Political legitimacy between substance and procedure
A pragmatical approach
Keywords:
democracy, legitimacy, knowledge, prgamatism, experimentalismAbstract
The most popular conceptions of democratic legitimacy incur in serious difficulties in dealing consistently with two dimensions of democratic legitimacy which seem to be naturally associated with it: (1) the procedural dimension, associated with the fairness of the decision making process; and (2) the epistemic dimension, associated with the correction of the outputs. In this paper I argue that (a) such tension arises from the adoption of a “veritistic-consequentialist” social epistemology; (b) it is possible to deal with that tension by replacing this problematic epistemological conception with a pragmatist procedural social epistemology, and c) such replacement leads institutional design to an experimentalist orientation.
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