Abstract
This essay criticizes the current approach to epistemic democracy. Epistemic democrats are preoccupied with the question of how a society can best exploit a given stock of knowledge. This article argues that the problem-solving capability of a society depends on two factors rather than one. The quality of decision-making depends both on how a democracy is able to make use of its stock of knowledge and on the size of the knowledge stock. Society’s problem-solving capability over time is therefore a function of its ability to develop its knowledge exploitation mechanisms and the growth rate of its knowledge stock. Based on this enhanced model of social problem-solving, this essay compares two different political ideal types: experimental democracy, as commonly defended by epistemic democrats; and polycentric democracy, a model defended most commonly by political economists.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
The term ‘institutional epistemology,’ to my knowledge, was coined by Anderson (2006).
While Hayek is famous for his argument that the market prices do wonders in aggregating the available information, it is commonly overlooked that Hayek was also concerned with the production of new knowledge.
The term ‘polycentric democracy’ is a term of art that refers to a special class of democratic conceptions. While political economists usually do not use the term, they have much to say about some political concepts as “ideal federalism” (Buchanan (1996) that fall under the much wider concept of “polycentric democracy.” Compare: Aligica and Tarko (2012), Aligica and Boettke (2011).
The reason for this is simply that any epistemic mechanism that aims at creating or discovering solutions to problems in contexts where we are not in the possession of full knowledge can never be evaluated absolutely, but only comparatively.
Emphasis deleted.
The conditions for this (original) version of the theorem are as follows: (1) there need to be exactly two choices, (2) the jury must contain an uneven number of people, (3) that each member of the jury can identify the correct decision with a probability of more than 50%.
For an easily accessible account, compare: Sunstein (2006).
Later I will have to say more about the content of the knowledge stock that is relevant for social problem-solving.
In the last section, we will talk in more detail about possible improvements on democracies capability to make use of its knowledge stock.
I don’t want to claim that these are the only factors that matter for the epistemic assessment. Other factors might matter as well. But science advances in small steps. In future work, it would be interesting to think about problem-solving accuracy, for instance. It seems plausible that a single social problem might take different forms in different parts of the country. A single solution that needs to address all the diverse manifestations of a problem, prima facie, might be less or more accurate.
Of course, there is good reason to believe that even if autocracies had more leeway to create knowledge, they nevertheless don’t have the incentives to invest in knowledge creation and in that enhance their problem-solving capability.
Principally, it would of course also be possible to choose a set of tentative solutions for implementation.
I use the term public goods here and elsewhere in a colloquial, non-technical manner.
This term is borrowed from the business and economics literature. In both literatures, the term is used to signify that some actor or company possesses full technological knowledge.
The book of blueprints then also contains entries on failed solutions, if we mean by that solutions that meet the relevant respective evaluative criteria only to a low degree.
There is of course the complication that in reality, the way we organize our healthcare system might have ramifications for our social safety net and so forth. Let us set a side all these difficulties. It is easily imaginable that the book of blueprints would have not only a section for individual alternatives for producing certain public goods, but also entries that would specify the entire set of institutions of a comprehensive doctrine like libertarianism, communism, or syndicalism.
The fixed costs of transition will be different, depending on the initial state of affairs. A perfect book of blueprints would need to accommodate this fact.
In this framework, it makes sense to distinguish between a moral problem and a social problem. A moral problem is a problem that exists in a given society whether or not the people within conceive of it as a problem or not.
Unfortunately, I do not have space here for such a reassessment. What I can posit is that deliberation is especially useful in the process of error elimination.
The wider literature in democracy studies is not open to the same critique. Especially scholars concerned with deliberative democracy have studied alternative ways of democratic schemes in much detail. I will say some more about that shortly.
The pragmatists listed are epistemic democrats in the sense that they are convinced of the epistemic superiority of democracy.
The definition is a variation on Aligica and Tarko’s (2012, p. 254) more general definition of polycentric systems.
In passing, it should also be noted that that there is no obvious conceptual reason that epistemic democrats should elect a (monocentric) experimentalist account of democracy over a polycentric (experimentalist) account. However, it is a simple fact that epistemic democrats of all varieties, mostly without giving any argument, unfold their arguments against the background of a monocentric, experimentalist account of democracy.
Unfortunately, I lack the space to discuss how a regulatory framework can limit the externalities of local experiments.
