Democracy and the Epistemic Commons

* Article: Democracy and the Epistemic Commons. The Consilience Project. Feb 27, 2021

URL = https://consilienceproject.org/democracy-and-the-epistemic-commons/

"Good decision-making depends on good sensemaking."

Description

"Democracy cannot function without an epistemically healthy public sphere that makes it possible for democratic self-government to achieve successful outcomes, maintain its legitimacy, and avoid runaway concentrations of power in society. The institutional structures responsible for maintaining our epistemic commons have faltered. Only a new movement for cultural enlightenment can harness the energy needed to reboot and revamp our ailing institutions—or generate new ones entirely—and thereby restore our democracy."

Excerpts

"The foundational mechanism upon which all others depend is the maintenance of a healthy epistemic commons within a democracy—an epistemically healthy public sphere where widely trusted norms, processes, and institutions for making sense out of and reaching consensus on raw information lead to certain facts being accepted as true. Additionally, propositions, notions of causation, and forecasts of the future are evaluated with an appropriate measure of skepticism and rigor. This healthy epistemic commons makes it possible for a democratic government to conduct successful governance at a pragmatic level on any number of issues, to maintain its legitimacy through the informed consent of the governed, and, ultimately, to prevent a runaway concentration of power in society that would lead to the functional death of democracy and its replacement with autocracy, oligarchy, or even societal collapse.