The idea of open speech: deliberated democracy

Society and school

The starting point of this essay series was the question of whether the Delphi method belongs in the pedagogical toolkit of schools and teachers. A pedagogical Delphi was trialled in basic education and upper secondary school in the Climate Forge (Ilmastotakomo) project in 2019. Besides testing the method, the project extended school activities into authentic learning environments outside the school. Behind it lay the idea that teaching needs more active work that prepares pupils for the civic skills of a democratic society. The idea is not new: democracy always needs citizens capable of independent thought, and in a polarising world democracy is challenged every day.

Aristotle's enduring insight was that the future is political. It is not a matter of indifference who defines it and by what means. In a democracy the future is built from the bottom up; in totalitarian states from the top down. In December 2021 the Finnish daily Helsingin Sanomat headed an editorial: "The Russian leadership wants to control the past, the present and the future". The piece dealt with the interpretation of history and the present, which in Russia is tightly held by the state. In the end it said nothing about the future. Perhaps the writer, like the Russian leadership, assumed that the future is controlled automatically through the story of the past and the present. The task of the school and other institutions is then to repeat a narrative that may not be renewed, let alone questioned.

How far can the comparison be taken to the Finnish school? Of course, schools in Finland also teach one national history at a time, even though researchers dispute its interpretations. But it may be discussed, and interpretations change when research gives reason to. That is the decisive difference. Still, in a Socratic spirit, one may suspect that schools often deal with the answers before the questions, if questions are asked at all.

Most of what is taught in school is uncontroversial in its truth value. Schools must teach knowledge that is correct and skills that work. The future cannot be known with certainty, and that is why it has been hard to embed in curricula. The hidden assumption then becomes that the future will not differ much from the present. The young first acquire knowledge and skills and then, as adults, get to build their own future and a shared one. But do futures skills and political skills develop by themselves with age? Elite schools in the English-speaking world teach debating. That is not enough as a model for a democratic school. The real skill is dialogue and the kind of handling of common affairs whose gains and losses are measured only decades later.

The school is the most important futures institution of every society, yet in its work the future appears mostly between the lines. The school prepares a new generation for tasks defined by what the previous generation has learned. If the school is not in sufficient contact with the surrounding world, changes reach it only with a delay. More than a century ago, the American educational philosopher John Dewey described a way of bringing politics and the future into the school: the school becomes a miniature society in which civic skills, shared discussion and responsible decision-making are practised.

Open speech

Jürgen Habermas's theory examines the conditions of ideal communication in society. He emphasises the importance of discussion, argumentation and joint negotiation in democratic decision-making. Open speech means the free exchange of ideas, perspectives and information without discussion being restricted by direct or indirect exercise of power or by ideology. Habermas belongs to the Frankfurt School, within which critical pedagogy has also been developed. According to it, dialogue and open speech must be practised already at school. The school holds that social contradictions contain not only problems but also opportunities for development, and resolving them moves society forward.

According to Habermas, democracy needs a public sphere in which all citizens can freely present and justify their views and submit them to the judgement of others. Central to this is communicative rationality: the ability to present and understand arguments and to resolve disagreements through discussion. Its opposite is instrumental rationality, which emphasises efficiency and the achievement of goals regardless of the means. From an instrumental point of view, broad participation can slow down the achievement of one's own goals, and so participation is restricted or steered. The Delphi method does not exclude either. The Policy Delphi clearly leans towards communicative rationality, but instrumentality enters it too through the panelists: besides their expertise, they represent interest groups whose aims do not always submit to the ideals of open speech.

Habermas himself acknowledged that open speech is not a model that can be implemented as such but a critical ideal against which public discussion and decision-making can be assessed and developed. Interests cannot be removed from life, but their influence can be examined and balanced. Habermas distinguished three knowledge-constitutive interests, which are also useful in a Delphi study dealing with contested social issues:

• The technical interest seeks to predict and control the environment. In the natural sciences and technology it has its place, but when carried over into human relationships it turns into steering others for one's own benefit.
• The practical interest seeks to understand and to create shared meanings. It might concern, for example, how a work community's development day should be spent so that wellbeing improves. Discussion brings out the different views so that a shared solution can be agreed. A pedagogical Delphi is well suited to this.
• The emancipatory interest seeks liberation. It wants to remove the obstacles that prevent people from taking part in discussion and decision-making, to dismantle structures of power and to promote freedom and equality.

Habermas emphasises critical reflection, which helps to identify injustices in society and to address them. In his discourse ethics he is concerned less with the content of ethics than with how discussion can lead to mutual understanding that, through the process itself, results in ethical choices. Habermas's ideas are linked to Paulo Freire's pedagogy of the oppressed. Both have been read especially on the left of the political spectrum, whereas Karl Popper, presented next, has been read more within the liberal right. Even so, their conclusions about democracy are the same, and both fit the foundations of the Delphi method.

