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  1. Philosophical Agreement and Philosophical Progress.Julia Smith - 2024 - Episteme:1-19.
    In the literature on philosophical progress it is often assumed that agreement is a necessary condition for progress. This assumption is sensible only if agreement is a reliable sign of the truth, since agreement on false answers to philosophical questions would not constitute progress. This paper asks whether agreement among philosophers is (or would be) likely to be a reliable sign of truth. Insights from social choice theory are used to identify the conditions under which agreement among philosophers would be (...)
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  • (1 other version)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 Procedural Value of Epistemic Virtues.Miljan Vasić - 2023 - In Nenad Cekić (ed.), Virtues and vices – between ethics and epistemology. Belgrade: Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade. pp. 91–118.
    The longstanding tension between the procedural and instrumental justification of democracy has been challenged by the theories that try to combine both approaches. These theories portray epistemic features of democracy in an instrumental framework and then try to reconcile them with procedural values. In this paper, I argue that it is possible to incorporate an epistemic dimension into a justification of democracy, without resorting to instrumentalism. On the view that I advance, Peircean epistemology, when combined with intrinsically valued epistemic virtues, (...)
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  • Virtues and vices – between ethics and epistemology.Nenad Cekić (ed.) - 2023 - Belgrade: Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade.
    The statement everyone wants to live a fulfilled and happy life may seem simple, self-evident, and even trivial at first glance. However, upon closer philosophical analysis, can we unequivocally assert that people are truly focused on well-being? Assuming they are, the question becomes: what guidelines should be followed and how should one behave in order to achieve true well-being and attain their goals? One popular viewpoint is that cultivating moral virtues and personal qualities is essential for a life of "true" (...)
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  • Epistemología de la Democracia.Elizabeth Anderson & Blas Radi - 2022 - Las Torres de Lucca: Revista Internacional de Filosofía Política 11 (1):117-127.
    Este trabajo investiga las capacidades epistémicas de las instituciones democráticas a través de una evaluación de tres modelos epistémicos de democracia: el Teorema del Jurado de Condorcet, el Teorema ‘Diversidad supera Habilidad’ y el modelo experimentalista de Dewey. El modelo de Dewey es superior a los demás en su capacidad de modelar las funciones epistémicas de tres características constitutivas de la democracia: la diversidad epistémica de los participantes, la interacción de la votación con el debate y los mecanismos de retroalimentación (...)
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  • (2 other versions)Richard Rorty and the Epistemic Defense of Democracy.Susan Dieleman - 2022 - Contemporary Pragmatism 19 (3):151-169.
    Richard Rorty has been taken to task for his apparent inability to defend democracy to the anti-democrat. Cheryl Misak, for example, in developing her own epistemic defense of democracy, argues that because he abjures truth, Rorty cannot provide any argument to show that democracy is superior to other political arrangements. In this paper, I agree with Misak that Rorty is unable to provide an argument, epistemic or otherwise, in defense of democracy, but show that this doesn’t mean he, or someone (...)
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  • Optimizing Political Influence: A Jury Theorem with Dynamic Competence and Dependence.Thomas Mulligan - forthcoming - Social Choice and Welfare.
    The purpose of this paper is to illustrate, formally, an ambiguity in the exercise of political influence. To wit: A voter might exert influence with an eye toward maximizing the probability that the political system (1) obtains the correct (e.g. just) outcome, or (2) obtains the outcome that he judges to be correct (just). And these are two very different things. A variant of Condorcet's Jury Theorem which incorporates the effect of influence on group competence and interdependence is developed. Analytic (...)
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  • Social choice problems with public reason proceduralism.Henrik D. Kugelberg - 2022 - Economics and Philosophy 38 (1):51-70.
    Most political liberals argue that only rules, policies and institutions that are part of society’s basic structure need to be justified with so-called public reasons. Laws enacted outside this set are legitimate if and when public reasons can justify the procedure that selects them. I argue that this view is susceptible to known problems from social choice theory. However, there are resources within political liberalism that could address them. If the scope of public reason is extended beyond the basic structure (...)
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  • Optimizing Individual and Collective Reliability: A Puzzle.Marc-Kevin Daoust - 2022 - Social Epistemology 36 (4):516-531.
    Many epistemologists have argued that there is some degree of independence between individual and collective reliability (e.g., Kitcher 1990; Mayo-Wilson, Zollman, and Danks 2011; Dunn 2018). The question, then, is: To what extent are the two independent of each other? And in which contexts do they come apart? In this paper, I present a new case confirming the independence between individual and collective reliability optimization. I argue that, in voting groups, optimizing individual reliability can conflict with optimizing collective reliability. This (...)
