What do truth and democracy have to do with each other? Not much, one might think. After all, the whole point of democracy is that people are entitled to vote no matter their knowledge or virtue, let alone their wealth or lineage. So, in principle, and sometimes in practice, the foolish and corrupt are entitled to rule over the wise and virtuous, just as the foreign-born and/or poor may come to govern rich natives. Such possibilities should be understood as a feature, not a bug, of democratic politics. Hence democracy has historically been the object of derision, aversion and contempt by those who suppose that knowledge and/or virtue are important qualifications for government.
However, at least two philosophical debates nowadays suggest that it would be hasty to assume that democracy has nothing to do with truth, simply because knowledge is neither a necessary nor a sufficient qualification for democratic government. The first debate was provoked by Rawls's claim, following Hannah Arendt, that truth is inimical to democracy and, therefore, a philosophy suitable for democracy should try to avoid political claims about truth in favour of claims about what is reasonable, or most reasonable. The second debate concerns the possibility and desirability of an epistemic justification of democracy. The first debate appears to imply that even if democracies have appealing epistemic properties, the moral and political demands of democracy may preclude insisting on these advantages when publicly justifying democracy itself…