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The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread

New Haven, CT, USA: Yale University Press (2019)

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  1. It Takes a Village to Trust Science: Towards a (Thoroughly) Social Approach to Public Trust in Science.Gabriele Contessa - 2023 - Erkenntnis 88 (7):2941-2966.
    In this paper, I distinguish three general approaches to public trust in science, which I call the individual approach, the semi-social approach, and the social approach, and critically examine their proposed solutions to what I call the problem of harmful distrust. I argue that, despite their differences, the individual and the semi-social approaches see the solution to the problem of harmful distrust as consisting primarily in trying to persuade individual citizens to trust science and that both approaches face two general (...)
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  • Fake News and Epistemic Vice: Combating a Uniquely Noxious Market.Megan Fritts & Frank Cabrera - 2022 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association (3):1-22.
    The topic of fake news has received increased attention from philosophers since the term became a favorite of politicians (Habgood-Coote 2016; Dentith 2016). Notably missing from the conversation, however, is a discussion of fake news and conspiracy theory media as a market. This paper will take as its starting point the account of noxious markets put forward by Debra Satz (2010), and will argue that there is a pro tanto moral reason to restrict the market for fake news. Specifically, we (...)
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  • Epistemic Courage.Jonathan Ichikawa - 2024 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Epistemic Courage is a timely and thought-provoking exploration of the ethics of belief, which shows why epistemology is no mere academic abstraction - the question of what to believe couldn't be more urgent. Jonathan Ichikawa argues that a skeptical, negative bias about belief is connected to a conservative bias that reinforces the status quo.
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  • Environmental Epistemology.Dallas Amico-Korby, Maralee Harrell & David Danks - 2024 - Synthese 203 (81):1-24.
    We argue that there is a large class of questions—specifically questions about how to epistemically evaluate environments that currently available epistemic theories are not well-suited for answering, precisely because these questions are not about the epistemic state of particular agents or groups. For example, if we critique Facebook for being conducive to the spread of misinformation, then we are not thereby critiquing Facebook for being irrational, or lacking knowledge, or failing to testify truthfully. Instead, we are saying something about the (...)
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  • Culture and Cognitive Science.Andreas De Block & Daniel Kelly - 2022 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Human behavior and thought often exhibit a familiar pattern of within group similarity and between group difference. Many of these patterns are attributed to cultural differences. For much of the history of its investigation into behavior and thought, however, cognitive science has been disproportionately focused on uncovering and explaining the more universal features of human minds—or the universal features of minds in general. -/- This entry charts out the ways in which this has changed over recent decades. It sketches the (...)
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  • Scientific polarization.Cailin O’Connor & James Owen Weatherall - 2017 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 8 (3):855-875.
    Contemporary societies are often “polarized”, in the sense that sub-groups within these societies hold stably opposing beliefs, even when there is a fact of the matter. Extant models of polarization do not capture the idea that some beliefs are true and others false. Here we present a model, based on the network epistemology framework of Bala and Goyal, 784–811 1998), in which polarization emerges even though agents gather evidence about their beliefs, and true belief yields a pay-off advantage. As we (...)
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  • People, posts, and platforms: reducing the spread of online toxicity by contextualizing content and setting norms.Isaac Record & Boaz Miller - 2022 - Asian Journal of Philosophy 1 (2):1-19.
    We present a novel model of individual people, online posts, and media platforms to explain the online spread of epistemically toxic content such as fake news and suggest possible responses. We argue that a combination of technical features, such as the algorithmically curated feed structure, and social features, such as the absence of stable social-epistemic norms of posting and sharing in social media, is largely responsible for the unchecked spread of epistemically toxic content online. Sharing constitutes a distinctive communicative act, (...)
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  • Sharing (mis) information on social networking sites. An exploration of the norms for distributing content authored by others.Lavinia Marin - 2021 - Ethics and Information Technology 23 (3):363-372.
    This article explores the norms that govern regular users’ acts of sharing content on social networking sites. Many debates on how to counteract misinformation on Social Networking Sites focus on the epistemic norms of testimony, implicitly assuming that the users’ acts of sharing should fall under the same norms as those for posting original content. I challenge this assumption by proposing a non-epistemic interpretation of (mis) information sharing on social networking sites which I construe as infrastructures for forms of life (...)
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  • Virtues for agents in directed social networks.Mark Alfano - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):8423-8442.
    In the age of the Internet, people have increased access to information along multiple dimensions. It might seem that we are on our way to an epistemic utopia in which we spend less time and effort on basic cognitive tasks while devoting more time and effort to complex deliberation. However, though there are many accurate sources on the Internet, they must be sifted from the spammers, concern trolls, practical jokers, conspiracy theorists, counterintelligence sock-puppets, and outright liars who also proliferate online. (...)
