ABSTRACT
It has recently become a trend to examine the epistemic powers of democracy by focusing on the distribution of individual epistemic virtues in a population. In this chapter, I argue (1) that the epistemic reliability of institutional systems is a matter of systemic properties which constitute collective rather than individual epistemic virtues and (2) that democracy exhibits these systemic properties, and we can epistemologically criticize existing representative electoral democracies if they fail to exhibit those systemic properties. In the first part of the chapter, I develop a framework for institutional systems’ epistemic reliability, which builds on institutional epistemology research in the New Diversity Theory, the division of cognitive labor, and mandevillian intelligence. It follows from the framework that institutional systems based on individual epistemic virtue suffer from collective epistemic vice. In the second part, I show how Elizabeth Anderson's experimentalist model of epistemic powers of democracy satisfies the core conditions of institutional systems’ epistemic reliability. Lastly, I provide a brief overview of the critical epistemic flaws of contemporary representative electoral democracies.
