Who Holds the Receipts?

Logan Martin Isaac

14 Jul 2026 • 6 min read

What a philosophy conference paper has to do with "thank you for your service"

Last month I presented a paper at the International Academy of Practical Theology's annual conference at the University of Chicago Divinity School. The paper has a title that sounds like it belongs behind a paywall — The Receipts Democracy Can't Discard: Marginalized Communities, Semiotic Realism, and the Limits of Dewey's Democratic Inquiry — and in some sense it does. But the argument underneath the title is one I've been living, not just writing, and it translates pretty directly into things most of you already know from your own lives.

Here's the short version.

The problem with "widest inclusion"

John Dewey was one of America's most important philosophers. He argued that a healthy democracy advances through the widest possible inclusion of diverse experience — that the more voices at the table, the closer we get to the truth. It's a genuinely compelling idea, and it's the intellectual ancestor of almost every progressive democratic ideal you've ever heard.

The problem is that Dewey's framework has a blind spot built in. It assumes that democratic communities are in principle self-correcting — that if we just get better at including people, the system will eventually catch up to its own stated values. What it can't account for is that the community of inquiry is already structured by who has been paying the costs and who has been collecting the benefits before anyone sits down at the table. You can't fix a frame from inside the frame that was built to conceal the problem.

Civilian epistemology can only ultimately produce civilian theology.

Here's the telling biographical detail: Dewey was a founding member of the NAACP. He stayed after W.E.B. Du Bois left — and Du Bois left precisely because the organization was managing Black inclusion on the dominant community's terms rather than reckoning with what real inclusion would cost. Dewey, the philosopher of the widest inclusion of diverse experience, never publicly asked why his peer left. The silence wasn't personal. It was structural.