According to Miranda Fricker, through the generation of cognitive confidence that facilitates the free exchange of individual experiences, mobilized groups are able to generate new symbolic resources that overcome existing gaps in the shared hermeneutical resource. In my essay, I aim at showing that an account of conceptual innovation on the side of mobilized groups must take into consideration deeper transformations of their epistemic practices. Drawing on the work of John Dewey, I develop an account of these transformations as a process of collective learning that involves both the emergence of a self-appropriative cultural life and epistemic innovation. I focus on the notion of experimentalism as a paradigm for these epistemic transformations.

No abstract

Should we consider the Yellow Vests, the Indignados Movement, or the Movimento delle Sardine to be purely populist movements? Are there alternative models of explanation that encompass features specific to the emergence and development of these movements? And should we look to left-wing populism as the source of much-needed democratic renewal in times of political and social regression? Or can we find alternatives to populism that represent a more promising base for the future of democracy? This paper aims to address these questions by providing a pragmatist, John Dewey-based answer, as an alternative to Ernesto Laclau's populist approach to the emergence of what the latter calls "popular identities."1 We base our response on a mutual dialogue made possible by socio-ontological premises common to the two authors-more specifically, by the central role played by the notion of "articulation" in each approach. For both Dewey and Laclau, articulation represents a fundamental dimension of the political that points to the "ontological openness" of the social world. However, their individual conceptions of the notion differ widely. Although Laclau talks of "rhetoric" in reference to the paradigmatic set of linguistic, quasi-automatic mechanisms at the source of the political constitution of popular identities, Dewey understands this process as the enactment of specific forms of "social inquiry." Each approach represents a different understanding of the articulative dimension of politics and thereby of the practices involved in popular struggles.2Based on the discussion of this central difference between the two models, we will also argue that Dewey's understanding of political articulation is superior to Laclau's in two senses. From a normative standpoint, it is a model of political practice that is more adequate to satisfy the democratic ideal self-determination. From a political perspective, it tends to promote democracy and democratization and seems to be better prepared to counteract the risks of authoritarianism and manipulation. Furthermore, a Dewey-based account contains an as-yet unexplored descriptive potential that challenges populism's current aspiration to fully account for the formation of popular identities. Based on these three considerations, we will propose an approach to the emergence of popular identities * Earlier versions of this paper have been discussed in Lisa Herzog's Forschungskolloquium at the TUM, and at the Departments of Philosophy of the

No abstract

No abstract