The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society

Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy

http://www.managingforimpact.org/sites/default/files/case/stilgoe_owen_macnaghten_2013_developing_a_framework_for_responsible_innovation.pdf

Developing a framework for responsible innovation

Inclusion and democracy.

more impressive with each exposure to it. Everything has changed and nothing has changed since Democracy in America was published in the 1830’s. Its author grasped with remarkable perception both the mutable and the immutable qualities of man. There could be nothing more salutary for us today than to assimilate his fine sense of what was permanent in a world which, like ours, was undergoing deep convulsions. Committed to the classical economics of Adam Smith, Tocqueville did not share Smith’s illusions about the eternal nature of the market. On the contrary, as Albert Salomon has emphasized, his point of view

Democracy in America: An Appreciation On the Occasion of the Centennial of Tocqueville's Death

‘‘Anecdotal evidence’’ has become a central point of contention in two recent controversies over science and technology (We follow Nelkin (1992, 10) in referring to our cases as controversies over science and technology.) in the United Kingdom and a contact point between individuals, expert institutions, and policy decisions. We argue that the term is central to the management of the boundary between experts and nonexperts, with consequences for ideas of public engagement and participation. This article reports on two separate pieces of qualitative social research into recent UK public risk controversies with the aim of unfolding the processes by which anecdotal evidence comes to be defined. We do not define anecdotal evidence as an epistemic category that exists prior to the public controversies themselves; rather, we aim to show how the term is constructed and contested by expert and nonexpert actors. We find that anecdotal evidence comes to be accepted (albeit in different ways) by the main actors as a...

Experts and Anecdotes The Role of "Anecdotal Evidence" in Public Scientific Controversies

Facilitation is indispensable to organized deliberative practices, yet largely absent from deliberative theory. This article theorizes the role of the deliberative facilitator through the central dilemma of ‘following from the front’. The facilitator necessarily occupies a leadership position in the deliberating group, yet must follow the group as it unfolds its own discourse on the issue at hand. This article will specify this tension in the framing of publics, the handling of expertise, the conduct of deliberation, and the crucial phase of bringing a deliberation to a conclusion. The various criticisms of deliberative practice in these dimensions are treated not as decisive objections, but rather as tensions to be negotiated by those who organize and conduct deliberative minipublics. This article aims to show the value of critical empirical work on deliberative practices as describing potential dangers, which can be set against the normative ideals and democratic potentials involved in attempts to gener...

Following from the front: theorizing deliberative facilitation

There can be good reasons to doubt the authority of a group of scientists. But those reasons do not include lack of unanimity among them. Indeed, holding science to a unanimity or near-unanimity standard has a pernicious effect on scientific deliberation, and on the transparency that is so crucial to the authority of science in a democracy. What authorizes a conclusion is the quality of the deliberation that produced it, which is enhanced by the presence of a non-dismissible minority. Scientists can speak as one in more ways than one. We recommend a different sort of consensus that is partly substantive and partly procedural. It is a version of what Margaret Gilbert calls “joint acceptance”–we call it “deliberative acceptance.” It capitalizes on there being a persistent minority, and thereby encourages accurate reporting of the state of agreement and disagreement among deliberators.

Should We Aim for Consensus

Democracies have a problem with expertise. Expert knowledge both mediates and facilitates public apprehension of problems, yet it also threatens to exclude the public from consequential judgments and decisions located in technical domains. This book asks: how can we have inclusion without collapsing the very concept of expertise? How can public judgment be engaged in expert practices in a way that does not reduce to populism? Drawing on deliberative democratic theory and social studies of science, Critical Elitism argues that expert authority depends ultimately on the exercise of public judgment in a context in which there are live possibilities for protest, opposition and scrutiny. This account points to new ways of looking at the role of civil society, expert institutions, and democratic innovations in the constitution of expert authority within democratic systems. Using the example of climate science, Critical Elitism highlights not only the risks but also the benefits of contesting expertise.

Critical Elitism: Deliberation, Democracy, and the Problem of Expertise

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057%2Fcpt.2013.26.pdf

Alfred Moore

Papers

Experts and Anecdotes The Role of "Anecdotal Evidence" in Public Scientific Controversies

Following from the front: theorizing deliberative facilitation

Should We Aim for Consensus

Critical Elitism: Deliberation, Democracy, and the Problem of Expertise

Democratic Reason: Politics, collective intelligence and the rule of the many