Epistemic Proceduralism Research Articles

Exploring the Effects of Teachers' Feed up and Feed Forward on Chinese Senior High Students' English Writing Self-efficacy and Writing Motivation

In second-language writing, learners need to coordinate a great number of linguistic and epistemic procedures and resources. Learners’ motivation and self-efficacy are influenced by many factors, among which teacher's feedback is particularly important. This study investigated the correlation between writing self-efficacy and motivation and feed up and feed forward. 56 Chinese students from one senior high school participated in questionnaires that were employed to collect the research data. The participants were asked to complete writing self-efficacy and motivation questionnaires as a pre-test and post-test after receiving feed up and feed forward over the course of four sessions. This study shows that teachers' feed up and feed forward considerably increased participants' writing motivation, but did not significantly affect their writing self-efficacy, according to the results of two scales and paired samples t-test comparisons. According to the study's conclusions, it is advised that teachers should recognize the complex relationship between feed up, feed forward and students' writing self-efficacy and motivation thus proposing some coping strategies.

From outcome to process: A developmental shift in judgments of good reasoning

What does it mean to reason well? One might argue that good reasoning means that the outcome of the reasoning process is correct: reaching the right belief. Alternatively, good reasoning might refer to the reasoning process itself: following the right epistemic procedures. In a preregistered study, we investigated children's (4–9-year-olds) and adults' judgments of reasoning in China and the US (N = 256). Participants of all age groups evaluated the outcome when the process was kept constant - they favored agents who reached correct over incorrect beliefs, and they evaluated the process when the outcome was kept constant – they preferred agents who formed their beliefs using valid over invalid procedures. Developmental changes emerged when we pitted outcome against process: young children weighed outcome more heavily than process; older children and adults showed the reverse preference. This pattern was constant across the two cultural contexts, with the switch from outcome to process happening earlier in development in China. These results suggest that children initially value what someone believes, but, with development, come to increasingly value how beliefs are formed.

13.C. Workshop: Epistemic and ethical innovations in public health research

Abstract About 90% of the biomedical data accessible to researchers was created in the last two years. These data have a very meaningful impact both in creating public policies on health, as well as public health research. This certainly implies complex technical problems on how to store, analyse and distribute data, but it also brings relevant epistemological issues. In this workshop we will present some of such problems and discuss how epistemic innovation is key in order to tackle ethical issues related to the use of big data in public health research. Databases implied in public health research are so huge that they rise relevant questions about how scientific method is applied, such as what counts as evidence of a hypothesis when data can not be directly apprehended by humans, how to distinguish correlation from causation, or in which cases the provider of a database can be considered co-author of a research paper. To consider such issues nowadays, current protocols do not hold, and we need innovation in methodological and epistemic procedures. At the same time, due to the fact that a relevant deal of such biomedical data is linked to individual people, and how medical data can be used to predict and transform human behavior, there are ethical questions difficult to solve as they imply new challenges. Some of them are related to communication issues, so patients and citizens understand these new ethical problems that didn't arise before the development of big data; others relate to the way in which public health researchers can and can't store, analyse and distribute information, and some others relate to the limits on which technologies are ethically, safe and which ones bring erosion of basic human rights. The four contributions in the workshop analyse these questions in some detail. During the workshop we will present a coherent understanding on what is epistemic innovation, some logical tools necessary for its development, and then we will discuss several cases on how epistemic innovation applies to different aspects of public health research, also commenting its relevance when tackling ethical problems that may arise. Key messages The workshop deepens the ethical and epistemological innovations involved in public health policies and research, specially related to big data. The workshop analyses novel aspects of public health ethics

Does epistemic proceduralism justify the disenfranchisement of children?

