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Part of
Science and Democracy: Controversies and conflicts
Edited by Pierluigi Barrotta and Giovanni Scarafile
[Controversies 13] 2018
► pp. 53–70

Chapter 3
Rethinking the notion of public

A pragmatist account

Recent times have witnessed that democracy and science may easily be in conflict. The goal of the paper is to reframe the issue of the relations between democracy and science in a way that makes it possible to preserve the distinction between the two, while rejecting the pessimistic view that their conflict is harmful. To achieve this goal, I will refine Dewey’s concept of public so as to develop a semantic interpretation of it grounded on the notion of articulation. My proposal is to conceive of the public as a logical space not reducible to that of science, in which the truths discovered by scientists are renegotiated through a process of interaction between the experts and the citizens.

Keywords: philosophy of expertise, pragmatism, technical democracy, science, public, articulation
Article outline
  • 1.Dewey’s conception of public
  • 2.Toward a pragmatist philosophy of expertise: The ontology of the public
  • 3.The autonomy of the public and the role of experts
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 23 May 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cvs.13.05gro
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Cited by 1 other publications

Barrotta, Pierluigi & Roberto Gronda
2020. Epistemic Inequality and the Grounds of Trust in Scientific Experts. In Trust [Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, 54], ► pp. 81 ff. DOI logo

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