Re-examining Aristotle on Collective Wisdom — Epoche B2
What the Multitude Is Competent For: Aristotle, Politics III.11, and the Limits of Diversity A passage read as a precursor One short stretch of Aristotle's Politics has become the standard ancient warrant for the epistemic case for democracy [1] . In Book III, chapter 11, he argues that the many, taken together, may judge better than the few excellent, and gives an image for it: each has a share of virtue and practical wisdom, and combined they are like one person with many feet, many hands and many senses. Hélène Landemore's Democratic Reason (2013 [2] ) treats the passage as an early statement of the mechanism she defends, in which the cognitive diversity of a large inclusive body outperforms the ability of a small expert one. This review argues that the passage will not carry the weight. Aristotle attaches two restrictions to his own argument, and neither is decoration. He denies that the superiority holds of multitudes as such. And he confines the competence he has established to a specific institutional function, which is not policy-making. Read with its restrictions in place, III.11 licenses a particular constitutional arrangement and not a general case for inclusion. The claim is deniable in two ways. Someone could show that Aristotle's caveat is a piece of local prejudice detachable from the argument, or that the functions he assigns the many are broader than election and audit. The argument, in the order Aristotle gives it The chapter opens with a question about who should hold sovereign authority in a city, and considers the case for the multitude. Aristotle grants at once that any individual among them may be a worse judge than the best men. His claim is about what happens when they come together, and he makes it with two images. The first is a dinner to which many contribute, which he says is better than one provided at a single person's expense. The second is the composite person with many senses and many characters. He then gives the mechanism, and it repays attention because it is more specific than the images suggest. Each member has a share of virtue and practical wisdom. Coming together, their partial excellences combine, as the parts of a face scattered among different individuals combine in a painting. The conclusion he draws is about evaluation: the many are better judges of works of music and poetry, because some judge one part and some another, and among them they judge the whole. Later in the chapter he tightens this with a further principle. The user of a thing is often a better judge of it than its maker. The householder judges a house better than the builder; the guest judges the feast better than the cook. The competence being credited is that of the person who undergoes the result. The first restriction Immediately after establishing the summation argument, Aristotle stops it. Whether this superiority of the many over the few good can obtain in every people and every multitude, he says, is not clear; in some cases it is impossible, and the same reasoning would then apply to beasts. He adds that nothing prevents what has been said from holding of a certain multitude. This is easy to read as an aristocrat's aside, and easy to discard on that reading. It is not an aside. It states the condition the mechanism needs. The argument runs on the assumption that each contributor brings a partial excellence: a share of virtue, a share of prudence, an accurate judgement of one part of the work. Summation improves the whole only if the parts are partly right. Where contributions are not partial insights but errors, combining them does not average towards the truth; it accumulates. Aristotle's caveat is his statement of that condition, and it is doing logical rather than sociological work. The second restriction The chapter's practical conclusion is narrower than the argument's opening suggests. Aristotle does not conclude that the many should govern. He concludes that they should be assigned the deliberative and judicial functions — participation in the assembly and the courts — and specifically the election of officials and the auditing of them once their terms are over, while not holding the highest offices individually. He notes that this is what Solon and certain other lawgivers arranged. This matches the mechanism exactly. Electing an official and calling him to account are evaluative judgements of a product by the people who bear its effects, which is the competence the guest-and-cook principle establishes. They are not acts of design. Nothing in the summation argument shows that a large body will devise a better tax system, a better treaty or a better law; it shows that a large body is well placed to say whether the one it has been given has gone badly for them. The distinction is not a technicality. The epistemic case for democracy as Landemore states it concerns the quality of collective decisions about what to do. Aristotle's argument concerns the quality of collective verdicts on what has been done. A theory can hold both, but it cannot get the second from the first, and III.11 supplies only the second. A tradition that never met the passage It is worth noticing how contingent the reception of III.11 has been. The Politics was not translated into Arabic. The philosophers of the Islamic world who worked most closely on Aristotle had no access to it, and built their political philosophy from Plato's Republic and Laws instead. Ibn Rushd [3] , who commented on nearly everything of Aristotle's that reached him, wrote a middle commentary on Plato's Republic and says at the outset that he does so because the Politics has not come to hand [4] . What they built without it is instructive, because it is the opposite commitment. Al-Fārābī's Principles of the Opinions of the Inhabitants of the Virtuous City orders the city under a first ruler who grasps the truths demonstratively [5] , while the citizens receive the same truths in images suited to their capacities. Ibn Rush