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  1. The Epistemic Aims of Democracy.Robert Weston Siscoe - 2023 - Philosophy Compass 18 (11):e12941.
    Many political philosophers have held that democracy has epistemic benefits. Most commonly, this case is made by arguing that democracies are better able to track the truth than other political arrangements. Truth, however, is not the only epistemic good that is politically valuable. A number of other epistemic goods – goods including evidence, intellectual virtue, epistemic justice, and empathetic understanding – can also have political value, and in ways that go beyond the value of truth. In this paper, I will (...)
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  • The epistemic value of deliberative democracy: how far can diversity take us?Jonathan Benson - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):8257-8279.
    This paper contributes to growing debates over the decision-making ability of democracy by considering the epistemic value of deliberative democracy. It focuses on the benefits democratic deliberation can derive from its diversity, and the extent to which these benefits can be realised with respect to the complexities of political problems. The paper first calls attention to the issue of complexity through a critique of Hélène Landemore and the Diversity Trumps Ability Theorem. This approach underestimates complexity due to its reliance on (...)
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  • Modeling Epistemology: Examples and Analysis in Computational Philosophy of Science.Patrick Grim - 2019 - In A. Del Barrio, C. J. Lynch, F. J. Barros & X. Hu (eds.), IEEE SpringSim Proceedings 2019. IEEE. pp. 1-12.
    What structure of scientific communication and cooperation, between what kinds of investigators, is best positioned to lead us to the truth? Against an outline of standard philosophical characteristics and a recent turn to social epistemology, this paper surveys highlights within two strands of computational philosophy of science that attempt to work toward an answer to this question. Both strands emerge from abstract rational choice theory and the analytic tradition in philosophy of science rather than postmodern sociology of science. The first (...)
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  • Wisdom of Crowds, Wisdom of the Few: Expertise versus Diversity across Epistemic Landscapes.Patrick Grim, Daniel J. Singer, Aaron Bramson, Bennett Holman, Sean McGeehan & William J. Berger - manuscript
    In a series of formal studies and less formal applications, Hong and Page offer a ‘diversity trumps ability’ result on the basis of a computational experiment accompanied by a mathematical theorem as explanatory background (Hong & Page 2004, 2009; Page 2007, 2011). “[W]e find that a random collection of agents drawn from a large set of limited-ability agents typically outperforms a collection of the very best agents from that same set” (2004, p. 16386). The result has been extremely influential as (...)
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  • Diversity and Democracy: Agent-Based Modeling in Political Philosophy.Bennett Holman, William Berger, Daniel J. Singer, Patrick Grim & Aaron Bramson - 2018 - Historical Social Research 43:259-284.
    Agent-based models have played a prominent role in recent debates about the merits of democracy. In particular, the formal model of Lu Hong and Scott Page and the associated “diversity trumps ability” result has typically been seen to support the epistemic virtues of democracy over epistocracy (i.e., governance by experts). In this paper we first identify the modeling choices embodied in the original formal model and then critique the application of the Hong-Page results to philosophical debates on the relative merits (...)
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  • Diversity, Ability, and Expertise in Epistemic Communities.Patrick Grim, Daniel J. Singer, Aaron Bramson, Bennett Holman, Sean McGeehan & William J. Berger - 2019 - Philosophy of Science 86 (1):98-123.
    The Hong and Page ‘diversity trumps ability’ result has been used to argue for the more general claim that a diverse set of agents is epistemically superior to a comparable group of experts. Here we extend Hong and Page’s model to landscapes of different degrees of randomness and demonstrate the sensitivity of the ‘diversity trumps ability’ result. This analysis offers a more nuanced picture of how diversity, ability, and expertise may relate. Although models of this sort can indeed be suggestive (...)
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  • Political Epistemology.Jeffrey Friedman - 2014 - Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 26 (1-2):i-xiv.
    ABSTRACTNormative political epistemologists, such as epistemic democrats, study whether political decision makers can, in principle, be expected to know what they need to know if they are to make wise public policy. Empirical political epistemologists study the content and sources of real-world political actors' knowledge and interpretations of knowledge. In recent years, empirical political epistemologists have taken up the study of the ideas of political actors other than voters, such as bureaucrats and politicians. Normative political epistemologists could follow this lead (...)
