Deliberative democrats vs epistemic detractors: Revisiting the dialectical state of play

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.