Suppose a committee or a jury confronts a complex question, the answer to which requires attending to several sub-questions. Two different voting procedures can be used. On one, the committee members vote on each sub-question and the voting results are used as premises for the committee’s conclusion on the main issue. This premise-based procedure can be contrasted with the conclusion-based approach, which requires the members to directly vote on the conclusion, with the vote of each member being guided by her (...) views on the relevant sub-questions. The two procedures are not equivalent: There may be a majority of voters supporting each of the premises, but if these majorities do not significantly overlap, there will be a majority against the conclusion. Pettit (2001) connects the choice between the two procedures with the discussion of deliberative democracy. The problem we want to examine instead concerns the relative advantages and disadvantages of the two procedures from the epistemic point of view. Which of them is better when it comes to tracking truth? As it turns out, the answer is not univocal. On the basis of Condorcet’s jury theorem, the premise-based procedure can be shown to be superior if the objective is reach truth for the right reasons, without making any mistakes on the way. However, if the goal instead is to reach truth for whatever reasons, right or wrong, there will be cases in which using the conclusion-based procedure turns out to be more reliable, even though, for the most part, the premise-based procedure will retain its superiority. (shrink)

It seems that intuitions are indispensable in philosophical theorizing. Yet, there is evidence that our intuitions are heavily influenced by biases. This generates a puzzle: we must use our intuitions, but we seemingly cannot fully trust those very intuitions. In this paper, I develop a methodology for philosophical theorizing which attempts to avoid this puzzle. Specifically, I develop and defend a methodology that I call Extra-Wide Reflective Equilibrium. I argue that this method allows us to use intuitions, while also providing (...) a mechanism to check the influence of bias on our intuitions. -/- In section I, defend the claim that intuitions are indispensable in philosophical theorizing. In section II, I outline recent arguments against the reliability of intuitions. In section III, I explain and defend my account of Extra-Wide Reflective Equilibrium. (shrink)

In the past two decades, epistemologists have significantly expanded the focus of their field. To the traditional question that has dominated the debate — under what conditions does belief amount to knowledge? — they have added questions about testimony, epistemic virtues and vices, epistemic trust, and more. This broadening of the range of epistemic concern has coincided with an expansion in conceptions of epistemic agency beyond the individualism characteristic of most earlier epistemology. We believe that these developments have not gone (...) far enough. While the weak anti-individualism we see in contemporary epistemology may be adequate for the kinds of cases it tends to focus on, a great deal of human knowledge production and transmission does not conform to these models. Furthermore, the dispositions and norms that are knowledge-conducive in the familiar cases may not be knowledge-conducive generally. In fact, dispositions that, at an individual level, count as epistemic vices may be epistemic virtues in common social contexts. We argue that this overlooked feature of human social life means that epistemology must become more deeply and pervasively social. (shrink)

In recent work, Cheryl Misak has developed a novel justification of deliberative democracy rooted in Peircean epistemology. In this article, the author expands Misak's arguments to show that not only does Peircean pragmatism provide a justification for deliberative democracy that is more compelling than the justifications offered by competing liberal and discursivist views, but also fixes a specific conception of deliberative politics that is perfectionist rather than neutralist. The article concludes with a discussion of whether the `epistemic perfectionism' implied by (...) the pragmatist argument could be endorsed by liberal democrats. Key Words: deliberative democracy • epistemology • liberalism • Cheryl Misak • Charles Peirce • perfectionism • pragmatism • truth. (shrink)

Despite the attention equality before the law has received, both laudatory and critical, peculiarly little has been done to precisely define it. The first ambition of this paper is to remedy this, by exploring the various ways in which a principle of equality before the law can be understood and suggest a concise definition. With a clearer understanding of the principle in hand we are better equipped to assess traditional critique of the principle. Doing so is the second ambition of (...) this paper. I will argue that traditional criticisms are unpersuasive, but that there is a different, powerful argument against equality before the law. The third ambition of the paper is to argue that there is a sense, overlooked by both proponents and critics, in which the principle still captures something important, albeit at the cost of shifting from intrinsic to instrumental value. (shrink)