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  • To Be Scientific Is To Be Communist.Liam Kofi Bright & Remco Heesen - 2023 - Social Epistemology 37 (3):249-258.
    What differentiates scientific research from non-scientific inquiry? Philosophers addressing this question have typically been inspired by the exalted social place and intellectual achievements of science. They have hence tended to point to some epistemic virtue or methodological feature of science that sets it apart. Our discussion on the other hand is motivated by the case of commercial research, which we argue is distinct from (and often epistemically inferior to) academic research. We consider a deflationary view in which science refers to (...)
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  • (2 other versions)How to Beat Science and Influence People: Policymakers and Propaganda in Epistemic Networks.James Owen Weatherall, Cailin O’Connor & Justin P. Bruner - 2018 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 71 (4):1157-1186.
    In their recent book, Oreskes and Conway describe the ‘tobacco strategy’, which was used by the tobacco industry to influence policymakers regarding the health risks of tobacco products. The strategy involved two parts, consisting of promoting and sharing independent research supporting the industry’s preferred position and funding additional research, but selectively publishing the results. We introduce a model of the tobacco strategy, and use it to argue that both prongs of the strategy can be extremely effective—even when policymakers rationally update (...)
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  • (1 other version)Conformity in scientific networks.Cailin O’Connor & James Owen Weatherall - 2020 - Synthese 198 (8):7257-7278.
    Scientists are generally subject to social pressures, including pressures to conform with others in their communities, that affect achievement of their epistemic goals. Here we analyze a network epistemology model in which agents, all else being equal, prefer to take actions that conform with those of their neighbors. This preference for conformity interacts with the agents’ beliefs about which of two (or more) possible actions yields the better result. We find a range of possible outcomes, including stable polarization in belief (...)
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  • (3 other versions)Social epistemology.Alvin I. Goldman - 2001 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Social epistemology is the study of the social dimensions of knowledge or information. There is little consensus, however, on what the term "knowledge" comprehends, what is the scope of the "social", or what the style or purpose of the study should be. According to some writers, social epistemology should retain the same general mission as classical epistemology, revamped in the recognition that classical epistemology was too individualistic. According to other writers, social epistemology should be a more radical departure from classical (...)
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  • Quasi-Metacognitive Machines: Why We Don’t Need Morally Trustworthy AI and Communicating Reliability is Enough.John Dorsch & Ophelia Deroy - 2024 - Philosophy and Technology 37 (2):1-21.
    Many policies and ethical guidelines recommend developing “trustworthy AI”. We argue that developing morally trustworthy AI is not only unethical, as it promotes trust in an entity that cannot be trustworthy, but it is also unnecessary for optimal calibration. Instead, we show that reliability, exclusive of moral trust, entails the appropriate normative constraints that enable optimal calibration and mitigate the vulnerability that arises in high-stakes hybrid decision-making environments, without also demanding, as moral trust would, the anthropomorphization of AI and thus (...)
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  • Theory and observation in science.Jim Bogen - 2009 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Scientists obtain a great deal of the evidence they use by observingnatural and experimentally generated objects and effects. Much of thestandard philosophical literature on this subject comes from20th century logical positivists and empiricists, theirfollowers, and critics who embraced their issues and accepted some oftheir assumptions even as they objected to specific views. Theirdiscussions of observational evidence tend to focus on epistemologicalquestions about its role in theory testing. This entry follows theirlead even though observational evidence also plays important andphilosophically interesting roles (...)
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  • The social dimensions of scientific knowledge.Helen Longino - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • (1 other version)Conformity in scientific networks.James Owen Weatherall & Cailin O’Connor - 2018 - Synthese:1-22.
    Scientists are generally subject to social pressures, including pressures to conform with others in their communities, that affect achievement of their epistemic goals. Here we analyze a network epistemology model in which agents, all else being equal, prefer to take actions that conform with those of their neighbors. This preference for conformity interacts with the agents’ beliefs about which of two possible actions yields the better result. We find a range of possible outcomes, including stable polarization in belief and action. (...)
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  • Public engagement and argumentation in science.Silvia Ivani & Catarina Dutilh Novaes - 2022 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 12 (3):1-29.
    Public engagement is one of the fundamental pillars of the European programme for research and innovation _Horizon 2020_. The programme encourages engagement that not only fosters science education and dissemination, but also promotes two-way dialogues between scientists and the public at various stages of research. Establishing such dialogues between different groups of societal actors is seen as crucial in order to attain epistemic as well as social desiderata at the intersection between science and society. However, whether these dialogues can actually (...)
