Noncognitive Deliberation: The Political Legacy of Logical Empiricism

Abstract Based on a survey of original sources representing the respective views of logical empiricists and their allies at different stages of the movement’s development, this paper argues that logical empiricism, seen in a broader context that includes the democratic views of Max Weber and Hans Kelsen as well as Austrian social democracy, reveals a powerful, if hitherto underappreciated, side of twentieth-century democratic thought. This conception, which I call “noncognitive deliberation,” is set in the context of debates about deliberative democracy that typically make no reference to logical empiricism. I argue that noncognitive deliberation, along with American pragmatism and current views of deliberative democracy, replaces the earlier Habermasian notion of universal consensus, which condemns those who do not share it as irrational, with the notion of compromise, which leaves room for unresolved conflict.