Project Summary |
Project News and Activities |
A prominent strand of theorizing about liberal democracy holds that it is very effective at producing knowledge. Several political philosophers even claim that its knowledge-producing potential provides a justification for liberal democracy. Briefly, their reasoning is that liberal democracy’s commitment to freedom of speech, free inquiry, pluralism, and inclusiveness facilitates rational deliberation among citizens, which in turn leads to knowledge.
Real political debates in liberal democracies, however, are often mired in controversy. Just think of discussions about climate change or healthcare reform. Moreover, their eventual outcomes frequently bear the marks of compromise or downright irrationality. The death toll and financial costs of the ‘war on terror’, for instance, are several orders of magnitude greater than those of the attacks it sought to pre-empt. This discrepancy between the theory and reality of liberal democracy provides the starting point for the current project. Its aim is to evaluate and improve the knowledge-producing potential of liberal democracy. (A) We will use contemporary social epistemology to articulate the ideal of how liberal democracy is supposed to be effective at producing knowledge. Then, we will investigate two major challenges to this ideal. (B) How to respond rationally to the intractable and deep disagreements among citizens that are characteristic of liberal democracies. And (C) to what extent the ideal is undermined by the impairments to individual and collective rationality that cognitive and social psychology have documented. Finally, (D) we will reassess the ideal in light of the challenges and propose ways in which they can be overcome so that liberal democracy can become better at producing knowledge. The project constitutes the first systematic effort by an epistemologist to evaluate the knowledge-producing potential of liberal democracy. Because we will look for realistic ways to make democracy better at producing knowledge, the project is also relevant to society. |
Truth-finding in democracy
December 2018 – The Young Academy has awarded Rens Vliegenthart and myself a small project grant for an interdisciplinary project on truth-finding in democracy. Together with the Raad voor Openbaar Bestuur, we will organize two interdisciplinary meetings with communication scientists, political scientists, psychologists, philosophers, and policy makers and edit an accessible volume in Dutch on the project theme.
Postdocs
November 2017 – Very happy to announce that Chris Ranalli will be joining my project as a postdoc. In addition, Michael Hannon will be collaborating with us as a visiting researcher.
PhD student
February 2017 – Thirza Lagewaard joins the project as a PhD student. She will be working on deep disagreement and epistemic injustice.
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