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Democratic Epistemology and Accountability*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2009

Russell Hardin
Affiliation:
Politics, New York University

Extract

Most of the knowledge of an ordinary person has a very messy structure and cannot meet standard epistemological criteria for its justification. Rather, a street-level epistemology makes sense of ordinary knowledge. Street-level epistemology is a subjective account of knowledge, not a public account. It is not about what counts as knowledge in, say, physics, but deals rather, with your knowledge, my knowledge, the ordinary person's knowledge. I wish not to elaborate this view here, but to apply it to the problems of representative democracy. I will briefly lay out the central implications of a street-level epistemology and then bring it to bear on democratic citizenship, especially on the problem of the citizen's holding elected officials accountable for their actions.

Information

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 2000

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