Against Political Cognitivism as a Ground of Political

Davide Versari

University of Eastern Piedmont

In the debate on political legitimacy, belief-based approaches have recently become popular. They hinge on two tenets. One is the commitment to political cognitivism, i.e., the idea that there exists, and can be reached, a standard of correctness for political decisions (Landemore, 2013). The other is that said commitment is the ground of legitimacy, i.e., that meeting the standard is what makes a decision legitimate (Peter, 2023).
Within this picture, my aim is to counter the second tenet, i.e., the use of political cognitivism as the ground of political legitimacy. To do that, I will rely on Peter’s “epistemic underdetermination objection” against pure belief-based accounts, showing that it is more powerful than what she herself takes it to be.
According to Peter, said accounts rest on the possibility to establish a “cognitive political authority”, i.e., an epistemic advantage in accessing beliefs about what the right decision is in certain circumstances, sufficient to confer the legitimacy to make political decisions to which the others should defer. But she also recognises that the epistemic circumstances of politics are so underdetermined that they rarely allow to establish such an authority. However, she claims that in principle this is possible, and thus we should not totally dismiss belief-based attempts but go for a hybrid one.
Instead, I argue that the obstacles that hinder the establishment of a cognitive political authority in the epistemic circumstances of politics are structural, not contingent. They are due to the reasonable disagreement that holds among the disciplines that contribute to a political decision, as Rawls’s argument of the “burdens of judgment” made clear (2005). Each of them has its own answer to the question of what the right decision is and they can hardly be reconciled. If this is correct, cognitive political authority cannot be established and consequently political cognitivism must be discarded as a ground for political legitimacy.

Chair: Dominik Boll

Time: September 11th, 14:10 – 14:40

Location: SR 1.007 (online)