Epistemic democracy is standardly characterized in terms of “aiming at truth”. This presupposes a veritistic conception of epistemic value, according to which truth is the fundamental epistemic goal. I will raise an objection to the standard (veritistic) account of epistemic democracy, focusing specifically on deliberative democracy. I then propose a version of deliberative democracy that is grounded in non-veritistic epistemic goals. In particular, I argue that deliberation is valuable because it facilitates empathetic understanding. I claim that empathetic understanding is an (...) epistemic good that doesn’t have truth as its primary goal. (shrink)

We give a review and critique of jury theorems from a social-epistemology perspective, covering Condorcet’s (1785) classic theorem and several later refinements and departures. We assess the plausibility of the conclusions and premises featuring in jury theorems and evaluate the potential of such theorems to serve as formal arguments for the ‘wisdom of crowds’. In particular, we argue (i) that there is a fundamental tension between voters’ independence and voters’ competence, hence between the two premises of most jury theorems; (ii) (...) that the (asymptotic) conclusion that ‘huge groups are infallible’, reached by many jury theorems, is an artifact of unjustified premises; and (iii) that the (nonasymptotic) conclusion that ‘larger groups are more reliable’, also reached by many jury theorems, is not an artifact and should be regarded as the more adequate formal rendition of the ‘wisdom of crowds’. (shrink)

Decision-making typically requires judgments about causal relations: we need to know the causal effects of our actions and the causal relevance of various environmental factors. We investigate how several individuals' causal judgments can be aggregated into collective causal judgments. First, we consider the aggregation of causal judgments via the aggregation of probabilistic judgments, and identify the limitations of this approach. We then explore the possibility of aggregating causal judgments independently of probabilistic ones. Formally, we introduce the problem of causal-network aggregation. (...) Finally, we revisit the aggregation of probabilistic judgments when this is constrained by prior aggregation of qualitative causal judgments. (shrink)

To find out what is in one’s own best interest, it is helpful to ask one’s epistemic peers. However, identifying one’s epistemic peers is not a trivial task. I consider a stylized political setting, an electoral competition of ‘Masses’ and ‘Elites’. To succeed, the Masses need to know which alternative on offer is truly in their interest. To find out, the Masses can pool their privately held information in a pre-election ballot, provided that they can reliably find out with whom (...) they should pool information. I investigate the process of finding the relevant peer group for information pooling by modelling this group formation process as dynamic network change. The simulations show that the Masses can succeed in finding the right peers, but they also suggest reasons why the Elites may often be more successful. This phenomenon generalizes to the notion of Epistemic Network Injustice. Such injustice arises when a subset of citizens is systematically deprived of connections to helpful epistemic peers, leading to their reduced political influence. Epistemic Network Injustice is a new form of epistemic injustice, related to but distinct from the notion introduced by Miranda Fricker. (shrink)

Social scientists use many different methods, and there are often substantial disagreements about which method is appropriate for a given research question. In response to this uncertainty about the relative merits of different methods, W. E. B. Du Bois advocated for and applied “methodological triangulation”. This is to use multiple methods simultaneously in the belief that, where one is uncertain about the reliability of any given method, if multiple methods yield the same answer that answer is confirmed more strongly than (...) it could have been by any single method. Against this, methodological purists believe that one should choose a single appropriate method and stick with it. Using tools from voting theory, we show Du Boisian methodological triangulation to be more likely to yield the correct answer than purism, assuming the scientist is subject to some degree of diffidence about the relative merits of the various methods. This holds even when in fact only one of the methods is appropriate for the given research question. (shrink)

This item was published as 'Appendix 3: An Implication of the k-option Condorcet jury mechanism for the probability of cycles' in List and Goodin (2001) http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/705/. Standard results suggest that the probability of cycles should increase as the number of options increases and also as the number of individuals increases. These results are, however, premised on a so-called "impartial culture" assumption: any logically possible preference ordering is assumed to be as likely to be held by an individual as any other. (...) The present chapter shows, in the three-option case, that given suitably systematic, however slight, deviations from an impartial culture situation, the probability of a cycle converges either to zero (more typically) or to one (less typically) as the number of individuals increases. (shrink)