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  • Consensus versus Unanimity: Which Carries More Weight?Finnur Dellsén - 2021 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    Around 97% of climate scientists endorse anthropogenic global warming (AGW), the theory that human activities are partly responsible for recent increases in global average temperatures. Clearly, this widespread endorsement of AGW is a reason for non-experts to believe in AGW. But what is the epistemic significance of the fact that some climate scientists do not endorse AGW? This paper contrasts expert unanimity, in which virtually no expert disagrees with some theory, with expert consensus, in which some non-negligible proportion either rejects (...)
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  • (1 other version)Enfranchising the Youth.Lachlan Montgomery Umbers - 2020 - Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 23 (6):732-755.
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  • Epistemic Democracy and the Truth Connection.Wes Siscoe - forthcoming - Public Reason.
    If political decision-making aims at getting a particular result, like identifying just laws or policies that truly promote the common good, then political institutions can also be evaluated in terms of how often they achieve these results. Epistemic defenses of democracy argue that democracies have the upper hand when it comes to truth, identifying the laws and policies that are truly just or conducive to the common good. A number of epistemic democrats claim that democracies have this beneficial connection to (...)
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  • Neurodemocracy: Self-Organization of the Embodied Mind.Linus Huang - 2017 - Dissertation, University of Sydney
    This thesis contributes to a better conceptual understanding of how self-organized control works. I begin by analyzing the control problem and its solution space. I argue that the two prominent solutions offered by classical cognitive science (centralized control with rich commands, e.g., the Fodorian central systems) and embodied cognitive science (distributed control with simple commands, such as the subsumption architecture by Rodney Brooks) are merely two positions in a two-dimensional solution space. I outline two alternative positions: one is distributed control (...)
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  • Towards a Critical Social Epistemology of Social Media.Joshua Habgood-Coote - 2024 - In Jennifer Lackey & Aidan McGlynn (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Social Epistemology. Oxford University Press.
    What are the proper epistemic aims of social media sites? A great deal of social media critique presupposes an exceptionalist attitude, according to which social media is either uniquely good, or uniquely bad for our collective knowledge-generating practices. Exceptionalism about social media is troublesome, both because it leads to oversimplistic narratives, and because it prevents us making relevant comparisons to other epistemic systems. The goal of this chapter is to offer an anti-exceptionalist account of the epistemic aims of social media. (...)
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  • Intuitions about the epistemic virtues of majority voting.Hugo Mercier, Martin Dockendorff, Yoshimasa Majima, Anne-Sophie Hacquin & Melissa Schwartzberg - forthcoming - Thinking and Reasoning:1-19.
    The Condorcet Jury Theorem, along with empirical results, establishes the accuracy of majority voting in a broad range of conditions. Here we investigate whether naïve participants (in the U.S. and...
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  • Formal Methods.Richard Pettigrew - manuscript
    (This is for the Cambridge Handbook of Analytic Philosophy, edited by Marcus Rossberg) In this handbook entry, I survey the different ways in which formal mathematical methods have been applied to philosophical questions throughout the history of analytic philosophy. I consider: formalization in symbolic logic, with examples such as Aquinas’ third way and Anselm’s ontological argument; Bayesian confirmation theory, with examples such as the fine-tuning argument for God and the paradox of the ravens; foundations of mathematics, with examples such as (...)
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  • Intuitions, Biases, and Extra‐Wide Reflective Equilibrium.Samuel Director - 2020 - Metaphilosophy 51 (5):674-684.
    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 (...)
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  • Deliberation and Group Disagreement.Fernando Broncano-Berrocal & J. Adam Carter - 2020 - In Fernando Broncano-Berrocal & Adam Carter (eds.), The Epistemology of Group Disagreement. Routledge. pp. 9-45.
    Suppose an inquiring group wants to let a certain view stand as the group's view. But there’s a problem: the individuals in that group do not initially all agree with one another about what the correct view is. What should the group do, given that it wants to settle on a single answer, in the face of this kind of intragroup disagreement? Should the group members deliberate and exchange evidence and then take a vote? Or, given the well-known ways that (...)
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  • Are Dissenters Epistemically Arrogant?Tine Hindkjaer Madsen - 2020 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 15 (1):1-23.
    “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 (...)
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  • Moral Disagreement and Higher-Order Evidence.Klemens Kappel & Frederik J. Andersen - 2019 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 22 (5):1103-1120.
    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 (and likewise for B with respect to not-p). If such higher-order evidence is not defeated, then one (...)
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  • The Premises of Condorcet’s Jury Theorem Are Not Simultaneously Justified.Franz Dietrich - 2008 - Episteme 5 (1):56-73.
    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.
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  • Knowledge From Vice: Deeply Social Epistemology.Neil Levy & Mark Alfano - 2020 - Mind 129 (515):887-915.
    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 (...)
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  • Representation in Models of Epistemic Democracy.Patrick Grim, Aaron Bramson, Daniel J. Singer, William J. Berger, Jiin Jung & Scott E. Page - 2020 - Episteme 17 (4):498-518.
