Roundtable on Epistemic Democracy and Its Critics

Abstract

On September 3, 2015, the Political Epistemology/Ideas, Knowledge, and Politics section of the American Political Science Association sponsored a roundtable on epistemic democracy as part of the APSA’s annual meetings. Chairing the roundtable was Daniel Viehoff, Department of Philosophy, University of Sheffield. The other participants were Jack Knight, Department of Political Science and the Law School, Duke University; Hélène Landemore, Department of Political Science, Yale University; and Nadia Urbinati, Department of Political Science, Columbia University. We thank the participants for permission to republish their remarks, which they edited for clarity after the fact.

Keywords:

• deliberative democracy
• epistemic democracy
• procedural democracy
• rational ignorance

Notes

1. For Aristotle too the “function of liberty” within democracies is to “live . . . as one likes” and not as a “slave” (Politics, 6.1317b). Obviously, however, Paine and Aristotle have vastly different conceptions of who should qualify as citizens within democracies.