“One who elects to serve mankind by taking the law into his own hands thereby demonstrates his conviction that his own ability to determine policy is superior to democratic decision making. [Defendants’] professed unselfish motivation, rather than a justification, actually identifies a form of arrogance which organized society cannot tolerate.” Those were the words of Justice Harris L. Hartz at the sentencing hearing of three nuns convicted of trespassing and vandalizing government property to demonstrate against U.S. foreign policy. Citizens engaging (...) in civil disobedience are indeed at times accused of being arrogant because they apparently think their own political judgment is superior to that of the democratic majority. This paper examines and evaluates the claim that dissenters are epistemically arrogant. Contrary to the dominant viewpoint in the literature, I argue that epistemic arrogance involves inflating the epistemic worth of one’s view. Indeed, the most plausible charge against civil dissenters consists of two claims: civil dissenters have a higher degree of rational certainty in P than is warranted, and civil dissenters use a method of expression that requires a higher level of rational certainty than is warranted in the propositions that their political view is right and the injustice they fight is substantial. I argue that civil disobedience does not necessarily involve epistemic arrogance. Whether an act of civil disobedience evinces epistemic arrogance has to be determined on a case-by-case basis depending on the extent to which each dissenter lives up to and. (shrink)

In judgment aggregation, unlike preference aggregation, not much is known about domain restrictions that guarantee consistent majority outcomes. We introduce several conditions on individual judgments su¢ - cient for consistent majority judgments. Some are based on global orders of propositions or individuals, others on local orders, still others not on orders at all. Some generalize classic social-choice-theoretic domain conditions, others have no counterpart. Our most general condition generalizes Sen’s triplewise value-restriction, itself the most general classic condition. We also prove a (...) new characterization theorem: for a large class of domains, if there exists any aggregation function satisfying some democratic conditions, then majority voting is the unique such function. Taken together, our results provide new support for the robustness of majority rule. (shrink)

Prepublication peer review should be abolished. We consider the effects that such a change will have on the social structure of science, paying particular attention to the changed incentive structure and the likely effects on the behaviour of individual scientists. We evaluate these changes from the perspective of epistemic consequentialism. We find that where the effects of abolishing prepublication peer review can be evaluated with a reasonable level of confidence based on presently available evidence, they are either positive or neutral. (...) We conclude that on present evidence abolishing peer review weakly dominates the status quo. (shrink)

It has been argued that an epistemically rational agent’s evidence is subjectively mediated through some rational epistemic standards, and that there are incompatible but equally rational epistemic standards available to agents. This supports Permissiveness, the view according to which one or multiple fully rational agents are permitted to take distinct incompatible doxastic attitudes towards P (relative to a body of evidence). In this paper, I argue that the above claims entail the existence of a unique and more reliable epistemic standard. (...) My strategy relies on Condorcet’s Jury Theorem. This gives rise to an important problem for those who argue that epistemic standards are permissive, since the reliability criterion is incompatible with such a type of Permissiveness. (shrink)

