Abstract: This paper defends a Peircean account truth in politics and ethics. It also sets out a novel epistemic conception of democracy. Roughly, if we are to aim at truth, we must take into account all the relevant experience and sustain the conditions under which prevailing arrangements may be contested, an idea which is aligned with democratic politics. Along the way, it identifies a mistake inspired by Dewey and one by Peirce and shows how these mistakes are manifest in contemporary political philosophy.
Misak et al. (Wed,) studied this question.