Enhancing Deliberation through Information Sets — Epoche B2
What Inclusion Actually Buys: Positional Objectivity in Democratic Deliberation The question Democratic theory has a familiar worry. Deliberation is supposed to be good in two ways at once — inclusive, so that everyone affected has a voice, and epistemically sound, so that the resulting decisions are well grounded. The worry is that these pull apart: widening participation admits people who are ill-informed, and narrowing it to those who know something sacrifices the claim to speak for anyone. The standard reply is that diversity is itself epistemically valuable, because more participants bring more information. That reply is too weak to do what is asked of it, and this essay argues for a different account of what inclusion buys. Inclusion does not chiefly add information. It corrects a class of error that cannot be corrected from inside a single social position, however much information that position accumulates. Amartya Sen's notion of positional objectivity makes the point precise [1] , and it has a consequence that most defences of inclusive deliberation would rather avoid: where positional distortion is absent, inclusion buys nothing epistemically, and the trade-off is exactly as real as the sceptics say. The thesis is therefore conditional in a way that can be tested, and it is not the claim that inclusiveness and quality are always complementary. Why the information story is not enough Begin with the argument that inclusion improves deliberation by enlarging the pool of information. In its best-known formal version — Lu Hong and Scott Page's result that groups of diverse problem-solvers can outperform groups of the highest-ability solvers (2004 [2] ) — diversity means variety in problem representations and heuristics, and the benefit is real under stated conditions. The trouble is that this argument concedes the sceptic's frame. If what inclusion contributes is information and heuristics, then the question becomes how much of each a given participant contributes, and the sceptic can reply that the marginal contribution of an uninformed participant is negative once the costs of sorting are counted. Jason Brennan presses exactly this line in Against Democracy (2016 [3] ): if the point of participation is epistemic, then participation should be allocated by competence. The information story gives no principled answer, because it has already agreed that participants matter in proportion to what they know. It is worth noting in passing that Sen's technical work in Collective Choice and Social Welfare (1970 [4] ) does not supply this argument either, although it is often invoked as though it did. Sen's subject there is the informational basis of social welfare judgements — which features of individual well-being a social choice rule is permitted to use [5] , whether preferences are taken ordinally or cardinally, whether interpersonal comparisons are admitted. That is a question about the inputs a formal aggregation rule may consult, not about who is in the room. Borrowing the vocabulary to mean "the different things different people know" trades on an equivocation. Positional objectivity Sen's genuinely relevant idea appears in his 1993 paper "Positional Objectivity" and is developed in The Idea of Justice (2009). An observation is positionally objective when it is invariant among all observers occupying the same position. The sun and moon look about the same size from the surface of the earth, and they look so to everyone; the report is not a personal quirk and not a failure of care. What matters is the corollary. A positionally objective observation can be unanimous, stable, sincere and wrong. Agreement among observers at a position is not evidence that the position is undistorting, because the distortion is a property of the position rather than of the observers. So the ordinary remedies for error — check again, be careful, ask a colleague — are all available inside the position and all useless against it. Sen's political examples are the ones that matter here. Self-reported morbidity in India runs in the wrong direction: populations with the best objective health indicators report the most illness, and populations with the worst report the least. The explanation is positional. What counts as being ill is calibrated locally, against what people around you endure and against what medical attention they receive. The reports are honest and mutually consistent within each region, and they invert the truth. The same structure appears in Sen's work on gender: where deprivation is long-standing and normalised, those bearing it may not register it as deprivation at all, and their own testimony understates it. Now the argument for inclusion looks different. The deficiency of a homogeneous deliberating body is not that it knows fewer facts. It is that its members share a position, so their agreement carries no information about whether the position distorts, and the errors it produces are invisible from within. Adding a differently positioned participant is not adding a data point of the same kind as the others. It is adding a second vantage from which the first can be checked. A tradition that theorised the same structure The distinction between a claim that is correct within a standpoint and one that is correct absolutely was worked out in detail by the Jain philosophers of the classical period, and the machinery is close enough to be worth setting beside Sen's. The doctrine is anekāntavāda , non-one-sidedness, elaborated by philosophers including Siddhasena Divākara, Samantabhadra, Mallavādin and Haribhadra between roughly the fifth and eighth centuries of the common era. Its working part is nayavāda , the doctrine of standpoints. A naya is a partial perspective on an object — a substance-standpoint, a modal standpoint, a standpoint of present function, and so on — and a judgement made from a naya is valid within it . The technical move is what happens when a naya is absolutised: a standpoi