The epistemic trap in Democratic Innovations

One of the main elements that support the deliberative turn of democracy is the epistemic dimension associated with its development. Through it, the theory predicts that the decisions made by actors in a deliberative process will be epistemically better. The design of the DMP transfers this objective in practical terms both in the organization of times and dynamics, as well as in its aspirations and purposes pursued. The DMPs thus describe a deliberative process directed by that epistemic dimension, which usually unfolds in three complementary stages. First the actors inform themselves and learn. Second, the actors deliberate and exchange arguments. Finally, they solve the problem at hand. This epistemic dimension conditions the organization of DMPs around evidence and impartial solutions. Deliberation in its practical way seems to be based on the concept of people weighing up evidence. This framework is based on a classic rational model, which prioritizes a cognitivist perspective of actors, which has often been contested. Following the structure of the toolkits developed to recommend the organization of DMP and the participant observation of four ACs, we can see that with the design it is expected that the actors process the information correctly, avoiding the usual cognitive biases in which any actor falls into the everyday life, such as motivated reasoning. This search for impartiality raises, however, many questions. The data on learning in the observed DMPs do not unequivocally confirm the theory. Not only are there many participants who do not learn, but they are even capable of unlearning over time. In some of the DMPs analyzed there is even evidence that the actors do not use the information at their disposal to make their own arguments. At the same time, this search for impartiality conditions the deliberative dynamics, which are very output driven, subtracting time from the deliberation itself, while preventing actors and their positions from being challenged or criticized by different perspectives. If these limitations derived from the design of the DMP condition the deliberation, to what extent is this an error attributable only to the practical design? In this work we will show that one of the great problems of the deliberative turn is its commitment to a classical rational model, which takes place outside the experiences of the actors who participate, who are required to process information as scientifically as possible. We understand that this epistemic dimension leads to a paradox for deliberative theory, as other researchers have already shown at a normative level. Instead, we think that deliberation should be supported by other rational models, more in line with the developments of contemporary neuroscience. This would imply basing deliberation on situational, rather than cognitive, mechanisms. In the paper we will offer a renewed description of the basic elements of deliberative dynamics from a situational perspective.