ABSTRACTMost laypersons and political theorists endorse the claims that (1) all adults should be enfranchised and (2) all children should be disenfranchised. The first claim rejects epistocracy; the second is a commitment to a minimum voting age. I call the conjunction of these two claims mainstream democracy. In this paper, I argue that mainstream democracy is in a predicament: it cannot consistently maintain both (1) and (2). Given that we oppose epistocracy, we must endorse the enfranchisement of children. To make this point, I first develop what I take to be the most plausible argument for mainstream democracy, derived from David Estlund's epistemic proceduralism. In the second part of the paper, I explain why this argument fails. In the third part, I address some practical concerns about enfranchising children. I conclude that abandoning mainstream democracy is not problematic because the enfranchisement of children is unlikely to have harmful consequences.

DERECHOS, ESCEPTICISMO Y MAYORITARISMO: UN TRIÁNGULO IMPOSIBLE. UNA CRÍTICA A LA TEORÍA DE LA LEGITIMIDAD POLÍTICA DE JEREMY WALDRON

El trabajo reconstruye y analiza críticamente la respuesta de Jeremy Waldron a importantes problemas sobre política y derecho, justicia y autoridad. Waldron reivindica al mismo tiempo una tesis no escéptica sobre la existencia los derechos morales-políticos, una tesis escéptica sobre la existencia de procedimientos epistémicos superiores para identificarlos, y una tesis positiva sobre la legitimidad política (mayoritarismo participativo). El trabajo argumenta que su respuesta solo resulta consistente si se añade un cuarto vértice: el presupuesto de “igualdad de agencia y capacidad epistémica” en los portadores de derechos. Pero su introducción requiere abandonar y redefinir dos de los otros elementos, lo que conduce finalmente a las respuestas típicas del deliberativismo epistémico. Las críticas de Waldron a la revisión judicial se reinterpretan sobre esa nueva base.

On the Paradigmatic Force of Anomaly

On the Paradigmatic Force of Anomaly Jocelyn Holland (bio) and Joel B. Lande (bio) No text has shaped the contemporary understanding and analytic use of anomalies as much as Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). For Kuhn, the anomaly constitutes an exceptional moment in the ordinary course of scientific activity that eventually forces a large-scale revision of the game-rules according to which natural phenomena are investigated, explained, and predicted. Oscillating between novelty and inexplicability, Kuhn’s anomaly tests the limited character of dominant epistemic procedures and encourages the search for new norms and practices. This understanding of the anomaly has come to play a salient role in both the history of science and literary studies. At the same time, this ‘normalization’ of the anomaly concept runs the risk of overshadowing a rich and complex history, one full of ambiguities and misprisions that have ramifications for how we think today, particularly for how we think about the interdependence of norms and their exceptions. In order to grasp the tensions inscribed in the concept, it is instructive to recall Ian Hacking’s introductory remarks to the prestigious fiftieth anniversary edition of Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, where he provides the following intuitively plausible etymology: “The a in anomaly is the a that means ‘not’, as in ‘amoral’ or ‘atheist.’ The nom is from the Greek word for ‘law’. Anomalies are contrary to lawlike regularities, more generally, contrary to expections” (xxvi). This familiar definition is fundamentally incompatible with the one advanced in Georges Canguilhem’s On The Normal and the Pathological, which was first published in 1943: “‘Anomaly’ comes from the Greek [End Page 527] anomalia which means unevenness, asperity; omalos in Greek means that which is level, even, smooth, hence ‘anomaly’ is, etymologically, an-omalos, that which is uneven, rough, irregular in the sense given these words when speaking of a terrain” (131). In addition to providing an etymology supported by the most authoritative Greek dictionaries, Canguilhem liberates the anomaly from a rigid relationship to the law, nomos. His philological work opens up rich metaphorical “terrain,” because, according to Liddell and Scott and other lexica, the “evenness” suggested by omalos evokes a range of sensory impressions: the consistency of a surface, the composition of sediment, and the uniformity of sound, to name just a few. With the privative prefix a-/an- indicating the deviation from or absence of such conditions, anomalos thus signifies in Ancient Greek the irregularity of movements and periods of time, the inconstancy of fate, the capricious behavior of individuals, and the intractable mutations of language. This widely expanded range of potential applications brings a number of things into focus. For one, it establishes the conection between the history of the anomaly and sense perception, thus rendering it an “aesthetic” concept in the most general sense of the word. It also makes clear that sight is not the only sensory faculty invoked in the early history of the anomaly. Tactility, too, plays a role in the “roughness” (or, in Canguilhem’s terms, “asperity”) of anomalies. Along the same lines, an anomaly can be an aberrant acoustic event, which calls for attention and explanation. With these discrepant etymologies in mind, we are able to rethink the epistemic import of the anomaly. It encourages us to ask how, broadly speaking, cultures cope with non-homologous, but nonetheless intelligible, phenonena and actions—anomalies that are fixtures of a culture’s conceptual matrices as incommensurable elements. Such phenomena and actions are, to borrow a turn of phrase popularized by the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, included as the exclusions to dominant modes of ordering, and can be social or political, mathematical or chemical, linguistic or sense-perceptual. The revision and expansion of the commonly held understanding of the anomaly—as the paradigmatic challenge to lawful order—offers the opportunity to revisit those fields of inquiry, pre-Kuhnian as well as post-Kuhnian, in which the anomaly concept has figured prominently. In an effort to frame the historical case studies and methodological observations introduced by the essays collected in this volume, we would like to sketch out some salient features of the discursive field in which the concept moves. The...

