EXPERTS AND CITIZENS IN THE TIMES OF COVID-19: A DEWEYAN PERSPECTIVE

The aim of this paper is to spell out, based on John Dewey’s pragmatist approach to politics, an alternative to neoliberalism and populism that has the idea of epistemic cooperation between scientists and citizens at its core. In order to carry out this task, we will follow three steps. In the first section we show that neoliberalism and populism, despite their obvious differences, share a common premise, namely, the assumption that scientists and lay citizens have two fundamentally different, incompatible approaches to knowledge. From this background, each of them tends to absolutize the value of either scientific knowledge (neoliberalism) or citizens’ knowledge (populism), bringing each of them and society at large into serious trouble. In the second section, we present Dewey’s alternative to populism and neoliberalism. Pragmatism avoids separating and absolutizing any of the two poles by pointing to the continuity between science and ordinary inquiry. Drawing on the famous Dewey-Lippmann debate, we argue for the use of institutional imagination for figuring out institutional arrangements organizing the cooperation between scientists and lay citizens. In a final step, we explore particular ways in which scientific progress has been linked to citizens’ epistemic achievements, namely, through “politicization” of apparently value-neutral issues such as certain health issues. More concretely, we show that politicization of HIV has generated valuable knowledge for scientific research. Here we see how, apart from institutional innovations, social struggles themselves represents a valuable source of the deabsolutization of knowledge and the promotion of epistemic cooperation.