Jonathan Benson

My book, Intelligent Democracy, offers a systemic defence of democracy’s epistemic value. Rather than a property of a single institution – such as an election or deliberative forum – I argue democracy’s intelligence is best located at the systemic level. By analysing the epistemic divisions of labour within a broader democratic system, democracy can be seen to possess informational properties superior to those exhibited by institutional alternatives, such as forms of elite rule or market-based decision-making. This article clarifies and defends the systemic approach to epistemic democracy against a range of critics. It considers challenges to the approach’s underlying logic, its conception of epistemic democracy, its minimal defence of elections, its rejection of epistocratic systems, its critique of individual exit and its endorsement of empowered forms of sortition.

Evidence that an animal is capable of some degree of symbolic, human language processing supports the argument that the animal's consciousness is to some degree human-like. In this paper, we reinterpret the findings of Savage- Rumbaugh et al. using the twin tools of Deacon's referential hierarchy and Systemic Functional Linguistics, with a view to providing further corroborative evidence for a Bonobo ape's symbolic processing abilities, and as a result to open a window into the consciousness of at least one non-human primate.