Abstract

The people's right to know boils down to their competence to know. The reality of a "poorly" informed public has led some scholars such as Walter Lippmann to turn to elitism, and others to political education and/or participation arguments. Although empirical studies in recent years all suggest that poorly voters are still capable of making intelligent political decisions using some information shortcuts or cognitive heuristics, these studies all lack theoretical underpinning and, as a result, their conclusions are limited to sporadic and unsystematic points. ;The present study tries firstly to show, through an examination of the long-cherished views of Walter Lippmann on the people's competence to know his Public Opinion, that not only Lippmann had confused direct democracy with indirect or representative democracy, but also most of his arguments no longer hold true. Then the author introduces a Chinese philosophical thought, the Thought of the Oneness of Nature and Man, which basically means that the constant ways or general principles working in both nature and human societies are the same. This thought justifies the people's competence to know in that people who obtain their appreciation of the constant ways through their own professions and daily lives will be able to understand politics, provided that political interpreters---journalists, politicians and political science scholars---translate political events into common-sense language by using, among other devices, metaphors in their interpretations