Falsification of Interpretive Hypotheses in the Humanities

This paper reconsiders the possibility of applying the procedure of falsification, which consists in testing a theory by confronting hypotheses derived from the theory with empirical data, in the studies of culture, in particular when evaluating interpretive hypotheses. Falsification, to which, according to Popper and his followers, the natural sciences owe their success, is viewed with strong suspicion when the object of investigation is meanings and values rather than material phenomena. If by interpretation one understands reconstruction of the artefact’s meaning, obvious challenges when falsifying interpretive hypotheses include: the multiplicity, instability and ambiguity (indefiniteness or self-contradictory character) of meanings inherent in artefacts. All of this does not seem to exclude the possibility of identifying as misreadings interpretive hypotheses which clearly contradict relevant (non-contradictory) artefactual evidence. Falsification thus understood seems indispensable in educational contexts. At the same time, it must be admitted that in practice (as contrasted with the logical formula which underlies the procedure) falsification is inconclusive, and the application of the procedure is further complicated when meanings and values are the object of research. This is one of the reasons why falsification in the humanities (as elsewhere) needs to be complemented by other epistemic procedures while the status of literary studies or history of philosophy might best be perceived as partly cognitive (and in so far as the research conducted in these disciplines is empirically testable, also scientific) and partly creative (artistic).

Jerzy Kmita’s methodological interpretation of Karl Marx’s philosophy. From ideology to methodological concepts

The article presents J. Kmita’s methodological interpretation of selected cognitive methods used by K. Marx. Those methods were (and I believe they still are) significant for the social sciences and the humanities, even a century after they had been developed. J Kmita’s interpretation reveals specificity of epistemic procedures carried out by the author of “Capital” and emphasizes contemporary actuality of Marx’s epistemological ideas. To achieve that aim, Kmita refers to the concepts established in the field of philosophy of science of his time. According to J. Kmita, the attractiveness of Marx’s approach lies in the opportunity to develop a methodological interpretation of Marx philosophy, which in turn enables the formation of a unique theory of science development, alternative to those provided by logical positivism, falsificationism, neopragmatism or sociology of knowledge. Such theory would combine the perspective of sociology of knowledge with an epistemological approach to the development of science.

Epistemic Proceduralism, Capabilities and Rights: An Approach from the Perspective of Amartya Sen

This paper expounds an exploratory study on the connections between Amartya Sen's capability approach and epistemic proceduralism focused on the measurement of poverty. The study describes the general features of Sen's approach and then analyses them from the perspective of epistemic proceduralism. Some difficulties were observed in the deliberative concept of democracy and the process of devising lists and consensuses to design tools for poverty measurement. We proved that the strongest link between the capability approach and epistemic proceduralism lies in the theoretical level. Therefore, whoever studies poverty and social needs has to cope with the challenge of applying the ideal of deliberative democracy to the definition of needs or lists of capabilities and provide arguments to ground rights.

