Article ID: CBB000773320

The Issues Deserve More Credit: Pragmatist Contributions to the Study of Public Involvement in Controversy (2007)

unapi

This paper explores the `issue-oriented' perspective on public involvement in politics opened up by recent research in Science and Technology Studies (STS). This research proposes that public controversy around techno-scientific issues is dedicated to the articulation of these issues and their eventual accommodation in society. It does not, however, fully answer the question of why issue formation should be appreciated as a crucial dimension of democratic politics. To address this question, I turn to the work of two early 20th-century American pragmatists: John Dewey and Walter Lippmann. In their work on democracy in industrial society, they conceived of public involvement in politics as being occasioned by, and providing a way to settle, controversies that existing institutions were unable to resolve. Moreover, Dewey developed a `socio-ontological' understanding of issues, which suggests that people's involvement in politics is mediated by problems that affect them. Dewey and Lippmann thus provide important argumentative resources for further elaborating the approach to public involvement developed in STS. STS research has also developed a `socio-ontological' approach, as it focuses on the `attachments' that people mobilize (and that mobilize people) in the performance of their concern with public affairs. Such an approach provides an alternative to discursivist analysis of the role of `issue framing' in the involvement of publics in politics.

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Description Uses pragmatic political theorists Dewey and Lippmann to further elaborate the nature of public involvement in STS issues.


Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB000773320/

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Authors & Contributors
Brown, Matthew J.
Levine, Steven
John J. Stuhr
Weldon, Stephen P.
Tucker, Aviezer
Tsukahara, Togo
Concepts
Science and politics
Science studies, theoretical works
Democracy
Science studies, as a discipline
Pragmatism; instrumentalism
Science and government
Time Periods
20th century, early
20th century, late
21st century
19th century
20th century
18th century
Places
United States
Russia
Europe
Cuba
Japan
France
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