An Epistemic Defense of Democracy: Knowledge, Power, and the People

(Hardback)

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Most philosophical defenses of democracy are moral ones, appealing to principles of inclusion or right or justice; this book takes seriously democratic skepticism but uses these critiques to argue for democracy as a political goal on epistemic grounds. An Epistemic Defense of Democracy explores conditions for political knowledge formation, how it can be expressed in the public political sphere, what economic barriers prevent its expression, and how the democratic state incurs certain epistemic obligations. Bridging the epistemic democracy literature and literature on social and feminist epistemologies, it argues that deliberative democracy is in theory the best political system for responding to the situatedness and fallibility of the knowledge of an individual political agent, but that it is rarely instantiated in actual political practice. It proposes concrete changes to politico-economic policy and practice to help democracies better respond to political knowledge.

Author Bio

Philipa Friedman is an Independent Scholar at US Food & Drug Administration.