The Role of Epistemology in ‘Problem-Driven’ Defenses of Democratic Institutions

Drawing on the recent proliferation of epistemic defenses and conceptualizations of democracy, this article takes issue with the presentation of epistemic democracy as a ‘problem-driven’ (as opposed to an ‘ideal’ or ‘theory-driven’) therapeutic against populism or as a long-overdue effort to bridge the gap between the normative and empirical study of democratic institutions. Epistemic democrats, on the view I seek to defend, fail to abide by their own commitment to problem-centeredness, that is, to refrain from elevating some specific aspect of democratic government – elections, deliberation, inclusivity, non-domination, etc. – into a comprehensive philosophical ‘ideal’ of democracy. Epistemic democrats revert to a distinctively non-problem-driven track in at least two situations, namely when it comes to the question whether i) epistemic performance is both necessary and sufficient for the normative justification of democracy, and ii) whether epistemic democracy entails any determinate institutional outcome or ‘conception’ of democracy. With respect to i), I argue that – pace their commitment to philosophical modesty – epistemic democrats lend undue weight on the epistemic value of democratic decision-making at the expense of its moral value. With respect to ii), I argue that epistemic democrats’ claim of a direct connection between truth-tracking politics and democratic institutions is not sustainable in the straightforward way they claim. Rather, I suggest that a problem-driven conception of democracy – as prefigured by John Dewey nine decades ago in The Public and Its Problems (1927) – is best conceptualized as a culture in the anthropological sense, in which individuals produce, cultivate, and reproduce a disposition to cooperatively identify public problems and efficiently settle them by choosing (and continuously adapting) adequate institutional instruments. Finally, I assess to what extent claims-based participatory instruments like the Swiss optional referendum are adequate institutional approximations of a political culture thus specified.