Abstract
The following essay begins by outlining the pragmatist link between truth claims and democratic deliberations. To this end, special attention will be paid to Jeffrey Stout’s pragmatist enfranchisement of religious citizens. Stout defends a deliberative notion of democracy that fulfills stringent criteria of inclusion and security against domination. While mitigating secular exclusivity, Stout nonetheless acknowledges the new visibility of religion in populist attempts to dominate political life through mass rule and charismatic authorities. In response, I evaluate recent innovations in deliberative democratic systems theory (DDST). By adding a pragmatist inflection to DDST, I aim to apprehend the complex religious interactions between partisan interest groups as well as the trust-building capacities of minipublics.
Highlights
In The Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy
Stout takes pains to ensure that his inclusivity of religious voices does not devolve into nihilist relativism,6 nor social narcissism (Stout 2007)
Stout is acutely aware that the seriousness of moral claims about issues such as slavery and violence cannot be left ambiguous in light of pragmatist skepticism concerning realist metaphysics
Summary
In his 1927 The Public and Its Problems, John Dewey declared, “optimism about democracy is to-day under a cloud” (p. 110). As more recent commentators note, few of Dewey’s concerns have changed in the near century of intervening years. Stout takes pains to ensure that his inclusivity of religious voices does not devolve into nihilist relativism, nor social narcissism (Stout 2007) He responds to past pragmatist considerations of truth claims found in Donald Davidson as well as some of the other more problematic aspects of Rorty’s thought. Stout is acutely aware that the seriousness of moral claims about issues such as slavery and violence cannot be left ambiguous in light of pragmatist skepticism concerning realist metaphysics To this end, Santurri acknowledged that Stout’s intentions were clearly both realist and constructivist Stout is here attributing to Rorty the less nuanced version of what he wrote with regard to “‘ontological’ explanations of the relations between minds and meaning” in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: “The aim of all such explanations is to make truth something more than what Dewey called ‘warranted assertability’: more than what our peers will ceteris paribus [other things being equal], let us get away with saying” (Rorty 1979, pp. 175–76)
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