Developing Deliberative Minds- Piaget, Vygotsky and the Deliberative Democratic Citizen

Democratizing the hospital: deliberative-democratic bioethics.

The increased presence of moral consultants, or bioethicists, within hospitals and clinics in the last two decades has begun to raise questions about their sources of authority and norms of practice. Under pressure from critics in the social sciences, a number of bioethicists have recently raised the ideal of democratic deliberation to defend and reconstruct their place in the medical field. Th...

Less than meets the eye: Democratic legitimacy and deliberative theory

Vygotsky and Piaget: scientific concepts

Jean Piaget’s so-called biological perspective is often paired with the viewpoint of Lev Vygotsky when we speak of learning in humans. Both authors acknowledged the active role of children in the construction of knowledge. However, they differ in that, unlike Piaget, Vygotsky believed that the assimilation of new information does not have to wait for an appropriate level of development but must...

Deliberative Democracy and the Deliberative Poll on the Euro

Focus on the concept of deliberative democracy has increased rapidly within recent decades. However, the concept is weakly defined, if at all. ‘Deliberation’ is defined as an unconstrained exchange of arguments that involves practical reasoning and potentially leads to a transformation of preferences. Throughout the 1990s several innovative democratic experiments have flourished focusing on cit...

Enhancing citizen engagement in cancer screening through deliberative democracy.

Cancer screening is widely practiced and participation is promoted by various social, technical, and commercial drivers, but there are growing concerns about the emerging harms, risks, and costs of cancer screening. Deliberative democracy methods engage citizens in dialogue on substantial and complex problems: especially when evidence and values are important and people need time to understand ...