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language and inquiry.”20 They saw knowledge of reality as constructed in a social process of deliberation in which the standards, norms, and rules of thumb applied to a problem or question were themselves the products of previous communities of inquiry, selected, tested, and modi fied in the process at hand. This view of knowledge as based on interaction led John Dewey to the idea that democracy was the only mode of public life that matched the knowledge process. The requirement that our knowledge and value claims do not have transcendental grounds but have to be argued about and discussed is a view of the knowledge process as a kind of democracy . “No government by experts in which the masses do not have the chance to inform the experts as to their needs can be anything but an oligarchy managed in the interests of the few.”21 The suggestion that knowledge is democratic sounds outlandish at first. After all, do we decide what is true by majority vote? According to Dewey, “Many persons seem to suppose that facts carry their meaning along with themselves on their face. Accumulate enough of them and their interpretation stares out at you.”22 I ran into this belief years ago interviewing dozens of public health practitioners in the course of a national study. Many people the study team talked to said something like, “Public health is a science, science gives us the facts, and the facts tell us what to do.” Obviously, these professionals didn’t believe that knowledge was democratic, or maybe it would be more accurate to say that they saw no difference between knowledge and possession of facts.23 But there is a gap between facts and knowledge, one that has to be bridged by means of deliberation. The meaning of facts, what they imply for understanding public problems and deciding what to do about them, is never obvious on its face.The conversion of facts into knowledge can only be done through interpretation, debate, discussion, and persuasion.This process of coming to understand situations and issues should be as open and inclusive as possible. Dewey’s criticism of traditional philosophy applies equally to the knowledge systems that currently shape public life, which are wedded to the view that some forms of knowledge are inherently superior to others. That commitment makes them claim the authority to make their knowledge definitive. As Dewey pointed out, this is a deeply 134 phlosophy for practce undemocratic idea. Making definite knowledge claims has the effect of shutting off debate, whereas politics is debate; therefore knowledge claims such as those made by science are antipolitical. Dewey thought that scientists and other “highbrows” needed to keep in mind that all human beings are experts on the conditions of their own lives. This doesn’t mean that all of us know all we need to about our problems and the problems of our communities. What we do know, however, has the kind of validity that comes only out of direct experience—out of living. We can add to that knowledge or we can reinterpret it; that is, we can learn. But wrestling with public problems and deciding on courses of action to deal with them has to start from what people know from daily life. It is amazing how frequently experts underrate or even ignore what people know about a situation just from living in it. A few days after September 11, 2001, a New York Times story carried this headline, “Even workers can see flaws in airlines’ screening system.”24 Even workers! Why is this such a surprise? Who would know the flaws in the system better than the screeners themselves? Yet until disaster struck no one asked them how things were going, and of course overworked and poorly paid people were hardly going to volunteer information, especially when they were likely to get blamed for whatever was wrong. What if, instead of investigating the screeners, someone had asked them to help figure out ways to improve the system? Out of direct experience and facts amassed through scientific study, people build democratic knowledge by means of discussion and argument. Yet this is rarely done. Somebody has to take the fall, after all. One difficulty with the American representative system of government is that it provides few pipelines for conveying people’s lived experiences into the policy process, whether they are firing line workers, like the airport screeners, clients of...

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