Let me reiterate that I am only concerned here with a comparative epistemic assessment. It might be the case that experimental democracy is more just than its polycentric counterpart, even though the latter has a higher epistemic value.
Gaus (2016) warns that we should not be too optimistic about the epistemic gains from social experiments. Gaus is certainly right that social experiments are very different from laboratory experiments, since we cannot hold all but one variable constant in social experiments. However, I think that Gaus’s critique at least partly misses the point. We don’t engage in open problem-solving processes, because we want to enhance our models in the social sciences. We engage in these processes to solve social and not explanatory problems. If one start-up city makes Rawls’s property-owning democracy work, that is an important information, regardless of whether we know or not which subset of the rule changes were necessary and sufficient for achieving a stable property-owning democracy.
References
Aligica, P. D., & Boettke, P. (2011). The two social philosophies of Ostroms’ institutionalism. Policy Studies Journal, 39, 29–49.
Aligica, P. D., & Tarko, V. (2012). Polycentricity: From Polanyi to Ostrom, and beyond. Governance, 25, 237–262.
Anderson, E. (2006). The epistemology of democracy. Episteme, 3, 8–22.
Brennan, J. (2016). Against democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Buchanan, J. M. (1996). Federalism and individual sovereignty. Cato Journal, 15(2–3), 259–268.
Dewey, J. (1946). The public and its problems: An essay in political inquiry. Chicago: Gateway Books.
Estlund, D. M. (2009). Democratic authority: A philosophical framework. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Fung, A. (2011). Minipublics: Designing institutions for effective deliberation and accountability. In S. Odugbemi & T. Lee (Eds.), Accountability through public opinion (pp. 183–202). Washington: World Bank Publications.
Gaus, G. F. (2016). The tyranny of the ideal: Justice in a diverse society. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Goodin, R. E. (2008). Innovating democracy: Democratic theory and practice after the deliberative turn. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.
Grönlund, K., Bächtiger, A., & Setälä, M. (Eds.). (2013). Deliberative mini-publics: Involving citizens in the democratic process. Colchester: ECPR Press.
Honneth, A. (2015). Die Idee des sozialismus: Versuch einer aktualisierung. Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag.
Knight, J., & Johnson, J. (2011). The priority of democracy: Political consequences of pragmatism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Landemore, H. (2013). Democratic reason: Politics, collective intelligence, and the rule of the many. Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Landemore, H. (2014). Yes, we can (make it up on volume): Answers to critics. Critical Review, 26, 184–237.
Laudan, L. (1978). Progress and its problems: Towards a theory of scientific growth. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Lindblom, C. E., & Cohen, D. K. (1979). Usable knowledge: Social science and social problem solving. New Haven, London: Yale University Press.
List, C., & Goodin, R. E. (2001). Epistemic democracy: Generalizing the Condorcet jury theorem. Journal of Political Philosophy, 9, 277–306.
Mantzavinos, C. (2001). Individuals, institutions, and markets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mantzavinos, C. (2013). Explanatory games. The Journal of Philosophy, 110(11), 606–632.
Miller, J. C. (1969). A program for direct and proxy voting in the legislative process. Public Choice, 7(1), 107–113.
Miller, D. (2006). Out of error: Further essays on critical rationalism. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Newell, A., & Simon, H. A. (1972). Human problem solving. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Ostrom, E. (2005). Understanding institutional diversity. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Polanyi, M. (1962). The republic of science. Minerva, 1, 54–74.
Popper, K. R. (1973). Objective knowledge an evolutionary approach. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Putnam, H. (1992). A reconsideration of Deweyan democracy. In H. Putnam (Ed.), Renewing philosophy (pp. 180–200). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Sunstein, C. R. (2006). Deliberating groups versus prediction markets (or Hayek’s challenge to Habermas). Episteme, 3, 192–213.
Tetlock, P. E. (2005). Expert political judgment: How good is it? How can we know?. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Tetlock, P. E., & Gardner, D. (2015). Superforecasting: The art and science of prediction. New York: Crown Publishers.
Unger, R. M. (2005). What should the left propose?. London: Verso.
von Hayek, F. A. (1945). The use of knowledge in society. The American Economic Review, 35(4), 519–530.
von Hayek, F. A. (2002). Competition as a discovery procedure. The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, 5(3), 9–23.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Müller, J.F. Epistemic democracy: beyond knowledge exploitation. Philos Stud 175, 1267–1288 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-0910-9
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-0910-9