    Epistemic justifications for democracy have been offered in terms of two different aspects of decision-making: voting and deliberation, or ‘votes’ and ‘talk.’ The Condorcet Jury Theorem is appealed to as a justification in terms votes, and the Hong-Page “Diversity Trumps Ability” result is appealed to as a justification in terms of deliberation. Both of these, however, are most plausibly construed as models of direct democracy, with full and direct participation across the population. In this paper, we explore how these results (...)
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  • Conocimiento y justificación en la epistemología democrática.Marc Jiménez Rolland - 2018 - In Ana Estanny & Mario Gensollen (eds.), Democracia y conocimiento. Univerisdad Autónoma de Aguascalientes, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, IMAC. pp. 153-182.
    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 (...)
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  • Improving deliberations by reducing misrepresentation effects.Cyrille Imbert, Thomas Boyer-Kassem, Vincent Chevrier & Christine Bourjot - 2020 - Episteme 17 (4):403-419.
    ABSTRACTDeliberative and decisional groups play crucial roles in most aspects of social life. But it is not obvious how to organize these groups and various socio-cognitive mechanisms can spoil debates and decisions. In this paper we focus on one such important mechanism: the misrepresentation of views, i.e. when agents express views that are aligned with those already expressed, and which differ from their private opinions. We introduce a model to analyze the extent to which this behavioral pattern can warp deliberations (...)
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  • Can Real Social Epistemic Networks Deliver the Wisdom of Crowds?Emily Sullivan, Max Sondag, Ignaz Rutter, Wouter Meulemans, Scott Cunningham, Bettina Speckmann & Mark Alfano - 2014 - In Tania Lombrozo, Joshua Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, Volume 1. Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press UK.
    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 (...)
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  • Is Peer Review a Good Idea?Remco Heesen & Liam Kofi Bright - 2021 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 72 (3):635-663.
    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. (...)
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  • One standard to rule them all?Marc-Kevin Daoust - 2018 - Ratio 32 (1):12-21.
    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. (...)
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  • Epistemic approaches to deliberative democracy.John B. Min & James K. Wong - 2018 - Philosophy Compass 13 (6):e12497.
    This article offers a comprehensive review of the major theoretical issues and findings of the epistemic approaches to deliberative democracy. Section 2 surveys the norms and ideals of deliberative democracy in relation to deliberation's ability to “track the truth.” Section 3 examines the conditions under which deliberative mini‐publics can “track the truth.” Section 4 discusses how “truth‐tracking” deliberative democracy is possible through the division of epistemic labor in a deliberative system.
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  • (1 other version)Disagreement.Jonathan Matheson & Bryan Frances - 2018 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    This article examines the central epistemological issues tied to the recognition of disagreement.
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  • Plural Voting for the Twenty-First Century.Thomas Mulligan - 2018 - Philosophical Quarterly 68 (271):286-306.
    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 (...)
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  • Voting, deliberation and truth.Stephan Hartmann & Soroush Rafiee Rad - 2016 - Synthese 195 (3):1-21.
    There are various ways to reach a group decision on a factual yes–no question. One way is to vote and decide what the majority votes for. This procedure receives some epistemological support from the Condorcet Jury Theorem. Alternatively, the group members may prefer to deliberate and will eventually reach a decision that everybody endorses—a consensus. While the latter procedure has the advantage that it makes everybody happy, it has the disadvantage that it is difficult to implement, especially for larger groups. (...)
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  • Concept, principle, and norm—equality before the law reconsidered.Frej Klem Thomsen - 2018 - Legal Theory 24 (2):103-134.
    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 (...)
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  • Reasons, Coherence, and Group Rationality.Brian Hedden - 2018 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 99 (3):581-604.
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.
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  • Participation, Legitimacy, and the Epistemic Dimension of Deliberative Democracy.Jeremy Butler - 2017 - Social Philosophy Today 33:55-72.
    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, (...)
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  • (1 other version)Democratic epistemology and democratic morality: the appeal and challenges of Peircean pragmatism.Annabelle Lever & Clayton Chin - 2017 - Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 22 (4):432-453.
    Does the wide distribution of political power in democracies, relative to other modes of government, result in better decisions? Specifically, do we have any reason to believe that they are better qualitatively – more reasoned, better supported by the available evidence, more deserving of support – than those which have been made by other means? In order to answer this question we examine the recent effort by Talisse and Misak to show that democracy is epistemically justified. Highlighting the strengths and (...)
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  • (1 other version)Jury Theorems.Franz Dietrich & Kai Spiekermann - 2019 - In Miranda Fricker, Peter Graham, David Henderson & Nikolaj Jang Pedersen (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Social Epistemology. New York, USA: Routledge.
    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) (...)