The open society

Karl Popper's view of science, discussed in the essay The idea of the future, rests on the idea that science is an endless, self-correcting process. Knowledge grows, but no knowledge may be considered final. Everything must be open to question, because only this prevents interests from devouring information. From the same idea Popper derived his social philosophy, which he gathered under the concept of the open society. Both open science and an open society require, above all, that information flows freely from the bottom up.

Popper opposed utopian social engineering, in which the whole of society is reshaped from above according to some grand plan. In his view such projects had led to totalitarianism. In their place he offered piecemeal, experimental reform: society should correct the ills that cause suffering step by step and learn from its mistakes. Citizens should be allowed to live their own lives and pursue happiness in their own way, as long as they do not restrict the same right of others.

The essay The idea of dialogue distinguished between debate, dialogue and discussion. Debate is a verbal battle whose aim is to win. In dialogue, one seeks to understand the other by listening and reshaping one's own views. In discussion, topics and motives range more freely. A parliamentary plenary session is an example of formal discussion in which quick speeches aimed at influence try to convince the audience that one's own position is justified. Unregulated discussion on social media is often chaotic, and dialogue rarely emerges in it. The challenge for democracy today is therefore to make open speech dialogical.

Neither ideal has been realised as such. An open society can nevertheless be recognised by the fact that matters are discussed widely and from many angles before decisions are taken, and that information flows freely. We call such a society a democracy, although it has taken many forms over history. The ideas of democracy are woven into many variants of the Delphi method, so they are worth a closer look.

Forms of democracy

Democracy comes from the Greek words demos, people, and kratos, power. It means rule by the people: a constitutional order in which power rests on the will of the people, either directly or through representatives. The principles of democracy can also be applied to communities other than the state. There is no generally accepted definition, and different conceptions of democracy can be used to justify entirely opposite political choices. There are several forms:

• Liberal democracy emphasises individual freedoms and rights. The power of elected representatives is limited by a constitution that protects minorities against the power of the majority. Participation is not an end in itself; what matters is the opportunity to replace those in power through elections.
• Direct democracy means that citizens take part in decision-making themselves, without representatives. In Socrates' Athens it applied only to free men. Today direct democracy is usually used in limited ways, but in Switzerland voters decide national questions in referendums several times a year, and digital participation may widen the possibilities.
• Liquid democracy is an intermediate form between direct and representative democracy: voters can vote themselves or delegate their vote to someone else.
• Consensus democracy requires broad agreement or a qualified majority for decisions, so that minority rights are not trampled by the majority.
• Deliberative democracy emphasises, in the spirit of Habermas, open and critical discussion of common affairs. Everyone has an equal opportunity to take part, to listen to others and to justify their views publicly according to agreed rules.

In the Nordic countries, democracy has also been built by the tradition of liberal adult education. Its guiding idea is that lasting democracy requires citizens who think independently. This capacity cannot be passed automatically from one generation to the next; every generation must work out its own education in this deeper sense, known in German as Bildung. That is why homes and schools are society's most important democratic institutions. Seppo Niemelä has described Nordic Bildung as a three-stage process: a person learns something new, forms an independent relationship to what they have learned and uses it for the common good as a citizen. Bildung is thus something other than a large store of knowledge or skills. It is a process of both the individual and the community, and a wise community builds its activity on independent individuals with voices of their own.

Forms of democracy beyond the national level are represented by the European Parliament, but the challenges of global governance remain unresolved. In systems called people's democracies, elections are held, but the party steers legislation and administration, and liberal democracies count them among authoritarian systems. Russia has slid into a nationalist system in which the power of one person extends over all legislation and the whole legal order.

The Delphi method and democracy

The Delphi method can also be used to study the futures of political systems. For example, the President of Finland, Alexander Stubb, outlines in his book The Triangle of Power (2025) three global forces whose relations will shape developments in the coming decades. The global West includes the democracies of Europe, North America and Australia, along with countries such as Japan and South Korea. The global East is led by China and Russia. Largest in number of states and population is the global South, where India, Brazil and South Africa carry particular weight. According to Stubb, future developments will be decided by which side, West or East, succeeds in the competition for the favour of the countries of the South. The Delphi method is an excellent tool for testing hypotheses of this kind.

The Delphi method was originally developed to speed up and prepare rational decision-making, and it sought agreement, which resembles consensus democracy. Indeed, it is often used as a tool for consensus, though less often for democratic purposes than for developing assessment indicators or preparing decisions. It is increasingly common to use it to explore several alternative futures, identifying reasons, probabilities and desirability as a basis for choices. This variant is often called a dissensus Delphi. In both, what matters is the repetition of the process, facilitation and interaction.

The Delphi method's most direct link of ideas is to deliberative democracy. The same features are emphasised in both: iterative and participatory knowledge-building, strong facilitation, comprehensive coverage of expertise and stakeholder perspectives, and the priority of arguments and interaction over formal positions. Representative democracy is criticised for decision-making drifting away from citizens' everyday lives and for the exercise of power not being transparent. Polarisation appears to accelerate a politics in which the majority restricts the activity of minorities. Deliberation and civic action are ways of broadening democracy in the spirit of open speech. One interesting form is the citizens' jury, which Mikko Kellokumpu has examined in his doctoral thesis from the perspective of Freirean critical pedagogy.

