Pluralistic ignorance
Pluralistic ignorance can be contrasted with the false consensus effect. In pluralistic ignorance, people privately disdain but publicly support a norm (or a belief), while the false consensus effect causes people to wrongly assume that most people think like they do, while in reality most people do not think like they do (and express the disagreement openly). For instance, pluralistic ignorance may lead a student to drink alcohol excessively because she believes that everyone else does that, while in reality everyone else also wishes they could avoid binge drinking, but no one expresses that due to the fear of being ostracized. A false consensus for the same situation would mean that the student believes that most other people do not enjoy excessive drinking, while in fact most other people do enjoy that and openly express their opinion about it.
Richard J. Bernstein
In addition to pragmatic fallibilism and judgment, Bernstein also highlights the importance of cultivating an engaged pluralism, an "ethos" that was also central for the classical American pragmatists, particularly James and Dewey. In his 1988 Presidential Address to the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, Bernstein defined engaged fallibilism as the genuine willingness to listen to others, “being vigilant against the dual temptations of simply dismissing what others are saying by falling back on one of those standard defensive ploys where we condemn it as obscure, wooly, or trivial, or thinking we can always easily translate what is alien into our own entrenched vocabularies.” As James observed in his essay “On a Certain Blindness in human Beings”, we tend to be egocentric and insensitive to the feelings, opinions, and convictions of those who are really different from us. “Hence the stupidity and injustice of our opinions, so far as they deal with the significance of alien lives. Hence the falsity of our judgments, so far as they presume to decide in an absolute way on the value of other persons’ conditions or ideals.” To really listen becomes one of the most important virtues in a true democratic community. But of course, listening is always much more than just hearing or even paying attention to what the other is saying; openness, in the words of Gadamer (another of Bernstein’s closest interlocutors), “involves recognizing that I myself must accept some things that are against me, even though no one else forces me to do so.” Pluralism, in this ethical sense, is intimately related to democracy, understood not a set of institutions or political procedures but rather as an ethical way of life, like John Dewey used to say. As such, democracy, more than a form of government, is an ongoing practical endeavor, a task that always lies before us and forces us to continually rebuild and reenergize the public space where we meet to discuss the “problems of men”. This, as Bernstein emphasizes, requires commitment, hard work, and the cultivation of certain habits, attitudes, feelings, and institutions. Ultimately, a healthy democracy turns out to be the most effective antidote against the Cartesian anxiety and the quest for absolutes, and the best way to reach concrete, yet non-relativist, communal solutions to our public concerns.