ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a distinctive view of the epistemic dimension of democracy that highlights the public role of argumentation. It presents the basic contours of the epistemic conception of democracy in a way that punctuates its pragmatist features. To review, Dewey was among the first to propose an epistemic conception of democracy, a conception according to which the worth of democracy centrally lies in its capacity to realize certain epistemic goods. Specifically, Dewey argued that in a proper democracy, socially distributed epistemic resources are pooled and applied to problems. Democracy's value, then, lies in its capacity to reliably deliver the epistemic good of intelligent responses to those problems. Modern democratic citizens naturally tend to recoil at Plato's argument. And his positive proposal that philosophers should rule is often met with understandable ridicule. Politics is not about discerning truths or tracking good reasons, but producing stable government.