This paper sketches a general account of how to respond in an epistemically rational way to moral disagreement. Roughly, the account states that when two parties, A and B, disagree as to whether p, A says p while B says not-p, this is higher-order evidence that A has made a cognitive error on the first-order level of reasoning in coming to believe that p. If such higher-order evidence is not defeated, then one rationally ought to reduce one’s confidence with respect (...) to the proposition in question. We term this the higher-order evidence account, and present it as a superior to what we might call standard conciliationism, which holds that when agents A and B disagree about p, and are epistemic peers, they should both suspend judgement about p or adjust their confidence towards the mean of A and B’s prior credences in p. Many have suspected that standard conciliationism is implausible and may have skeptical implications. After presenting the HOE account, we put it to work by applying it to a range of cases of moral disagreement, including those that have feature in recent debates assuming standard conciliationism. We show that the HOE account support reasonable, non-skeptical verdicts in a range of cases. Note that this is a paper on moral disagreement, not on the HOE account, thus the account is merely stated here, while defended more fully elsewhere. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to elucidate a significant epistemic dimension of deliberative democracy. I argue that the role of citizens’ political judgments in deliberative democratic theory commits deliberative democracy to a view of deliberation as an essentially epistemic enterprise, one aimed at identifying correct answers to questions of political morality. This epistemic reading stands in contrast to prevailing views of deliberative democracy that tend to hold that the normatively significant function of deliberation is merely to legitimate democratic decisions, (...) regardless of their substantive correctness. These views tend to regard any epistemic benefit of deliberation as a mere welcome side effect, ancillary to the aim of securing legitimacy. My argument, however, shows deliberative democratic legitimacy itself to depend on the epistemic success of deliberative procedures with respect to questions of political morality. I approach this argument by way of a contrast between deliberative democracy and the so-called aggregative conception of democracy. It will turn out that the important philosophical differences between the two views are located in their different conceptions of political participation and democratic legitimacy. I then go on to argue that the deliberative conceptions of participation and legitimacy give rise to an epistemic dimension which is generally underappreciated, but which is crucial to a proper understanding of deliberative democracy. I conclude that it is incumbent upon deliberative democrats to offer a compelling account of the epistemic value of deliberative procedures. The epistemic value of deliberation is not just a convenient epiphenomenon of deliberative democracy’s legitimation procedures. Rather, it is a necessary condition of those procedures playing their legitimating role at all. (shrink)

Analytic political philosophy tries to make our political language more precise. But in doing so it risks departing from our natural language and intuitions. This article examines this tension. We...

The contemporary theory of epistemic democracy often draws on the Condorcet Jury Theorem to formally justify the ‘wisdom of crowds’. But this theorem is inapplicable in its current form, since one of its premises – voter independence – is notoriously violated. This premise carries responsibility for the theorem's misleading conclusion that ‘large crowds are infallible’. We prove a more useful jury theorem: under defensible premises, ‘large crowds are fallible but better than small groups’. This theorem rehabilitates the importance of deliberation (...) and education, which appear inessential in the classical jury framework. Our theorem is related to Ladha's (1993) seminal jury theorem for interchangeable (‘indistinguishable’) voters based on de Finetti's Theorem. We also prove a more general and simpler such jury theorem. (shrink)

Assuming that votes are independent, the epistemically optimal procedure in a binary collective choice problem is known to be a weighted supermajority rule with weights given by personal log-likelihood-ratios. It is shown here that an analogous result holds in a much more general model. Firstly, the result follows from a more basic principle than expected-utility maximisation, namely from an axiom (Epistemic Monotonicity) which requires neither utilities nor prior probabilities of the ‘correctness’ of alternatives. Secondly, a person’s input need not be (...) a vote for an alternative, it may be any type of input, for instance a subjective degree of belief or probability of the correctness of one of the alternatives. The case of a profile of subjective degrees of belief is particularly appealing, since here no parameters such as competence parameters need to be known. (shrink)

The point of departure in my story is the contrast between two models of democratic voting process: popular democracy and what might be called committee democracy. On one interpretation, voting in popular democracy is a procedure whose function is to aggregate the individuals’ preferences to something like a collective preference, while in committee democracy what is being aggregated are committee members’ judgments. The relevant judgments on the agenda often address an evaluative question. It is such value judgments that this paper (...) focuses on. The question is how their aggregation differs from aggregation of preferences. I focus on the case in which the two aggregation scenarios exhibit a far-reaching structural similarity: more precisely, the case in which, in the judgment aggregation scenario, the individual inputs are value rankings. This means that, formally, the individual judgments in this case have the same structure as preference rankings over a given set of alternatives, but while in a preference ranking the alternatives are ordered in accordance with one’s preferences, a value ranking expresses one’s comparative evaluation of the alternatives: say, this alternative is best, those two alternatives are second-best, that alternative is third-best, etc. I suggest that this difference in the nature of individual inputs in two aggregation scenarios has important implications for the task of aggregation. In particular, distance-based methods that look fine for the aggregation of judgments turn out to be inappropriate for the aggregation of preferences: Minimization of distance from individual inputs violates the Pareto condition. When applied to judgment aggregation, distance-based methods can also be approached from the epistemic standpoint: the questions canl be posed concerning their advantages as a truth-tracker. In this context, what matters is not only the probability of the outcome of the aggregation procedure being true, but also the expected verisimilitude of the outcome: its expected distance from truth. (shrink)

