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- Friberg-Fernros, Henrik, 1972, et al.
(författare)
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An epistemic alternative to the public justification requirement
- 2024
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Ingår i: Philosophy & Social Criticism. - : SAGE Publications. - 0191-4537 .- 1461-734X. ; 50:6
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- How should the state justify its coercive rules? Public reason liberalism endorses a public justification requirement: Justifications offered for authoritative regulations must be acceptable to all members of the relevant public. However, as a criterion of legitimacy, the public justification requirement is epistemically unreliable: It prioritizes neither the exclusion of false beliefs nor the inclusion of true beliefs in justifications of political rules. This article presents an epistemic alternative to the public justification requirement. Employing epistemological theories of argumentation, we demonstrate how this approach enables assessing the epistemic quality of justifications of political rules, even when the truth is difficult to establish.
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- Friberg-Fernros, Henrik, 1972, et al.
(författare)
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Assessing the Epistemic Quality of Democratic Decision-Making in Terms of Adequate Support for Conclusions
- 2017
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Ingår i: Social Epistemology. - : Informa UK Limited. - 0269-1728 .- 1464-5297. ; 31:3, s. 251-265
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- How can we assess the epistemic quality of democratic decision-making? Sceptics doubt such assessments are possible, as they must rely on controversial substantive standards of truth and rightness. Challenging that scepticism, this paper suggests a procedure-independent standard for assessing the epistemic quality of democratic decision-making by evaluating whether it is adequately supported by reasons. Adequate support for conclusion is a necessary (but insufficient on its own) aspect of epistemic quality for any epistemic justification of democracy, though particularly relevant to theories that emphasise public deliberation. Finding existing methods for measuring the quality of public discourse to fall short, we draw on an epistemological theory of argumentation to provide a more sophisticated approach to evaluating the epistemic quality of democratic decision-making, illustrate how the approach can be used, and demonstrate its relevance for the epistemic turn in democratic theory.
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- Friberg-Fernros, Henrik, 1972, et al.
(författare)
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Media and the power of naming: An experimental study of racist, xenophobic and nationalist party labels
- 2017
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Ingår i: Ethnicities. - : SAGE Publications. - 1468-7968 .- 1741-2706. ; 17:5, s. 727-745
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Racism has been widely discredited in past decades, and opinions that are perceived to be in conflict with the anti-racist norm are considered improper. Therefore, the anti-racist norm arguably represents an obstacle for anti-immigration parties. They must ensure that their criticism is not perceived as racism since that threatens to delegitimize the party and thereby undermine its possibilities for electoral success. The idea of the study is that the existence of the anti-racist norm make descriptions of these parties by the media decisive: the stronger connection to racism, the more severe the parties’ violation of the anti-racist norm is perceived by the public, which make voters less inclined to vote for them. This hypothesis is experimentally tested by labelling a fictive party differently and the result supports the basic idea of the study albeit the ‘racist’ label itself surprisingly does not decrease support more than the label of xenophobia.
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- Friberg-Fernros, Henrik, 1972, et al.
(författare)
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The Consensus Paradox: Does Deliberative Agreement Impede Rational Discourse?
- 2014
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Ingår i: Political Studies. - : SAGE Publications. - 0032-3217 .- 1467-9248. ; 62:S1 (suppl.), s. 99-116
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article explores a tension in deliberative democratic theory. The tension consists in that deliberative opinion formation ideally aims to reach consensus, while a consensus, once established, will likely impede the conditions for further rational public discourse. Hence, over time, deliberative democracy might risk undermining itself. While the tension is demonstrable in theory, we also suggest three cognitive and socio-psychological mechanisms by which consensus might hamper the rationality of public discourse: after an agreement, participants cease to develop new arguments, they tend to forget existing arguments and their fear of deviating from the social norm promotes conformism. Existing research has largely neglected to study how consensus in decision making affects future public deliberation. Our article thus serves three purposes: to elaborate the consensus paradox in deliberative democratic theory; to open up a research agenda for examining the paradox empirically; and to assess the theoretical implications of the paradox.
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