DOI

Accounts of public deliberation often refer to the notion of ‘facts’ or ‘accurate information.’ These epistemological notions, however, lack a stable, reliable definition used in research across disciplines or in practical politics across ideological fault lines. We consider realist definitions of fact within the analytical philosophy of language, specifically recent proposals to distinguish between facts of nature and socially constructed facts (Searle), and pragmatist definitions of fact (Peirce, Dewey). We argue that a pragmatist approach to facts as agreed upon circumstances that define a problem, i.e., consistent social constructivism, is more suitable for deliberative theory and practice. We use a case of The Citizens’ Initiative Review, where participants are explicitly asked to agree on a set of factual statements about the legislation at stake, as a clear example of cognitive difficulties that people experience when facts are treated as atomistic units with a context-independent truth value. We propose that in contexts of ideological pluralism facts can be defined as key parameters of problem situations that are consistently brought up in competing opinions. In such contexts, agreeing on facts will involve a complex syntactic pattern that brings these parameters into a coherent description of disagreement.

Язык оригиналаанглийский
Число страниц14
ЖурналSocial Epistemology
Дата раннего онлайн-доступа6 окт 2021
DOI
СостояниеЭлектронная публикация перед печатью - 6 окт 2021

    Предметные области Scopus

  • Социальные науки (все)
  • Философия

ID: 86159072