Una de las bifurcaciones en el debate contemporáneo sobre la legitimidad de la democracia explora si ésta ofrece ventajas distintivamente epistémicas frente a otras alternativas políticas. Quienes defienden la tesis de la democracia epistémica afirman que la democracia es instrumentalmente superior o equiparable a otras formas de organización política en lo que concierne a la obtención de varios bienes epistémicos. En este ensayo presento dos (grupos de) argumentos a favor de la democracia epistémica, que se inspiran en resultados formales: el (...) teorema del jurado de Condorcet [TJC] y el teorema ‘diversidad supera habilidad’ [DSH]. Pese a su gran atractivo, sostengo que estos argumentos son incapaces de respaldar dicha tesis: no brindan razones para considerar que la democracia es epistémicamente superior (o equiparable) a algunas alternativas políticas no democráticas. En su lugar, sugiero que, sin requerir un cambio radical en nuestras formas de organización política, la epistemología democrática –el estudio de las ‘circunstancias epistémicas de la democracia’– puede ofrecer valiosas lecciones de sobre cómo optimizar, en nuestra situación, instituciones y procedimientos de toma de decisiones. Para ello, primero distingo entre varias maneras de evaluar procedimientos de toma de decisión colectiva. Argumento que, al considerarlos como formas de organización política, un factor importante en la evaluación de tales procedimientos involucra asuntos fácticos sobre los cuales puede aspirarse a obtener o promover algunos bienes epistémicos. En este contexto, presento algunos de los argumentos más importantes a favor de la democracia epistémica. A continuación, reúno algunas de las objeciones sobre la aplicabilidad de dichos argumentos y ofrezco razones independientes para dudar de que ofrezcan apoyo a la tesis de la democracia epistémica. Finalmente, defiendo que la epistemología democrática puede desempeñar un papel significativo en la legitimación de formas de organización colectiva que podrían denominarse ‘democráticas’. (shrink)

The article analyses the necessary conditions an argument for popular punishment would need to meet, and argues that it faces the challenge of a dilemma of reasonableness: either popular views on punishment are unreasonable, in which case they should carry no weight, or they are reasonable, in which case the reasons that support them, not the views, should carry weight. It proceeds to present and critically discuss three potential solutions to the dilemma, arguing that only an argument for the beneficial (...) effects of coherence between popular views and penal policy is persuasive, but that it makes popular punishment less important than proponents claim, and offers a justification proponents will find it difficult to advance. (shrink)

One of the most noticeable trends in recent years has been the increasing reliance of public decision-making processes on algorithms, i.e. computer-programmed step-by-step instructions for taking a given set of inputs and producing an output. The question raised by this article is whether the rise of such algorithmic governance creates problems for the moral or political legitimacy of our public decision-making processes. Ignoring common concerns with data protection and privacy, it is argued that algorithmic governance does pose a significant threat (...) to the legitimacy of such processes. Modelling my argument on Estlund’s threat of epistocracy, I call this the ‘threat of algocracy’. The article clarifies the nature of this threat and addresses two possible solutions. It is argued that neither solution is likely to be successful, at least not without risking many other things we value about social decision-making. The result is a somewhat pessimistic conclusion in which we confront the possibility that we are creating decision-making processes that constrain and limit opportunities for human participation. (shrink)

Condorcet's famous jury theorem reaches an optimistic conclusion on the correctness of majority decisions, based on two controversial premises about voters: they are competent and vote independently, in a technical sense. I carefully analyse these premises and show that: whether a premise is justi…ed depends on the notion of probability considered; none of the notions renders both premises simultaneously justi…ed. Under the perhaps most interesting notions, the independence assumption should be weakened.

