Liberal Democracy and Epistemic Neutrality # Klemens Kappel Philosophy Section, Department of Media, Cognition, and Communication, University of Copenhagen, Denmark kappel@hum.ku.dk 1. Epistemic Neutrality It will have escaped notice of no one that liberal democracies in the western world feature fiercely debated disagreements over vital matters of fact. Celebrated recent examples include the clashes over the existence and causes of climate change, the disputes between supporters of intelligent design or creationism on the one hand, and Darwinian evolution on the other. Another well-known example is the argument over the existence of weapons of mass destruction and links to Islamic terrorist networks in pre-war Irak. At a lesser but still important level, people argue about the benefits of complementary and alternative medicine, the possible health hazards of GM-crops, possible danger of electro-magnetic radiation from mobile phones, possible links between certain vaccination programs and certain mental disorders, or which diets will cause weight-losses, and many, many other factual issues that matters for the way we conduct our daily life. 1 Disagreements over factual matters come in many varieties, of course. In some cases the disagreements are entirely intra-scientific, in other cases the disagreement is between the scientific establishment - the experts - and smaller or larger parts of the population. In some conflicts, each of the opposing views count a substantial number of supporters, whereas in cases such as Holocaust- denial, the minority view counts as supporters only a tiny fraction of the population. Some cases of factual disagreement feature sensible proponents on each side, whereas other disagreements are better described as crazy attacks on common sense. There are disagreements whose mere existence are abhorrent, and indeed the rift over the nature and magnitude of the Holocaust is one, as are various conspiracy theories that have evolved in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Very often, of course, factual disagreements are tightly interwoven with political, ideological or religious controversies. Consider for example the genocide of the Armenian population in Turkey, the existence of which is # Thanks to John Lyne, Stephen Turner, Thomas Brudholm and Lars Binderup for comments to this material at various stages. 1 An amusing opionated guide is provided by (Taverne 2005)