We’re all familiar with the thought that democracy is merely the rule of the unwise mob. In the hands of Plato and a long line of philosophers since him, this thought has been developed into a formidable anti-democratic argument: Only truth or wisdom confer authority, and since democracy is the rule of the unwise, it has no authority.  This rough line of argument has proven so formidable, in fact, that many democratic theorists have tried to evade it by explicitly denying that politics has anything to do with wisdom.  But another strand of democratic theory takes the argument by the horns and tries to show that democracy is indeed epistemically sound.  Some of these views try to show that democracy, warts and all, is yet wiser than the alternatives.  But others have proposed a more ambitious reply according to which democracy has a positive epistemic value.

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