Contrary to the popular belief, I argue that a more inclusive polity does not necessarily conflict with the goal of improving the epistemic capacities of deliberation. My argument examines one property of democracy that is usually thought of in non-epistemic terms, inclusion. Inclusion is not only valuable for moral reasons, but it also has epistemic virtues. I consider two epistemic benefits of inclusive deliberation: inclusive deliberation helps to create a more complete picture of the world that everyone dwells together; and (...) inclusive deliberation can be helpful in reducing biases and errors endemic to a society. Having advanced two epistemic arguments for inclusive deliberation, I argue that the Deweyan model best captures the knowledge-pooling function of deliberation. (shrink)

From Mill to, most recently, Bryan Caplan, political and economic elites have been seen as the solution to the public’s ignorance and incompetence. In order to show that elites are actually more competent than the public, however, we would have to find out what type of knowledge is necessary to enact good public policy. The empirical evidence shows that economic experts have a slight advantage over the general public in knowledge of how to achieve policy goals. But, contrary to Caplan, (...) the evidence indicates that economists don’t possess significant predictive knowledge, and that general economic laws are of little help in predicting the magnitude of the effects of a specific policy in a multi‐variable, complex world. When we adopt a more complex understanding of the reasons behind policy choice, and consider rules and principles in addition to goal pursuit, the slight edge of economic experts evaporates. (shrink)

I am grateful to Geoffrey Brennan, Campbell Brown, Franz Dietrich, Christian Elsholtz, Robert Goodin, Frank Jackson and David Soskice for very helpful comments and suggestions; and to the participants of a Social and Political Theory seminar at the ANU in February 2003 and the participants of a conference panel of the Australasian Association of Philosophy at the University of Adelaide in July 2003 for comments and discussion.

Under the independence and competence assumptions of Condorcet’s classical jury model, the probability of a correct majority decision converges to certainty as the jury size increases, a seemingly unrealistic result. Using Bayesian networks, we argue that the model’s independence assumption requires that the state of the world (guilty or not guilty) is the latest common cause of all jurors’ votes. But often – arguably in all courtroom cases and in many expert panels – the latest such common cause is a (...) shared ‘body of evidence’ observed by the jurors. In the corresponding Bayesian network, the votes are direct descendants not of the state of the world, but of the body of evidence, which in turn is a direct descendant of the state of the world. We develop a model of jury decisions based on this Bayesian network. Our model permits the possibility of misleading evidence, even for a maximally competent observer, which cannot easily be accommodated in the classical model. We prove that (i) the probability of a correct majority verdict converges to the probability that the body of evidence is not misleading, a value typically below 1; (ii) depending on the required threshold of ‘no reasonable doubt’, it may be impossible, even in an arbitrarily large jury, to establish guilt of a defendant ‘beyond any reasonable doubt’. (shrink)

In this paper, we explain and showcase the promising methodology of testimonial network analysis and visualization for experimental epistemology, arguing that it can be used to gain insights and answer philosophical questions in social epistemology. Our use case is the epistemic community that discusses vaccine safety primarily in English on Twitter. In two studies, we show, using both statistical analysis and exploratory data visualization, that there is almost no neutral or ambivalent discussion of vaccine safety on Twitter. Roughly half the (...) accounts engaging with this topic are pro-vaccine, while the other half are con-vaccine. We also show that these two camps rarely engage with one another, and that the con-vaccine camp has greater epistemic reach and receptivity than the pro-vaccine camp. In light of these findings, we question whether testimonial networks as they are currently constituted on popular fora such as Twitter are living up to their promise of delivering the wisdom of crowds. We conclude by pointing to directions for further research in digital social epistemology. (shrink)

There is a substantial class of collective decision problems whose successful solution requires interdependence among decision makers at the agenda-setting stage and independence at the stage of choice. We define this class of problems and describe and apply a search-and-decision mechanism theoretically modeled in the context of honeybees and identified in earlier empirical work in biology. The honeybees’ mechanism has useful implications for mechanism design in human institutions, including courts, legislatures, executive appointments, research and development in firms, and basic research (...) in the sciences. Our paper offers a fresh perspective on the idea of “biomimicry” in institutional design and raises the possibility of comparative institutional analysis across species. (shrink)