A multidimensional account of democratic legitimacy: how to make robust decisions in a non-idealized deliberative context

This paper analyses the possibility of granting legitimacy to democratic decision-making procedures in a context of deep pluralism. We defend a multidimensional account according to which a legitimate system needs to grant, on the one hand, that citizens should be included on an equal footing and acknowledged as reflexive political agents rather than mere beneficiaries of policies, and, on the other hand, that their decisions have an epistemic quality. While Estlund’s account of imperfect epistemic proceduralism might seem to embody a dualistic conception of democratic legitimacy, we point out that it is not able to recognize citizens as reflexive political agents and is grounded in an idealized model of the circumstances of deliberation. To overcome these ambiguities, we develop an account of democratic legitimacy according to which disagreement is the proper expression of citizens’ reflexive agency and the attribution of epistemic authority does not stem from a major expertise or specific ability, but it comes through the public confrontation among disagreeing agents. Consequently, the epistemic value of deliberation should be derived from the reasons-giving process rather than from the reference to the alleged quality of its outcomes. In this way, we demonstrate the validity of the multidimensional perspective of legitimacy, yet abstain from introducing any outcome-oriented criterion. Finally, we argue that this account of legitimacy is well suited for modeling deliberative democracy as a decision-making procedure that respects the agency of every citizen and grants her opportunity to influence public choices.

Is moral deference reasonably acceptable?

Advocates of epistemic conceptions of democracy sometimes argue that democratic decision-making is a more reliable guide to getting the issues at stake right than the decision-making of individuals. Such arguments give rise to the question of whether those finding themselves in the minority should defer to democratic outcomes. In this article, I discuss the bearing of the normative criterion of reasonable acceptability on this question. I thus ask, can the demand to defer to democratic outcomes be rendered reasonably acceptable to citizens who disagree with them? Using the example of David Estlund’s epistemic proceduralism, I show that the problem of moral deference is inherent to epistemic conceptions of democracy. I then discuss the kind of reasons that would make a demand of deference reasonably acceptable to the minority, arguing that they should be independent from the reasons supporting the majority position. Subsequently, I introduce the conciliatory conception of democracy as an example of what such reasons could be. The conception’s central idea is that disagreement between citizens conceived as equal epistemic authorities carries epistemic significance. This significance makes it rational for citizens so conceived to conciliate their conflicting judgments. Because democratic decision-making has an inbuilt tendency to track such conciliatory positions, the conception offers an independent reason to accept democratic outcomes as the more reliable guide to getting the issues at stake right.

The ideal and reality of epistemic proceduralism

The complex debate about proceduralism in deliberative democratic theory is important for understanding alternative models for bridging theory and practice. In this article, I contrast Jürgen Habermas’ model of epistemic proceduralism with that of David Estlund. I begin by locating the differences between them in terms of contrasting interpretations of Rousseau’s idea of the general will. On this basis, I set out two competing models of democratic proceduralism – an instrumental conception and a constitutive conception – and show how Estlund’s critique of Habermas’ procedural theory of ‘deep deliberative democracy’ mistakenly presupposes that Habermas is committed to an instrumental conception. After clarifying the role of Habermas’ ideal speech situation, I explicate and defend a Habermasian model of reflexive epistemic proceduralism. I conclude by considering the implications of this model for understanding the relationship between normative theory and empirical research.

