Science and Representative Democracy: Experts and Citizens

Mauro Dorato charts pressing debates within the philosophy of science that centre around expertise, access to knowledge, consensus, debate and decision-making.

This English-language translation of Disinformazione Scientifica e Democrazia argues that the advancement of science depends on an exponential process of specialization, accompanied by the creation of technical languages that are less and less accessible to the general public. Dorato reveals how such a process aligns with representative forms of democracies in which knowledge and decision-making is pyramided in terms of ‘the general interest’. Despite being based on the principle of competence, the role of experts as mediators of scientific knowledge threatens the autonomy of the citizen and calls for new ways to increase the level of literacy about science and its philosophical and probabilistic foundations. Using an opposition between pluralism and conformism, Scientific Methodology and Representative Democracy reveals the obstacles to the functioning of both science and democracy.