Intelligently Designing Deliberative Health Care Forums: Dewey's Metaphysics, Cognitive Science and a Brazilian Example

Imagine you are the CEO of a hospital [. . .]. Decisions are constantly being made in your organization about how to spend the organization's money. The amount of money available to spend is never adequate to pay for everything you wish you could spend it on, therefore you must set spending priorities. There are two questions you need to be able to answer . . . How should we set priorities in this organization? How do we know when we are doing it well? When people seek to achieve good public policy, the result will tend to be good public policy. In a collective choice process, public-spirited individual participants produce good public policy by deliberating-talking with each other, listening to each other's arguments, and being willing to learn and change their minds based on such dialogue. - Steven Kelman (1992: 181)