Jacopo Marchetti POLYCENTRIC DEMOCRACY, DISPERSED KNOWLEDGE AND IGNORANCE IN POLICY DESIGN One of the main debates in political philosophy throughout the past for- ty years has revolved around finding the best kind of association in the light of the profound disagreements about the vision of a “good society”. Though the prominent figures of this debate do not always share the same political arguments, they do not consider disagreements about facts and norms as a problem of pure theory but as a predicament that fundamental- ly endangers the stability of society. On the other hand, alternative ap- proaches to the problem of democratic decision-making processes have emerged and have flowed into a tradition called epistemic democracy. This look at institutional architecture from a particular perspective: it is not con- cerned with values such as justice, liberty, or equality, but rather with the epistemic capability of problem-solving applied to the study of political and collective choice phenomena. Scholars have provided different meanings and definitions for it 1 . Among its characteristics, this paper tries to focus on epistemic democracy with respect to the claim by its advocators according to which it would prove superior to the forms of government we know in terms of the exploi- tation of social knowledge. In this regard, in last few years a fine-tuned version of this theory has been developed under the appellative of polycen- tric democracy 2 . Its advocators believe that it would outperform tradition- al epistemic conceptions. 1 J. Cohen, An Epistemic Conception of Democracy, in “Ethics”, 97, n. 1, 1986, pp. 26-38; C. List , R. E. Goodin, Epistemic democracy: Generalizing the Con- dorcet Jury theorem, in “Journal of Political Philosophy”, 9, 2001, pp. 277-306; D. Estlund, Introduction: Epistemic Approaches to Democracy, in “Epis- teme”, 5, n. 1, 2008, pp. 1-4; J. Knight, H. Landemore, N. Urbinati, D. Vie- hoff, Roundtable on epistemic democracy and its critics, in “Critical Review”, 28, n. 2, 2016, pp. 137-170. 2 J. Müller, Political Pluralism, Disagreement and Justice: The Case for Polycen- tric Democracy, Routledge, London-New York 2019.