ABSTRACT
It is commonly thought that pragmatists must be committed to an epistemic view of democracy. However, this idea is complicated by certain terminological difficulties regarding the term pragmatism and the concept of an epistemic view of democracy. After distinguishing an epistemic argument for democracy from an epistemic conception of it, this chapter argues that the Deweyan position offers a fundamentally moral argument for an epistemic conception of democracy. It is argued that this moral argument fails to accommodate an intuitive requirement for democratic legitimacy identified by John Rawls. A Peircean epistemic argument for democracy is then developed. The Peircean argument is then shown to support a distinctive epistemic conception of democracy that avoids the difficulties which beset the Deweyan position.
