Participation

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Participation

Participation can mean different things depending on context. In the context of science, technology, and ethics, the concept of participation points toward questions of how technologies might be developed to promote political interaction among democratic citizens, and issues of how technoscientific expertise may itself be related to democratic decision making. The present analysis focuses on the second issue by examining three philosophical perspectives on participation in preface to making a sociological argument—an argument that will (a) refine how the problem of participation ought to be conceptualized and (b) consider all the normative aspirations of philosophy to work in conjunction with empirical studies for the purpose of offering citizens and scientists alike greater reflexive purchase on their collective decision making.

Preliminaries

Before turning to the three perspectives on participation, it is useful to note a few things in general about the problem of participation. Expertise is a term that is not only associated with knowledge, skill, and authority, but also with hierarchy—elitism, paternalism, and power. On the one hand, hierarchy is an essential component of representative democracy. If a government encouraged people to vote about everything without regard to expert knowledge, it would promote self-destructive mob rule rather than democracy.

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