In her book Democracy and Truth: The Conflict between Political and Epistemic
Virtues, Snjezana Prijic Samarzija advocates a stance that not only
political, but also epistemic values are necessary for justification of
democracy. Specifically, she mounts defense for one particular type of
public deliberation on epistemic grounds. In this paper, I will discuss the
following issue: What connects this type of public deliberation to the wider
context of (epistemic) justification of democracy? I will attempt to explain
why Prijic Samarzija?s stance can be understood as a version of deliberative
epistemic instrumentalism and to discuss the role played by the public
deliberation within this framework.