Deliberative democracy’s core is the act of deliberation: assessment of rational
considerations for or against adopting a belief or undertaking an action. Deliberation is
hindered when features of our epistemic environment make us insensitive to rational
considerations. Insofar as our epistemic environment today is awash with social
phenomena which desensitize us to rational considerations – misinformation,
disinformation, polarization, conspiracy – the prospects for realizing deliberative
democracy look bleak. Put differently, deliberative democratic ideals appear
epistemically demanding in ways that not only outstrip our present cognitive capacities
but also any improvements which we could make in our epistemically vitiated
circumstances. Consequently, those ideals may be beyond saving, and we might be
better off seeking normative guidance elsewhere.
In this paper, I revisit the dialectical state of play between deliberative democrats and
their epistemic detractors and argue that we should not draw this conclusion hastily.
Indeed, this gives us reason to resist the conclusion on four grounds. First, certain risks
are somewhat overstated. Though political misinformation and echo chambers are
present in the current media landscape, empirical studies indicate that they are not so
widespread as epistemic critiques intimate (Guess et al. 2018). Other phenomena,
such as the fact-check backfire effect, are more fiction than fact (Wood and Porter
2019). Second, some social and psychological phenomena may be more charitably
interpreted. Myside bias and lazy reasoning may in fact be part and parcel of wellfunctioning
deliberation on an interactionist picture of reason (Mercier and Sperber
2017). Moreover, if social epistemologists are right that what is rational for a person to
believe depends on her information environment but our contemporary information
environment is poor and epistemic trust low, political polarization may sometimes be
epistemically rational or virtuous (Ahlstrom-Vij 2020). Even when present, epistemic
vices may turn out to be remedial epistemic interventions.
Third, certain epistemic objections are unspecific to deliberative democracy. To the
extent that our epistemic environment fosters genuine epistemic vice in the citizenry
and this vice endangers self-government between equals, a successful critique of
deliberative democratic ideals is simultaneously a critique of other democratic ideals.
Furthermore, improvements to the epistemic environment through effective
counterspeech (Lepoutre 2019) or disinformation safeguards (McKay and Tenove
2020) are no less available to deliberative democrats than others. Hence, these
objections are unlikely to be decisive between deliberative and other democratic
theories. Fourth, these critiques are often also propped up by a shifting burden of proof.
For example, it is inconsistent to dismiss deliberative democrats’ model of
communication as overly simplistic and to advance a critique from belief polarization
and dialectical fallacy on the basis of a similarly simplistic model (Talisse 2017).
None of this is to dismiss the very real challenges facing existing democratic societies
and deliberative democratic ideals. Nor is it to claim that these ideals are immune to
all epistemic critique. Nevertheless, if deliberative democracy’s epistemic detractors
are to show that those ideals are epistemically suboptimal or vicious, they will need to
get their argumentative house in order.