According to Habermas and Popper, the precondition of genuine democracy is the free exchange of information and open discussion, through which decisions based on the principle of the best argument can be reached. Arguments must be tested at every level and over a span of time that reaches from understanding history to anticipating the future. In schools, futures thinking is often linked to the study of history and social studies. There are good reasons for this, partly because historical research resembles futures studies in many ways. According to history professor Jukka Korpela, "historical truth is ultimately always an interpretation". He points out that histories declared to be true have been used to justify discrimination, subjugation and mass murder. To Russians, Vyborg is a liberated city; to Finns, a conquered one. Control of the past is an exercise of power, and so, increasingly, is the interpretation of the future.

Open and closed systems

The ideas of democracy suit other communities as well as the state. Associations follow the rules of democracy directly. In a cooperative, decision-making power lies with the members, in a limited company with the owners, but even there currents of democracy can be seen, for instance through ethical investment and corporate responsibility. Skills of dialogue and cooperation are in demand in both formal and informal communities.

Lawrence M. Miller has studied ways of conversing in business and politics and has wondered why political culture has become stuck in static ways of conversing. Miller's background is the divided political landscape of the United States, but echoes of it can be heard in Finland too. According to Miller, results are the consequence of the process by which they are achieved. It would therefore be logical to change the process when the results are unsatisfactory. In politics, he says, the opposite often happens: elections rest on a culture of debate in which people get stuck defending their own position against others, and the process is defended even when it ought to change. Debate is like a gladiatorial fight. It tickles the ego and represents thinking alone. Dialogue concerns "us" and is above all thinking together.

Miller distinguishes between a closed and an open system of interaction. The closed system is a vicious cycle governed by a zero-sum assumption: when one wins, the other loses. The right answer has been chosen in advance, and only convincing others of it is practised. The closed system moves monologically, through convincing, acquiescing, quick judgement and one right way, towards a narrow and fragmented picture in which positions are formed reactively. In Habermas's terms, this is communication driven by the technical interest.

The open system is a virtuous cycle in which information flows freely from the bottom up, as Popper requires. It begins when me is replaced by we. In Miller's open system, dialogue proceeds through eight stages:

1. hearing and listening to the other person
2. inquiring into issues and backgrounds
3. avoiding a final judgement too early
4. exploring many possibilities
5. appreciating different actors and views
6. looking at the whole
7. diverse perspectives and outcomes
8. finding and using one's own authentic voice

Miller's list would serve well as a motto on the wall for an exemplary Delphi panel, and why not for an individual panelist too. A Delphi study often starts from a pointed thesis that invites debate but is softened by the possibility of answering on a scale between the extremes. The task of the pointed thesis is to awaken the need to justify one's own position. The facilitator's task is to deepen argumentation into discussion and dialogue in which justifications are weighed against one another. Listening to others and weighing their reasons can lead people to revise their own position. Such reasoned change of mind can also be called learning from others.

The rest of the series

The next essay, The idea of expertise, considers how expertise changes along a continuum of three information flows: biological, cultural and external to the human body. Expertise, once regarded as a property of the individual, has increasingly become a property of communities, driven by experts' ability to communicate with one another. The newest layer emerges when information is refined with the help of AI into understanding and action, partly without human involvement. The last two essays, The idea of the future and The idea of futures studies, broaden our understanding of what can be known about the future and how a desired future can be made.

Sources

• Dewey, John (1916). Democracy and Education. Macmillan.
• Freire, Paulo (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Herder and Herder.
• Habermas, Jürgen (1968). Erkenntnis und Interesse. Suhrkamp. In English Knowledge and Human Interests (1971), Beacon Press.
• Habermas, Jürgen (1981). Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. Suhrkamp. In English The Theory of Communicative Action (1984–1987), Beacon Press.
• Kellokumpu, Mikko (2023). Kansalaisvaikuttaminen kansalaisraadilla [Civic influence through citizens' juries]. Doctoral thesis, University of Lapland.
• Kylmäkoski, Merja & Rainò, Päivi (eds.) (2021). Delfoilla tulevaisuuteen [With Delphi into the future]. Humak University of Applied Sciences Publications 120.
• Miller, Lawrence M. (2015). Drop the Debates, Begin the Dialogues. lmmiller.com.
• Niemelä, Seppo (2011). Sivistyminen [Becoming educated: Bildung in the Nordic tradition of popular education]. Snellman Institute.
• Popper, Karl (1945). The Open Society and Its Enemies. Routledge.
• Stubb, Alexander (2025). The Triangle of Power: Rebalancing the New World Order. Polity.
• Helsingin Sanomat (2021). Venäjän johto haluaa hallita menneisyyttä, nykyisyyttä ja tulevaisuutta [The Russian leadership wants to control the past, the present and the future]. Editorial, 10 December 2021.