WinSysop
From Deliberative Democracy Institiute Wiki
Hello,
My Name is Tal Yaron, and I am practitioner and theorist in the filed of deliberation.
I have M.Sc. in biology, and started Ph.D. in biology. While I was reading the scientific literature and participated in conferences, I have noticed that I difficulties following the logic in the scientific communication. When I tried to follow the logic from premiss to conclusions, it did not worked out. I have deepend my knowldge in logic, in order to see the logic in the papers but it didn't follow any roles of logic, I have learned. Therefore I have read Popper's book "The Logic of Scientific Discovery", but again, Popper's logic, was not the one that I found in the literature. The riddle had puzzled me, so I moved to the program of History and Philosophy of Science in Bar-Ilan university. There I was introduced to the constructionists writings on science, yet their writings did not pleased me. I thought it has critical nature but they can not explain the science I have experienced it in my years at biology department. Therefore, I have set my self to try to explain science as I have experienced it. for four years I have devised a model of scientific reason. After four years, and nudge from the head of the program, I have started to show the model to researchers in philosophy. Most of them said it is interesting, but it is too new, and too wide, to be a Ph.D. thesis. I couldn't find anyone that will mentor me. So I left the academy to try to develop this model on my own.
After a while, I have engaged Direct Democracy, and found that the deliberation field is critical for the development of successful direct democracy and participatory democracy, so I have used my model to try to understand how "lay people" reason. Because I was not restricted by philosophy, I could enter in to my model also knowledge from brain research. After experiencing with real life deliberation, and experiencing wide variety of on-line and off-line deliberation, I have started to adjust the model for deliberation. This time, I have integrated knowledge from the deliberation research filed, in order to be relevant to the experts in deliberation. In 2012, with the help of Dr. Azi Lev-On, I organized conferences of experts in the field, and we discused a vrity of methods of deliberation. This was a boost for my experience, and led me to open this wiki. I hope we can build here theories that will explain the mechanism of deliberation, and will create a ground for developing edvance deliberation methods and on-line tools.