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  • The Anatomy of Frank and Stein. An Ontological Exploration of Cyborg Identity, Culture, and Education.Peter Strandbrink - 2020 - The New Bioethics 26 (3):210-223.
    This contribution aims to unpack the ontological nexus of cyborg identity and culture. It highlights a set of core assumptions driving its operations that merit critical attention as cyborgic and A...
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  • Computational Philosophy.Patrick Grim & Daniel Singer - 2024 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Computational philosophy is the use of mechanized computational techniques to instantiate, extend, and amplify philosophical research. Computational philosophy is not philosophy of computers or computational techniques; it is rather philosophy using computers and computational techniques. The idea is simply to apply advances in computer technology and techniques to advance discovery, exploration and argument within any philosophical area. -/- After touching on historical precursors, this article discusses contemporary computational philosophy across a variety of fields: epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of science, ethics and (...)
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  • Democracy and Epistocracy.Paul Gunn - 2014 - Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 26 (1-2):59-79.
    ABSTRACTIn Democratic Reason, Hélène Landemore argues that deliberation and the aggregation of citizens' dispersed knowledge should tend to produce better consequences than rule by the one or the few. However, she pays insufficient attention to the epistemic processes necessary to realize these democratic goods. In particular, she fails to consider the question of where citizens' beliefs and ideas come from, with the result that the democratic decision mechanisms she focuses on are insufficiently powerful to justify her consequentialist defense of mass (...)
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  • Knowledge-Making in Politics: Expertise in Democracy and Epistocracy.Matthew C. Lucky - 2024 - Political Theory 52 (3):431-458.
    Recently, epistocrats have challenged the value of democracy by claiming that policy outcomes can be improved if the electorate were narrowed to empower only those with sufficient knowledge to inform competent policy decisions. I argue that by centering on contesting how well regimes employ extant knowledge in decision-making, this conversation has neglected to consider how regimes influence the production of knowledge over time. Science and technology studies scholars have long recognized that political systems impact the productivity of expert research. I (...)
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  • Cognitive diversity, binary decisions, and epistemic democracy.John A. Weymark - 2015 - Episteme 12 (4):497-511.
    In Democratic Reason, Hne Landemore has built a case for the epistemic virtues of inclusive deliberative democracy based on the cognitive diversity of the group engaged in making collective decisions. She supports her thesis by appealing to the Diversity Trumps Ability Theorem of Lu Hong and Scott Page. This theorem is quite technical and the informal statements of it aimed at democratic theorists are inaccurate, which has resulted in some misguided critiques of the theorem's applicability to democratic politics. This paper (...)
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  • Looking But Not Seeing: The (Ir)relevance of Incentives to Political Ignorance.Paul Gunn - 2015 - Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 27 (3-4):270-298.
    ABSTRACTIlya Somin's Democracy and Political Ignorance represents a missed opportunity to fully examine the implications of public ignorance in modern democracies. Somin persuasively argues that existing levels of public ignorance undermine the main normative accounts of democratic legitimacy, and he demonstrates that neither cognitive shortcuts nor heuristics can provide a quick fix for democracy. However, Somin seeks to find a simple explanation for public ignorance in the conscious, rational choices of voters. He thus commits to the position that voters choose (...)
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  • Yes, We Can (Make It Up on Volume): Answers to Critics.Hélène Landemore - 2014 - Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 26 (1-2):184-237.
    ABSTRACTThe idea that the crowd could ever be intelligent is a counterintuitive one. Our modern, Western faith in experts and bureaucracies is rooted in the notion that political competence is the purview of the select few. Here, as in my book Democratic Reason, I defend the opposite view: that the diverse many are often smarter than a group of select elites because of the different cognitive tools, perspectives, heuristics, and knowledge they bring to political problem solving and prediction. In this (...)
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  • Roundtable on Political Epistemology.Scott Althaus, Mark Bevir, Jeffrey Friedman, Hélène Landemore, Rogers Smith & Susan Stokes - 2014 - Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 26 (1-2):1-32.
    On August 30, 2013, the American Political Science Association sponsored a roundtable on political epistemology as part of its annual meetings. Co-chairing the roundtable were Jeffrey Friedman, Department of Government, University of Texas at Austin; and Hélène Landemore, Department of Political Science, Yale University. The other participants were Scott Althaus, Department of Political Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Mark Bevir, Department of Political Science, University of California at Berkeley; Rogers Smith, Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania; and Susan (...)
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