Recent political developments cast doubt on the wisdom of democratic decision-making. Brexit, the Colombian people's (initial) rejection of peace with the FARC, and the election of Donald Trump suggest that the time is right to explore alternatives to democracy. In this essay, I describe and defend the epistocratic system of government which is, given current theoretical and empirical knowledge, most likely to produce optimal political outcomes—or at least better outcomes than democracy produces. To wit, we should expand the suffrage as (...) wide as possible and weight citizens’ votes in accordance with their competence. As it turns out, the optimal system is closely related to J. S. Mill's plural voting proposal. I also explain how voters’ competences can be precisely determined, without reference to an objective standard of correctness and without generating invidious comparisons between voters. (shrink)

Memory Detection Tests (MDTs) are a general class of psychophysiological tests that can be used to determine whether someone remembers a particular fact or datum. The P300 MDT is a type of MDT that relies on a presumed correlation between the presence of a detectable neural signal (the P300 “brainwave”) in a test subject, and the recognition of those facts in the subject’s mind. As such, the P300 MDT belongs to a class of brain-based forensic technologies which have proved popular (...) and controversial in recent years. With such tests increasingly being proffered for use in the courtroom — to either support or call into question testimony — it would behoove the legal system to have some systematic framework for ensuring that they are used responsibly. In this paper, I defend one such framework for ensuring that this is the case: the legitimacy enhancing test. According to this test, it is appropriate to make use of technologies such as the P300 MDT whenever doing so would (probably) enhance the legitimacy of the trial. I argue that this test addresses tensions between scientific and legal norms of evidence, and exhibits a number of additional virtues including unification, simplicity and flexibility. Although the test is defended by considering the example of the P300 MDT, its significance is much broader than that. If it has the virtues I claim for it, it should provide a general framework for the responsible use of technologies, and the responsible innovation of social epistemic systems. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

Consider the hypothesis H that a defendant is guilty, and the evidence E that a majority of h out of n independent jurors have voted for H and a minority of k:=n-h against H. How likely is the majority verdict to be correct? By a formula of Condorcet, the probability that H is true given E depends only on each juror's competence and on the absolute margin between the majority and the minority h-k, but neither on the number n, nor (...) on the proportion h/n. This paper reassesses that result and explores its implications. First, using the classical Condorcet jury model, I derive a more general version of Condorcet's formula, confirming the significance of the absolute margin, but showing that the probability that H is true given E depends also on an additional parameter: the prior probability that H is true. Second, I show that a related result holds when we consider not the degree of belief we attach to H given E, but the degree of support E gives to H. Third, I address the implications for the definition of special majority voting, a procedure used to capture the asymmetry between false positive and false negative decisions. I argue that the standard definition of special majority voting in terms of a required proportion of the jury is epistemically questionable, and that the classical Condorcet jury model leads to an alternative definition in terms of a required absolute margin between the majority and the minority. Finally, I show that the results on the significance of the absolute margin can be resisted if the so-called assumption of symmetrical juror competence is relaxed. (shrink)

We introduce a number of logics to reason about collective propositional attitudes that are defined by means of the majority rule. It is well known that majoritarian aggregation is subject to irrationality, as the results in social choice theory and judgment aggregation show. The proposed logics for modelling collective attitudes are based on a substructural propositional logic that allows for circumventing inconsistent outcomes. Individual and collective propositional attitudes, such as beliefs, desires, obligations, are then modelled by means of minimal modalities (...) to ensure a number of basic principles. In this way, a viable consistent modelling of collective attitudes is obtained. (shrink)

