Science and Technology Studies (STS) offers contrasting normative visions of how to democratically manage the relations between experts and larger publics in contemporary liberal democracies. This lack of uniformity has not stopped advocates of participatory politics from implying that to be anything other than staunch defenders of ‘the public’ is to be illiberal and undemocratic. But if we turn to political philosophy, part of liberal democratic theory is the attempt to theorize how deliberation might include limits to public discourse. This paper treats the debate between Sheila Jasanoff and Brian Wynne, on one side, and Harry Collins and Robert Evans, on the other, as representative of opposing normative sensibilities within STS. Jasanoff and Wynne claim that widespread deliberation is the democratic means for protecting publics from experts who colonize public meanings. Collins and Evans caution that a failure to draw distinctions between publics and experts, or politics and expertise, undermines expertise and is impractical for democracy. By relating both of these approaches to prominent positions and traditions within political philosophy, I aim to illuminate different senses of democracy. Jasanoff and Wynne appear to have the normative upper hand, but only because their approach dovetails with a politics of identity, which is widespread in contemporary political discourse. However, it is an unsatisfactory view of the grounds of public discourse. I argue that Collins and Evans work within a different tradition, that of John Rawls and liberal egalitarianism. Explicating these links helps to disrobe the implication that Collins and Evans are anti-democratic in their effort to impose restrictions on public engagement with expertise.
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