Epistemic Free Riders and Reasons to Trust Testimony

Sinan Dogramaci has recently developed a view according to which the function of epistemic evaluations—like calling someone’s behavior “rational” or “irrational”—is to encourage or discourage the behavior evaluated. This view promises to explain the rational authority of testimony, by describing a social practice that promotes the coordination of epistemic procedures across a community. We argue that Dogramaci’s view is unsatisfactory, for two reasons. First, the social practice at its heart is vulnerable to free riders. Second, even if the problem of free riders can be solved, it “alienates” epistemic agents from the testimony that they receive, in that, though they will accept testimony from their fellows, they will have no reason to do so. We argue that a more satisfactory view can be had if we couple the genuine insights that are to be found in Dogramaci’s proposal with the recognition that testimony is an excludible good that is often distributed according to market forces. It is this fact about testimony that discourages free riding, and, when coupled with an amended version of Dogramaci’s view, provides agents with a reason to trust testimony.

Photographic Uncertainties: Between Evidence and Reassurance

This paper examines the mid-nineteenth century photographic collecting practices in the Colonial Office (CO) in London. Following methodologies laid down by Stoler and Joyce, the paper excavates the epistemic procedures through which photography and its role in colonial governance operated between the late 1860s and 1875. I focus my analysis on the production of, and response to, two CO despatches, which were circulated in November 1869 requesting photographs. But what was the work expected of these photographs, what were they meant “to do”? What was their relationship with anthropology and geography? The paper argues that in the praxis of central government, the role of photographic evidence was more uncertain and confused than instrumental interpretative models have assumed. I shall argue that in many cases photographs were not “evidence” in any dynamic sense in information provision, but rather functioned as tools of reassurance.

Epistemic logic and the process of verification used in ambient intelligence home environment

In this work I present the way of using an epistemic logic and the process of knowledge verification in order to control and monitor the object in the given environment. The achievement of correct recognition of situations depends on the system knowledge and how the system responds on the given issue. The aim is to describe and induce an example of using the logical or epistemic procedures.

Should We be Utopophobes about Democracy in Particular?

In his book Democratic Authority, David Estlund puts forward a case for democracy, which he labels epistemic proceduralism, that relies on democracy's ability to produce good – that is, substantively just – results. Alongside this case for democracy Estlund attacks what he labels ‘utopophobia’, an aversion to idealistic political theory. In this article I make two points. The first is a general point about what the correct level of ‘idealisation’ is in political theory. Various debates are emerging on this question and, to the extent that they are focused on ‘political theory’ as a whole, I argue, they are flawed. This is because there are different kinds of political concept, and they require different kinds of ideal. My second point is about democracy in particular. If we understand democracy as Estlund does, then we should see it as a problem-solving concept – the problem being that we need coercive institutions and rules, but we do not know what justice requires. As democracy is a response to a problem, we should not allow our theories of it, even at the ideal level, to be too idealised – they must be embedded in the nature of the problem they are to solve, and the beings that have it.

Pyrrhonian Skepticism and Two Kinds of Knowledge

AbstractIn his Reflective Knowledge, Ernest Sosa offers a theory of knowledge, broadly virtue-theoretic in character, that is meant to transcend simple ways of contrasting "internalist" with "externalist" or "foundationalist" with "coherentist" approaches to knowledge and justification. Getting beyond such simplifications, Sosa thinks, is the key to finding an exit from "the Pyrrhonian Problematic": the ancient and profound skeptical problem concerning the apparent impossibility of validating the reliability of our basic epistemic faculties and procedures in a way that escapes vicious circularity. Central to Sosa's anti-skeptical strategy is the claim that there are two kinds of knowledge. His thought is that animal knowledge, which can be understood in purely reliabilist terms, can ground justified trust in the reliability of our basic cognitive faculties, thus elevating us (without vicious circularity) to the level of reflective knowledge. I offer a sketch of an alternative approach, linking knowledge and justification with epistemic accountability and responsible belief-management, which casts doubt on the idea that "animal" knowledge is knowledge properly so-called. However, it turns out that this approach is (perhaps surprisingly) close in spirit to Sosa's. I suggest that the differences between us may rest on a disagreement over the possibility of providing a direct answer to the Pyrrhonian challenge.

