Book Review: Listening for Democracy: Recognition, Representation, Reconciliation, by Andrew Dobson

• DOI: 10.1177/0090591715606886
• Date: 01 December 2015
• Author: Jade Larissa Schiff
• Published date: 01 December 2015
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

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Political Theory 43(6)
other words, we can evaluate the accounts that result from our inquiries as
working better or worse, and therefore as succeeding or failing as truths. As
Jeff Stout puts it, “Democratic social criticism too is a form of inquiry. Its
standards require critical attention to the question of who dominates whom in
families, economies, and polities.”2 Here too our inquiry must “answer for
the ultimate correctness of their application not to what you or I or all of us
take to be the case but to what actually is the case.”
Such pragmatism might be termed “strong corrigibilism.” This is not
merely the idea that in some domains it is very hard to come to know the truth
about matters and so we are limited to a perspectivalism that accepts that
certain domains of experience will look different from each situated subjec-
tivity and that we must all accept the fallibility of our beliefs about them.
Despite the necessary perspectivalism that attends our effort to understand
“the demands of excellence, . . . the harm we inflict on others, and . . . our
complicity in evils” (Stout), it is also the case that we inevitably participate in
inquiry about those matters, and that those practices of inquiry answer ulti-
mately for the correctness of their application to what actually is the case.
Our collective ability to test and weigh the truth-claims that are generated
through practices of moral inquiry and democratic social criticism should
generate a dynamic of constant self- and collective-correction. This is what
we are after, and what emerges from the pragmatists’ insights about precisely
how truth claims are also political claims.
I may be making too much of Ferguson’s distinction between truth claims
and political claims, just as I think she is making too much of it. Perhaps we
are closer than I can see. I would be glad to stand corrected.
Notes
1. Brandom, Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive
Commitment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 594, quoted in
Jeffrey Stout, “The Spirit of Pragmatism: Bernstein’s Variations on Hegelian
Themes,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 33, no. 1 (2012): 185–246.
2. Stout, Ibid.
Listening for Democracy: Recognition, Representation, Reconciliation, by Andrew
Dobson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Reviewed by: Jade Larissa Schiff, Oberlin College
DOI: 10.1177/0090591715606886

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Book Reviews
855
Listening is vital to democratic politics. In this book, Andrew Dobson joins an
ongoing conversation about the possibilities and limits of political listening.1
The book has several virtues: Dobson...