to continually test our ideas. Contra Knight and Johnson, moreover, we ought to accept that our ability to interpret social experiments properly is questionable. A pragmatic approach to social inquiry, therefore, ought to investigate what beliefs political actors actually bring to collective decisions rather than how theoretically perfect beliefs ought to be elicited and aggregated.

Keywords:

• deliberative democracy
• interpretivism
• James Johnson
• Jack Knight
• political epistemology
• pragmatism

Notes

1. I thank Jeffrey Friedman for clarifying this point to me.

2. This is a point adapted from Knight and Johnson 2011, 15–16; see also Pennington 2014.

3. Hayek does not actually make an argument from incentives in “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” so this is a somewhat inaccurate characterization. Perhaps the closest thing to an incentives argument offered by Hayek (1945, 526) is that individuals need only be concerned with their own ends and how external events affect these ends to adjust their choices harmoniously with those of others. A close reading of Hayek suggests that this is an epistemological point that is provided to encourage Hayek's colleagues in economics to consider the process that moves economies to equilibrium rather than the facets of equilibrium itself. Nonetheless, as my argument suggests, some sympathy ought to be extended to Knight and Johnson's reading of Hayek, for if one assumes (as Hayek appears to do in 1945) that we already possess all the information we need, the only explanation left for whether or not we put that information to good use is whether or not we are motivated to do so.

4. See Landemore and Page 2014.

5. Landemore follows Lu Hong and Scott Page (2004) in setting out the “diversity trumps ability” thesis. However, Landemore adapts and develops the theorem enough for us to be able to reasonably restrict ourselves to her use of it (see Landemore 2013, 160–66).

6. It may be supposed here that one's ability to absorb such contrary evidence is itself dependent upon the deliberative process, such that deliberation itself may make us more open-minded. This is of course an empirical claim. But there is good reason to think it is incorrect; the literature on public opinion, for instance, largely suggests that the more informed people are, the more they tend to interpret new information in a way that confirms existing beliefs (see, for instance, Taber and Lodge 2006, Gaines et al. 2007, and Druckman 2012). The likely explanation for this effect has arguably been clear since Philip Converse's (1964) classic study on public opinion: the more informed one becomes, the tighter and seemingly more coherent one's opinions seem to be (Friedman 2006). As a result, it seems likely that in democratic deliberations, the more coherent discussions become, the less one might expect diversity to have an impact upon beliefs.

7. It may appear that I have given short shrift to the role of experts in this argument. When I talk to my physician, for instance, I learn things precisely because we are located in different epistemic networks. This is of course true, but to suggest that our different epistemic positions are the cause of my learning here is incorrect. I learn from my physician because, straightforwardly enough, she is a physician and I am not. I speak to my physician prepared to believe her because my web of beliefs tells me that she is well informed, and that I am ignorant, about the topics we are to discuss. Indeed, I am so well prepared to believe her that she could tell me a range of falsehoods and I would believe her. Similarly, I tend to believe other scholars when they tell me about their research, and (even!) journalists when they report the news. In none of these cases is diversity the cause of my “learning.” Rather, it is my prior belief that their credentials are credentials that make their opinions “worth listening to.” At the point at which I am no longer credulous (maybe I've done my own research), this learning process breaks down, and I need some other, non-diversity mechanism such as authority or charisma to change my beliefs.

8. See Friedman 2014.