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Examines the innovative potential of the Internet for democracy as applied to deliberative transnationalism, asserting, however, that this public sphere requires innovative institutions. Keeping in mind deliberative democracy, a conceptual clarification of the conditions for a public sphere is provided. It is contended that for the public sphere to exist in large & highly differentiated modern societies, technological mediation of public communication is needed; this necessitates finding indirect & mediated alternatives to the public sphere as face-to-face public forum. Dialogue, when it can expand & transform the conditions of communicative interaction, is taken as a key feature of any public sphere. How computer-mediated communication extends the forum is then addressed in terms of how the Internet, with its many-to-many communicative potential, can fulfill the requirements of publicity. The Internet opens a space for a "distributive," ie, a transnational public of publics, rather than unified public sphere with new forms of interaction; the public sphere becomes decentered, where the Internet becomes a public sphere only through agents who engage in reflexive & democratic activity, ie, dialogue, with the defining characteristic that all participants can propose & incur mutual obligations. This reflexive agency would foster the creation of software capable of turning networks into publics using the distributive processes of communication to transcend space & time limitations inherent in national public spheres & state forms. However, some remarks are offered on whether the Internet has the capacity to escape the manner in which state sovereignty organizes space & time, highlighting the thought of Will Kymlicka. The European Union is taken as a case study to explore the democratic deficit of transnational & international institutions, focusing on proposals indicative of how a polycentric form of publicity night allow a more directly deliberative form of governance. Considered in closing is whether the kind of public sphere generated in transnational politics might spur new institutional forms of democracy that confront the problems of time and space concomitant with global democracy, eg, collective identity. 26 References. J. Zendejas

Political liberals now defend what Rawls calls the "inclusive view" of public reason with the appropriate ideal of reasonable pluralism. Against the application of such a liberal conception of toleration to deliberative democracy "the open view of toleration is with no constraints" is the only regime of toleration that can be democratically justified. Recent debates about the public or nonpublic character of religious reasons provide a good test case and show why liberal deliberative theories are intolerant and fail to live up to democratic obligations to provide justifications to all members of the deliberative community. In a deliberative democracy, accommodations to religious minorities must be based on transformations in the current reflective equilibrium among the norms that make up the complex democratic ideal. This is not merely a conceptual enterprise of commensuration, since the need for any such transformation in standards of justification is due to changes in the nature of the polity itself, changes that in turn modify its regime of toleration.

Pragmatism and critical theory share a practical and pluralist orientation to social inquiry. On this account, social inquiry is practical not simply by being instrumentally useful but by being oriented toward the realisation of normative ideals, most especially those of democracy. Central to such an enterprise is the relationship between social facts and norms, where facts are understood in the Deweyean sense of a `problematic situation' that contains factors that both inhibit and enable the realisation of normative ideals. Social facts in this sense can best be analysed by `multiperspectival theories' that take into account all the dimensions of the problem as well as the perspectives of all relevant actors. When understood as practical social inquiry, a multiperspectival International Relations theory could contribute to the task of realising new democratic possibilities, especially now given the `fact' of uneven globalisation.

Jurgen Habermas's (eg, 1984) notion of distorted communication, ie, his solution to the problem of communicative irrationality, is restructured in order to connect it with his understanding of formal pragmatic norms. After discussing the factors that render speech acts successful & unsuccessful, it is contended that ideologically imposed restrictions have been placed on communication & that such external restrictions (eg, freedom & equality) are not sufficient to prevent the violation of implicit norms of successful communication, thus resulting in communication distorted by power. It is subsequently argued that Habermas's explanation of distorted communication is paradoxical & that Habermas's notion of "latent strategic action" fails to demonstrate how such activities distort communication. Consequently, an alternative theory of distorted communication based on the assertion that such communication violates the implicit norms of communicative success rather than the explicit conditions for communication is presented. The alternative approach's implications for theorizing discursive & deliberative institutions are considered. J. W. Parker

A hallmark of recent critical social science has been the commitment to methodological and theoretical pluralism. Habermas and others have argued that diverse theoretical and empirical approaches are needed to support informed social criticism. However, an unresolved tension remains in the epistemology of critical social science: the tension between the epistemic advantages of a single comprehensive theoretical framework and those of methodological and theoretical pluralism. By shifting the grounds of the debate in a way suggested by Dewey's pragmatism, the author argues that a thoroughgoing pluralism strengthens, rather than weakens, both the social scientific and political aims of critical social science. Not only does pragmatism offer a plausible interpretation of the epistemic pluralism of the social sciences, but it also provides a way of thinking about their fundamentally practical and political character. With a better normative vocabulary with which to discuss the epistemological issues of such a pluralistic mode of inquiry, the democratic role of critical inquiry and its specifically "practical" form of verification can be clarified.