Deliberation, Cultural Difference, and Indigenous Self-Governance

Deliberation, Cultural Difference, and Indigenous Self-Governance Jorge M. Valadez (bio) In this essay I argue that cultural differences between indigenous groups and settler societies are, in at least some cases, of significant importance for granting indigenous groups rights of self-governance. I maintain that the legitimacy of a political community crucially depends on whether none of the groups in that community are significantly disadvantaged in its democratic decision-making procedures. Significant political disadvantages are those that undermine the basic well-being of the members of the disadvantaged group. I contend that even under deliberative democracy, which places demanding conditions on understanding and taking into account the perspectives and interests of all members of the political community, some indigenous groups will find themselves continually losing out when collectively binding decisions are made after democratic deliberation. The primary reason for their losing out will likely be the significantly different cultural views they hold in such areas as empirical beliefs, normative principles and practices, and epistemic procedures for validating empirical and normative claims. These cultural differences will make it difficult for the criterion of political justification proposed by deliberative democracy, namely, the reciprocal giving of reasons that are reasonable from the perspective of other deliberators, to be satisfied. Secondary reasons include economic and social factors that make it difficult for indigenous groups to participate with equal effectiveness in the society's decision-making procedures. A just democratic society can bear the burden of particular groups being coerced to follow collective decisions with which they fundamentally disagree only if the realistic possibility exists that in future negotiations their point of view will win the day. However, when deep and pervasive cultural differences exist between minority indigenous groups and majority societies, this condition is not likely to be fulfilled. In these cases, it is difficult to maintain that they constitute a deliberative political community in which reciprocity in reason-giving is respected in procedures for making collectively binding political decisions. I maintain that there is an important connection between the principle of reciprocity and political equality and that when this principle is consistently violated in the democratic decision-making procedures of a political community, the legitimacy of that community is seriously undermined. Under these circumstances the just response is to grant the indigenous groups powers of autonomous governance that remove the source of the political disadvantages they face by being forced to be a part of a common civic body with the settler society. In the first part of this essay, I discuss briefly the criticisms that advocates of deliberative democracy have made of conventional procedures of democratic decision-making. This will help us understand how the legitimacy of political decisions that rely on these procedures can be called into question. In the second part, I discuss the alternative conception of political justification proposed by deliberative democracy and place particular attention on how this conception applies in culturally divided societies like those composed of indigenous groups and settler societies. In the third section, I argue that this conception of political justification—which is designed to produce just outcomes in pluralistic societies—cannot resolve the significant political disadvantages that indigenous groups face by remaining part of a common civic body with the majority society. I maintain that given these considerations, self-governance should be seriously considered as a way of removing these significant political disadvantages. Political Legitimacy and Deliberative Democracy In considering whether indigenous groups and majority settler societies can comprise a just political order in which fair decision-making procedures can be implemented, it is useful to examine deliberative democracy, for a central concern of this normative democratic theory is the justification of political decisions.1 For defenders of deliberative democracy, political decisions are justified only if they are reached through procedures that take into account the interests and views of all members of the polity. Since all members of the polity will be subject to the political decisions reached, their preferences should be given equal consideration in an open and uncoerced process of public deliberation. For the deliberative democrat, equal consideration means: (1) that deliberators will understand and take into account the views and interests of others and (2) that deliberators will provide...

