I argue that fulfillment of the democratic ideal is predicated on a "scientific public”: a citizenry committed to and capable of reasoning in accordance with scientific norms of inquiry on matters of public concern.  I understand those norms, most crucially, in terms of the commitment to employ observation as the primary basis for knowledge claims.  The importance of that commitment derives from two distinctive features of observational epistemology: First, the capacity to observe competently is distributed widely across the diverse social groups that constitute political society and, second, observers wield a uniquely high degree of control over the causal chain through which knowledge is acquired.  The first of these features allows for the widespread social contestation of knowledge claims, while the second, I argue, allows citizens to harness competition among those claims for epistemic progress.  It is only given this kind of progressive and widespread contestation that democracies can adequately bring information to bear on the relations, in practice, among the diverse and dynamically interactive political ends they must serve.

The Scientific Public: Epistemic Norms in Democratic Society

Committee: Philip Kitcher (advisor), Akeel Bilgrami, Joseph Raz

My central claim is that fulfillment of the democratic ideal is predicated on a "scientific public”: a citizenry committed to and capable of reasoning in accordance with scientific norms of inquiry on matters of public concern.  I defend that claim by elucidating the distinctive social-epistemic challenges that democratic societies confront, and then showing how an epistemology of deliberation, grounded in appeals to observable evidence, is specially suited to meet them.
   
I begin with the observation that the knowledge necessary for the solution of political problems is scattered widely across the political community.  Consequently one can only expect effective governance given both (a) widespread and ongoing consultation with that community, and (b) a means of assimilating the knowledge thereby collected into coherent policy.  Therein lies the critical role of deliberation, which provides a means of knowledge-assimilation that also preserves the necessary transparency of political justification to citizens. 
   
But standard conceptions of deliberative democracy – in particular, Habermasian and post-Rawlsian conceptions – frame the objectives of deliberation in terms of consensus rather than epistemology.  I argue that consensus is ill-conceived as the objective of deliberation because the process of contestation and inquiry that constitutes deliberation is premised on evaluative distinctions among possible points of consensus, distinctions that make no sense unless the object of deliberation is some consensus-independent value.  A substantive account of deliberative norms must proceed from an understanding of how deliberation contributes to that value, and this fact points naturally to a concern for deliberation’s epistemic benefits.
   
The guiding norms of epistemic deliberation derive from the distinctive challenges that the political context poses.  The success of political deliberation depends on the capacity of citizens to offer and accept knowledge claims in good faith.  That requires a degree of mutual confidence, however, that the political context seems tailored to undermine, given (i) the extraordinary diversity and difficulty of the epistemic domains involved, (ii) the height of the moral stakes, and (iii) the deep conflict among the values and interests of deliberators.  I argue that, given these circumstances, the possibility of mutual confidence requires a commitment among the citizenry to a norm of public appraisability: all defend their use of political power strictly by appeal to those arguments whose epistemic quality can be competently evaluated across social divisions of interest and value.
   
Using the paradigmatic case of science, I then show how an observational epistemology provides an ideal framework for satisfaction of public appraisability.  Science has a special capacity to harness the social features of inquiry because (1) the capacity to observe competently is widely distributed across agents with diverse evaluative attitudes and cognitive properties and (2) inquirers have the capacity to manipulate, to a high degree of refinement, the causally relevant features of the context in which observations are made.  Whereas (1) ensures a valuable diversity of competing theories, (2) allows inquirers to translate that diversity into shared research programs directed at the progressive resolution of controversy.  In this way, the scientific community exploits theoretical conflict for epistemic gain. 
   
That, in turn, suggests a model for political deliberation: social diversity produces competing policy arguments that are subject to ongoing, common appraisal.  But how can an observational epistemology be applied in political disputes?  The answer arises from a pragmatist conception of how political ends are to be appraised.  The key question in deciding to pursue a given end is not whether that end is valuable in itself but, rather, whether the consequences of pursuit of that end – including the consequences of achieving the end itself – are valuable.  Because the consequences of pursuing a given end inevitably interact in dynamic fashion with our pursuit of other vital ends, the question of how to value a given end can only be intelligently answered given ongoing observation of those consequences in the full richness of human practice.