Abstract

Our goal in this article is to explore the relevance of the recent debate on epistemology of disagreement for democratic theory and especially for deliberative democracy. When talking about democratic decision making, deliberative democrats typically stress the importance of consensus or at least some kind of higher-level agreement. According to one prominent view in the epistemology of disagreement debate, that might be called the view of conformists, in the case of peer disagreement we should revise our own beliefs or degrees of belief so that we end up in agreement with our epistemic peers. It is not surprising that deliberative democrats welcomed this result. In this paper I shall argue that deliberative democrats should not embrace too readily the view of conformists.