Contemporary Pragmatism Editions Rodopi Vol. 4, No. 2 (December 2007), 3–9 © 2007 Pragmatism and the Epistemic Defense of Democracy Eric MacGilvray Robert Westbrook argues in Democratic Hope that for the pragmatist “all believers [must] be democrats simply by virtue of their desire to assert their beliefs as true,” and that they must therefore “open their beliefs to the widest possible range of experience and inquiry.” I argue against this view that doubt, not belief, lies at the center of the pragmatic theory of inquiry, and that our beliefs can be placed into doubt only by those whom we consider to be epistemically reliable. It follows that any connection between pragmatism and democracy must be empirical and not conceptual in nature. When I first became interested in pragmatism more than ten years ago, one of the first books that I turned to was Robert Westbrook’s seminal intellectual biography of John Dewey, John Dewey and American Democracy. 1 It provided me with an invaluable road map through Dewey’s dauntingly large and wide- ranging corpus, the dauntingly wide range of political movements and figures that he was associated with, and the dauntingly complicated question of the relationship between his life and his thought. As I worked my way through Dewey’s writings over the next several years, I would often turn to Westbrook’s book for help in clarifying Dewey’s ideas, placing them within their proper context, and getting a sense of what I should look at next. It is still not at all uncommon for me to reach for it when I need to brush up on some point of Deweyana. So I was very pleased to see that Westbrook has a new collection of essays on pragmatism and democratic theory, 2 and to be asked to comment on it in this forum. I am also very pleased to be able to begin my comments by saying that this book is very much up to the high standard set by the Dewey biography, and that it is sure to be a resource to me and to anyone who is interested in the history of pragmatism or of American democratic theory for a long time to come. I would like to use my space here to take issue not with any of the particulars of Westbrook’s narrative, but rather with what I take to be its unifying theme: the claim that pragmatism provides, or can provide, a justification of participatory democracy, and in particular that it provides what Westbrook calls an “epistemic defense” or “epistemological justification” of