A novel recent approach in pragmatist political philosophy has sought to justify democracy on purely epistemic grounds. Based on (1) a few fundamental epistemic principles we cannot reasonably deny, (2) a number of epistemic commitments following from them, which in turn justify (3) democracy in a full-fledged, deliberative sense. While some of the more controversial elements of the approach have been highlighted, a systematic investigation of the argument is lacking. In this paper, we analyse this argument and argue that it fails on several levels, even if we accept the fundamental premise (1). The epistemic principles are not only too weak to justify democracy in a full-fledged sense (3), but also to justify the deliberative properties of an independently grounded democratic society. In fact, they cannot even take the argument to second base, (2), since the epistemic commitment to equality does not follow from the fundamental premise (1).