In this paper we propose and analyze a game-theoretic model of the epistemology of peer disagreement. In this model, the peers' rationality is evaluated in terms of their probability of ending the disagreement with a true belief. We find that different strategies---in particular, one based on the Steadfast View and one based on the Conciliatory View---are rational depending on the truth-sensitivity of the individuals involved in the disagreement. Interestingly, the Steadfast and the Conciliatory Views can even be rational simultaneously in (...) some circumstances. We tentatively provide some reasons to favor the Conciliatory View in such cases. We argue that the game-theoretic perspective is a fruitful one in this debate, and this fruitfulness has not been exhausted by the present paper. (shrink)

How can democratic governments be relied upon to achieve adequate political knowledge when they turn over their authority to those of no epistemic distinction whatsoever? This deep and longstanding concern is one that any proponent of epistemic conceptions of democracy must take seriously. While Condorcetian responses have recently attracted substantial interest, they are largely undermined by a fundamental neglect of agenda-setting. I argue that the apparent intractability of the problem of epistemic adequacy in democracy stems in large part from a (...) failure to appreciate the social character of political knowledge. A social point of view brings into focus a number of vital factors that bear on our understanding of democratic epistemology and our assessment of its prospects: the essential role of inclusive deliberation, the public's agenda-setting function, institutional provisions for policy feedback, the independence of expert communities, and the knowledge-pooling powers of markets. (shrink)

Alice Le Goff ,Christian Nadeau | : Ce texte constitue une introduction au dossier. Il introduit les différentes contributions en mettant en relief leurs principales orientations. Ce faisant, il propose donc une cartographie conceptuelle, forcément partielle, des enjeux associés à la notion de démocratie épistémique et des enjeux du croisement de cette notion avec celle de démocratie de contestation. En un premier temps, nous revenons sur l’apport du procéduralisme épistémique et sur les questions qu’il soulève. Ensuite, nous revenons sur le (...) néo-pragmatisme et la façon dont il permet d’envisager une justification épistémique de la démocratie. Puis nous mettons l’accent sur les enjeux d’un dialogue entre modèle républicain de la démocratie contestataire et modèle épistémique. Enfin, le texte propose un résumé du parcours proposé dans le cadre de ce dossier. | : This introduction brings out the main lines of the articles collected in the present issue. Our aim is to provide the reader with a conceptual overview of the main stakes of epistemic democracy and of its intersections with the model of contestatory democracy. First, we focus on epistemic proceduralism, its contributions and the questions it raises. Second, we emphasize the way neo-pragmatism deals with the epistemic justification of democracy. Then, we insist on the interest of a dialogue between epistemic democracy and the neo-republican model of contestatory democracy. Finally, the text sums up the path followed in that issue. (shrink)

Recent accounts of epistemic democracy aim to show that in some qualified sense, democratic institutions have a tendency to produce reasonable outcomes. Epistemic democrats aim to offer such accounts without presupposing any narrow, controversial view of what the outcomes of democratic procedures should be, much as a good justification of a particular scientific research design does not presuppose the hypothesis that the research aims to test. The article considers whether this aim is achievable. It asks, in particular, whether accounts of (...) epistemic democracy can be reconciled with the commonly held view that disagreement about which laws and policies should be enacted is a fundamental, permanent feature of democratic politics and imposes constraints on how we justify democratic procedures. (shrink)

Faced with a national tragedy, citizens respond in different ways. Some will initiate debate about the possible connections between this tragedy and broader moral and political issues. But others often complain that this is too early, that it is inappropriate to debate such larger issues while ‘the bodies are still warm’. This paper critically examines the grounds for such a complaint. We consider different interpretations of the complaint—cynical, epistemic and ethical—and argue that it can be resisted on all of these (...) readings. Debate shortly after a national disaster is therefore permissible. We then set out a political argument in favour of early debate based on the value of broad political participation in liberal democracies and sketch a stronger argument, based on the duty to support just institutions, that would support a political duty to engage in debate shortly after tragedies have occurred. (shrink)

In his 2010 paper “Philosophical Naturalism and Intuitional Methodology”, Alvin I. Goldman invokes the Condorcet Jury Theorem in order to defend the reliability of intuitions. The present note argues that the original conditions of the theorem are all unrealistic when analysed in connection to the case of intuitions. Alternative conditions are discussed.