Foresight, Epistemic Reliability and the Systematic Underestimation of Risk

Foresight, Epistemic Reliability and the Systematic Underestimation of Risk Joshua A. Miller (bio) and Steven Douglas Maloney (bio) "Liberal governments cannot plan." —Theodore Lowi Good government must balance demands of legitimacy with those of accurate inquiry about the common good. David Estlund's work on epistemic proceduralism, culminating (to this point) with Democratic Authority, demands theories of democratic legitimacy respect this balance. Estlund compels his reader to doubt that either correctness theories or pure procedural democracy adequately manage this balance. Estlund moves the conversation on deliberative democracy dramatically forward by pushing all parties away from either extreme. Still, we wonder about Estlund's view that there exist no instances when a political regime might need to tilt heavily towards correctness at the expense of legitimacy. Perhaps some events are so cataclysmic that their avoidance must trump both legitimacy on the particular decision and general reliability on questions of less importance. Ultimately, Estlund's claims to balance the demands of truth-seeking and democratic justification raise many principled objections and empirical challenges to institutional design even as they lay others to rest. Estlund claims that public inquiry into moral and empirical facts is authoritative only when it is subordinated to a general acceptability requirement, "no one has the authority or legitimate coercive power over another without a justification that could be accepted by all qualified points of view."1 The general acceptability requirement ideally harnesses the preference aggregating and information-assessing functions of democratic institutions like voting, deliberating, and protesting while curbing elitist ("epistocratic") procedures. Moral experts are not, by virtue of this qualification, political authorities capable of making generally obligating policies. Since our moral intuitions and judgments are generally not biddable by unexplained appeals to expertise, democratic polities that defer to experts are, he claims, confusing correctness with authority. This caveat preserves the authority by which even dissenting citizens feel obliged to obey or face just coercion. Estlund's view is laudable for trying to force formal political theorists to consider epistemic demands, but it ignores the growing requirements of predictive inquiry necessitated by the state's exclusive claim to protect the health, safety, and welfare of its citizens. We agree that a fair procedure is insufficient if it is not also likely to produce good policy: "it must count in favor of a social decision procedure that it tends to produce the better decision."2 Still, a procedure that does this must successfully collect epistemically reliable evaluations of facts and norms. A functioning democracy must not only be able to determine basic fact-finding (that a flood or financial collapse is occurring or has occurred) and norm-discovery (to proclaim in retrospect that it ought to have been prevented.) A state must also prevent and prepare for future risks, to preserve its citizens' health, safety, and welfare. Even more difficult, it must handicap the likely risk of its occurrence against the expenditure of limited resources for prevention or ameliorative response. Strictly speaking, this is not normative inquiry. There are facts of the matter about future states of affairs, but they can only be measured in probabilities, cautiously and with constant corrections as new facts come to light. Nonetheless, future events have normative implications such that prediction and prescription are often conflated. We fear that predictive and preventative inquiry is a kind of empirical inquiry for which majoritarian institutions are ill suited. It appears, then, that Estlund cannot split the difference between authority and accuracy: for some decisions, at least, he must choose. A. The Challenge "What if democracy got most things right, but none of the most important things?"3 There are some decisions a state can make whose effects outweigh all others. The risks associated with failure in these decisions overshadow considerations of legitimacy, acceptability, and accuracy in lesser matters: getting those decisions right must be the first priority of any polity if it is to survive to make more banal choices. In this way, all regimes are truth-seeking, and all citizens should accept institutions that [End Page 54] get these decisions right the most often rather than trading off the possibility of cataclysm for some other goods like fairness. When considering cataclysmic risks, Estlund focuses on...

Pure Epistemic Proceduralism

ABSTRACTIn this paper I defend a pure proceduralist conception of legitimacy that applies to epistemic democracy. This conception, which I call pure epistemic proceduralism, does not depend on procedure-independent standards for good outcomes and relies on a proceduralist epistemology. It identifies a democratic decision as legitimate if it is the outcome of a process that satisfies certain conditions of political and epistemic fairness. My argument starts with a rejection of instrumentalism–the view that political equality is only instrumentally valuable. I reject instrumentalism on two grounds: (i) because it fails to respect reasonable value pluralism and to recognize the constitutive role of democratic procedures for legitimacy in pluralist societies, and (ii) because it neglects the constructive function of democratic decision-making. I then consider two alternatives to pure epistemic proceduralism: David Estlund's version of epistemic proceduralism and a Deweyan account of epistemic democracy. I argue that only pure epistemic proceduralism can make good on both shortcomings of instrumentalism, whereas each of the other two approaches only makes good on one and neglects the other.