Alfred Moore

ABSTRACT“Post-truth” politics is often framed as a failure of the competition of idea­s. Yet there are different ways of thinking about the competition of ideas, with different implications for the way we understand its benefits and risks. The dominant way of framing the competition of ideas is in terms of a marketplace, which, however, obscures the different ways ideas can compete. Several theorists can help us think through the competition of ideas. J. S. Mill, for example, avoided the metaphor of the market by focusing, instead, on competition as the testing of arguments in adversarial encounters before a critical audience. Georg Simmel, alternatively, conceived of competition as a form of indirect conflict, where two individuals strive in parallel to gain audience approval. This view emphasizes innovation and creativity in the competition of “all for all.” More recently, theorists have developed the market logic of competition by thinking of a marketplace not for ideas but for rationalizations. This articulates some of the features of Simmel’s view of competition, but underestimates the degrees of constraint required to secure the goods of competition. Ultimately, recognizing these different modes of competition in the public sphere can enrich our theories of deliberative democracy and sharpen our view of the problem of “post-truth” politics.

Technocracy is a contested concept, but it is typically associated with the exercise of political power justified by claims to expertise, and is often contrasted with populist forms of politics. In Power Without Knowledge, Jeffrey Friedman reframes the concept of technocracy as a form of politics oriented to solving social and economic problems, and thereby extends it to cover not only epistemic elites but ordinary people. This move usefully challenges the simplistic framing of populism and technocracy as opposites, but at the expense of effacing other dimensions of democratic politics. Friedman also suggests that maximizing individuals’ exit opportunities will allow them to take advantage of their relatively reliable personal knowledge. The architecture of “exitocracy” would itself, however, be designed by experts who, as such, might be tempted to insulate the institutional architecture they design against democratic interference.

What can one say to the self-deceived? And – perhaps more importantly – who can say it? The attribution of self-deception depends heavily on the criteria for what is thought to be beyond dispute. For Galeotti, misperception of reality is a product of psychological and emotional pressure resulting in ‘emotionally overloaded wishes’, and her solution thus involves the construction of what an ‘impartial’ and ‘dispassionate’ observer would conclude when presented with the same evidence. Drawing on her examples of foreign policy decision-making, I discuss two objections. First, I ask whether being ‘dispassionate’ is enough get one off the hook from the sorts of value judgements that must be made in assessing evidence in complex situations. Second, I address the role of disagreement and dissent, and suggest that what is required are not actors with a lack of emotionally overloaded wishes, but actors with different goals and wishes. Thus, while Galeotti emphasizes solutions drawing on ideals of impartiality, we might more productively look for solutions that engage multiple forms of partiality.

Democracies have a problem with expertise. Expert knowledge both mediates and facilitates public apprehension of problems, yet it also threatens to exclude the public from consequential judgments and decisions located in technical domains. This book asks: how can we have inclusion without collapsing the very concept of expertise? How can public judgment be engaged in expert practices in a way that does not reduce to populism? Drawing on deliberative democratic theory and social studies of science, Critical Elitism argues that expert authority depends ultimately on the exercise of public judgment in a context in which there are live possibilities for protest, opposition and scrutiny. This account points to new ways of looking at the role of civil society, expert institutions, and democratic innovations in the constitution of expert authority within democratic systems. Using the example of climate science, Critical Elitism highlights not only the risks but also the benefits of contesting expertise.

ABSTRACTWhile conspiracies have always been with us, conspiracy theories are more recent arrivals. The framing of conspiracy theories as rooted in erroneous or delusional belief in conspiracies is characteristic of “positive” approaches to the topic, which focus on identifying the causes and cures of conspiracy theories. “Critical” approaches, by contrast, focus on the historical and cultural construction of the concept of conspiracy theory itself. This issue presents a range of essays that cut across these two broad approaches, and reflect on the problematic relationship between conspiracy theory and democratic politics.

ABSTRACTHayek’s social theory is resolutely anti-conspiratorial: He consistently rejects conceiving complex orders as though they were designed or planned. His account of democratic politics, by contrast, treats it as conducive to conspiracy, organized deception, and ultimately totalitarianism. His epistemology of spontaneous order and his radical suspicion of democratic politics are connected: The decay of democracy is itself a complex consequence of popular misunderstandings of social order. However, since Hayek is unable to account for self-correction within democratic structures, his argument has the unanticipated consequence of leading him to an implicitly authoritarian position.

There can be good reasons to doubt the authority of a group of scientists. But those reasons do not include lack of unanimity among them. Indeed, holding science to a unanimity or near-unanimity standard has a pernicious effect on scientific deliberation, and on the transparency that is so crucial to the authority of science in a democracy. What authorizes a conclusion is the quality of the deliberation that produced it, which is enhanced by the presence of a non-dismissible minority. Scientists can speak as one in more ways than one. We recommend a different sort of consensus that is partly substantive and partly procedural. It is a version of what Margaret Gilbert calls “joint acceptance” – we call it “deliberative acceptance.” It capitalizes on there being a persistent minority, and thereby encourages accurate reporting of the state of agreement and disagreement among deliberators.

ABSTRACTHélène Landemore's Democratic Reason develops one important line of research in political epistemology, which we can define as the study of the ways in which distributed knowledge is put together for the purposes of making political decisions. Landemore argues for the epistemic benefits of cognitive diversity in political decision procedures in a condition of epistemic equality—where there are no experts. Given this omission, her approach has undeveloped potential for a second line of research in political epistemology, on the problem of aggregating asymmetrically distributed knowledge, i.e., integrating democratic reason with expertise.