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  • Challenging the Majority Rule in Matters of Truth.Bernd Lahno - 2014 - Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics 7 (2):54-72.
    The majority rule has caught much attention in recent debate about the aggregation of judgments. But its role in finding the truth is limited. A majority of expert judgments is not necessarily authoritative, even if all experts are equally competent, if they make their judgments independently of each other, and if all the judgments are based on the same source of (good) evidence. In this paper I demonstrate this limitation by presenting a simple counterexample and a related general result. I (...)
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  • Pure Epistemic Proceduralism.Fabienne Peter - 2008 - Episteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology 5 (1):33-55.
    In this paper I defend a pure proceduralist conception of legitimacy that applies to epistemic democracy. This conception, which I call pure epistemic proceduralism, does not depend on procedure-independent standards for good outcomes and relies on a proceduralist epistemology. It identifies a democratic decision as legitimate if it is the outcome of a process that satisfies certain conditions of political and epistemic fairness. My argument starts with a rejection of instrumentalism–the view that political equality is only instrumentally valuable. I reject (...)
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  • (2 other versions)Democratic Answers to Complex Questions – An Epistemic Perspective.Luc Bovens & Wlodek Rabinowicz - 2006 - Synthese 150 (1):131-153.
    This paper addresses a problem for theories of epistemic democracy. In a decision on a complex issue which can be decomposed into several parts, a collective can use different voting procedures: Either its members vote on each sub-question and the answers that gain majority support are used as premises for the conclusion on the main issue, or the vote is conducted on the main issue itself. The two procedures can lead to different results. We investigate which of these procedures is (...)
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  • The Threat of Algocracy: Reality, Resistance and Accommodation.John Danaher - 2016 - Philosophy and Technology 29 (3):245-268.
    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 (...)
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  • A Game-Theoretic Approach to Peer Disagreement.Remco Heesen & Pieter van der Kolk - 2016 - Erkenntnis 81 (6):1345-1368.
    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 (...)
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  • Vindicating methodological triangulation.Remco Heesen, Liam Kofi Bright & Andrew Zucker - 2016 - Synthese 196 (8):3067-3081.
    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 (...)
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  • How to Condorcet a Goldman.Michele Palmira - 2015 - Episteme 12 (3):413-425.
    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.
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  • The Social Value of Non-Deferential Belief.Allan Hazlett - 2016 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 94 (1):131-151.
    We often prefer non-deferential belief to deferential belief. In the last twenty years, epistemology has seen a surge of sympathetic interest in testimony as a source of knowledge. We are urged to abandon ‘epistemic individualism’ and the ideal of the ‘autonomous knower’ in favour of ‘social epistemology’. In this connection, you might think that a preference for non-deferential belief is a manifestation of vicious individualism, egotism, or egoism. I shall call this the selfishness challenge to preferring non-deferential belief. The aim (...)
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  • (1 other version)Democracy: two models.Wlodek Rabinowicz - 2011 - In .
    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 (...)
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  • Responsible Innovation in Social Epistemic Systems: The P300 Memory Detection Test and the Legal Trial.John Danaher - forthcoming - In Van den Hoven (ed.), Responsible Innovation Volume II: Concepts, Approaches, Applications. Springer.
    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 (...)
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  • A statistical approach to epistemic democracy.Marcus Pivato - 2012 - Episteme 9 (2):115-137.
    We briefly review Condorcet's and Young's epistemic interpretations of preference aggregation rules as maximum likelihood estimators. We then develop a general framework for interpreting epistemic social choice rules as maximum likelihood estimators, maximum a posteriori estimators, or expected utility maximizers. We illustrate this framework with several examples. Finally, we critique this program.Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage (...)
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  • (1 other version)Evaluating Google as an Epistemic Tool.Thomas W. Simpson - 2012 - Metaphilosophy 43 (4):426-445.
    This article develops a social epistemological analysis of Web-based search engines, addressing the following questions. First, what epistemic functions do search engines perform? Second, what dimensions of assessment are appropriate for the epistemic evaluation of search engines? Third, how well do current search engines perform on these? The article explains why they fulfil the role of a surrogate expert, and proposes three ways of assessing their utility as an epistemic tool—timeliness, authority prioritisation, and objectivity. “Personalisation” is a current trend in (...)
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  • A general model of a group search procedure, applied to epistemic democracy.Christopher Thompson - 2013 - Synthese 190 (7):1233-1252.
    The standard epistemic justification for inclusiveness in political decision making is the Condorcet Jury Theorem, which states that the probability of a correct decision using majority rule increases in group size (given certain assumptions). Informally, majority rule acts as a mechanism to pool the information contained in the judgements of individual agents. I aim to extend the explanation of how groups of political agents track the truth. Before agents can pool the information, they first need to find truth-conducive information. Increasing (...)
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