Can We Talk It Out?

Research on the normative ideal of democracy has taken a sharp epistemic and deliberative turn. Increasingly, normative theories of democracy defend deliberative democracy by appealing to the putative cognitive benefits of political deliberation. I argue that the most prominent epistemic defences of deliberative democracy are unwarranted. Relying on a body of empirical findings on the workings of implicit bias, I explain that they all rely on exaggerated claims about the epistemic virtues of political deliberation. However, I also argue that findings in cognitive and social psychology can aid in the development of a new and improved generation of epistemic arguments for deliberative democracy that can sidestep these issues.