Justifying public participation in technical decision making

The need for expert knowledge and expert knowledge-based action in an advanced technoscientific society poses a fundamental challenge to any attempt to involve the public in the specialized basis of this society, i.e. in technical decision-making. The concern is not so much with how to meet this challenge at the practical level; it is with how to ground or rationally defend the will to do so-and to provide a brief topology of discussions that are deepening this understanding. So the author sketches out reasons for participation-as prolegomena to undertaking the work of actually creating or institutionalizing such participation. The task is more theoretical than applied, but, like the mathematics and physics that commonly prepare the way for the engineering sciences and the practice of engineering design, the task is not without practical importance.