Synopsis.
Chapter 9 advances the first stage of an argument which is completed in chapter 10. I’ll just concentrate on the part of the argument that is presented in chapter 9, but it is worth seeing where it is going. The burden of the two chapters is to show that feasible democratic procedures have substantially more than random probability of finding the correct answers to what society should do. Chapter 9 only argues that an imaginary situation which Estlund calls a model epistemic deliberation would have a substantially better than random chance of getting the right answers, but he also says that this model is not an ideal for which it would be sensible to strive. Rather, it illustrates how an ideal democracy could be justified epistemically, and the subsequent chapter will argue that feasible democratic procedures for which it would be sensible to strive are relevantly like this “ideal”. The point is to “defeat a certain kind of sceptic, the one who denies that any (nonutopian) democratic arrangements could tend to perform better than random”.
How does the argument of this chapter work, then?
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