Craig Ferrie

I am interested in the connection between truth pluralism and democratic legitimacy.

Truth pluralism is the view that different kinds of claims, like ‘2+2=4’, ‘Murder is morally wrong’ or ‘dogs have four legs’, get to be true in different ways. This is plausible because when we think of claims about the world, we think they are true if they accurately represent the way the world is. Claims about numbers or morality (or possibilities, fictional entities, logic, etc.) do not seem to be about the way the world is. Never will you bump into the number ‘2’ in the same way you might bump into a dog!

Democratic Legitimacy plausibly depends upon responsiveness to citizens’ good judgement about which policy to pursue; a government is legitimate only if it’s citizens are involved in policy-making. The Scottish approach to policy-making aims to do just that by empowering communities, respecting their lived experiencing and by holding governments accountable to ‘national outcomes’.

The mechanism for doing this largely depends upon the work of Audit Scotland which assesses the success of government policy. The role of audit in informing citizens and policy professionals and the role of citizens and professionals in informing audit, are both central to the legitimacy-conferring benefits of the ‘Scottish approach’ to policymaking. Moreover, both depend on prior questions about truth; legitimacy depends on responsiveness to citizens’ good judgement about which policy to pursue, which itself depends on citizens’ and auditors’ understanding of the truth about matters to which the policy pertains.