Public knowledge and its discontents

Abstract

Ideally, public knowledge should encapsulate the achievements of millennia of inquiry, making them available to individuals and groups for the promotion of their various ends. I explore the ways in which the actual situation fails to live up to this ideal. Our investigations are not always directed towards the questions of most concern to most people, the results on which experts agree are not always based on reasons the broader public is prepared to endorse, and the dissemination of information is so distorted as to make supposedly free discussion and debate an unproductive shouting match. The consequences for democracy are severe, since a healthy system of public knowledge, able to discharge its function, is an essential component of a flourishing democratic society.

Keywords

democracy free speech public knowledge science policy well-ordered science

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Akerlof G. ( 1984) An Economic Theorist’s Book of Tales. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Dahl R. ( 1970) Preface to Democratic Theory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Dewey J. ( 1964) Problems of Men. Paterson, NJ: Littlefield, Adams.

Dewey J. ( 1985) The Public and its Problems. Athens, OH: Swallow Press.

Elgin C. ( 2004) True enough. Philosophical Issues 14: 113-31.

Feyerabend P. ( 1978) Science in a Free Society. London: New Left Books.

Flory J. and Kitcher P. ( 2004) Global health and the scientific research agenda. Philosophy and Public Affairs 32: 36-65.

Goldman A. ( 1986) Epistemology and Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Goldman A. ( 1999) Knowledge in a Social World. New York : Oxford University Press.

10.

Goodin R. ( 2003) Reflective Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press.

11.

Haraway D. ( 1989) Primate Visions. New York: Routledge.

12.

Kitcher P. ( 1990) The division of cognitive labor. Journal of Philosophy 87: 5-22.

13.

Kitcher P. ( 2001) Science, Truth, and Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press.

14.

Kitcher P. ( 2004) The ends of the sciences. In: B Leiter (ed.) The Future for Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 208-29.

15.

Kitcher P. ( 2007) Living with Darwin. New York: Oxford University Press.

16.

Kitcher P. ( 2008) Science, religion, and democracy. Episteme 5: 5-18.

17.

Kitcher P. ( 2011a) The Ethical Project. Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press.

18.

Kitcher P. ( 2011b) Science in a Democratic Society. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

19.

Longino H. ( 1990) Science as Social Knowledge, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

20.

Plato (1992) Republic, trans. GMA Grube, amended by CDC Reeve. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.

21.

Reiss J. and Kitcher P. (2009) Biomedical research, neglected diseases, and well-ordered science. Theoria 24: 263-82.

22.

Shapiro I. ( 2003) The Moral Foundations of Politics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.