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  • Endogenous epistemic factionalization.James Owen Weatherall & Cailin O’Connor - 2020 - Synthese 198 (Suppl 25):6179-6200.
    Why do people who disagree about one subject tend to disagree about other subjects as well? In this paper, we introduce a model to explore this phenomenon of ‘epistemic factionization’. Agents attempt to discover the truth about multiple propositions by testing the world and sharing evidence gathered. But agents tend to mistrust evidence shared by those who do not hold similar beliefs. This mistrust leads to the endogenous emergence of factions of agents with multiple, highly correlated, polarized beliefs.
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  • How should we promote transient diversity in science?Jingyi Wu & Cailin O’Connor - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-24.
    Diversity of practice is widely recognized as crucial to scientific progress. If all scientists perform the same tests in their research, they might miss important insights that other tests would yield. If all scientists adhere to the same theories, they might fail to explore other options which, in turn, might be superior. But the mechanisms that lead to this sort of diversity can also generate epistemic harms when scientific communities fail to reach swift consensus on successful theories. In this paper, (...)
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  • The Dynamics of Retraction in Epistemic Networks.Travis LaCroix, Anders Geil & Cailin O’Connor - 2021 - Philosophy of Science 88 (3):415-438.
    Sometimes retracted or refuted scientific information is used and propagated long after it is understood to be misleading. Likewise, retracted news items may spread and persist, despite being publi...
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  • Skepticism and the Digital Information Environment.Matthew Carlson - 2021 - SATS 22 (2):149-167.
    Deepfakes are audio, video, or still-image digital artifacts created by the use of artificial intelligence technology, as opposed to traditional means of recording. Because deepfakes can look and sound much like genuine digital recordings, they have entered the popular imagination as sources of serious epistemic problems for us, as we attempt to navigate the increasingly treacherous digital information environment of the internet. In this paper, I attempt to clarify what epistemic problems deepfakes pose and why they pose these problems, by (...)
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  • The Problem with Disagreement on Social Media: Moral not Epistemic.Elizabeth Edenberg - 2021 - In Elizabeth Edenberg & Michael Hannon (eds.), Political Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Intractable political disagreements threaten to fracture the common ground upon which we can build a political community. The deepening divisions in society are partly fueled by the ways social media has shaped political engagement. Social media allows us to sort ourselves into increasingly likeminded groups, consume information from different sources, and end up in polarized and insular echo chambers. To solve this, many argue for various ways of cultivating more responsible epistemic agency. This chapter argues that this epistemic lens does (...)
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  • Towards a Critical Social Epistemology of Social Media.Joshua Habgood-Coote - 2025 - In Jennifer Lackey & Aidan McGlynn (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Social Epistemology. New York, NY, United States of America: 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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  • Probability without Tears.Julia Staffel - 2023 - Teaching Philosophy 46 (1):65-84.
    This paper is about teaching probability to students of philosophy who don’t aim to do primarily formal work in their research. These students are unlikely to seek out classes about probability or formal epistemology for various reasons, for example because they don’t realize that this knowledge would be useful for them or because they are intimidated by the material. However, most areas of philosophy now contain debates that incorporate probability, and basic knowledge of it is essential even for philosophers whose (...)
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  • Fake news, conceptual engineering, and linguistic resistance: reply to Pepp, Michaelson and Sterken, and Brown.Joshua Habgood-Coote - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 65 (4):488-516.
    ABSTRACT In Habgood-Coote : 1033–1065) I argued that we should abandon ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’, on the grounds that these terms do not have stable public meanings, are unnecessary, and function as vehicles for propaganda. Jessica Pepp, Eliot Michaelson, and Rachel Sterken and Étienne Brown : 144–154) have raised worries about my case for abandonment, recommending that we continue using ‘fake news’. In this paper, I respond to these worries. I distinguish more clearly between theoretical and political reasons for abandoning (...)
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  • The preference for belief, issue polarization, and echo chambers.Bert Baumgaertner & Florian Justwan - 2022 - Synthese 200 (5):1-27.
    Some common explanations of issue polarization and echo chambers rely on social or cognitive mechanisms of exclusion. Accordingly, suggested interventions like “be more open-minded” target these mechanisms: avoid epistemic bubbles and don’t discount contrary information. Contrary to such explanations, we show how a much weaker mechanism—the preference for belief—can produce issue polarization in epistemic communities with little to no mechanisms of exclusion. We present a network model that demonstrates how a dynamic interaction between the preference for belief and common structures (...)
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  • On the Harms of Agnotological Practices and How to Address Them.Inmaculada de Melo-Martín - 2023 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 36 (3):211-228.
    Although science is our most reliable producer of knowledge, it can also be used to create ignorance, unjustified doubt, and misinformation. In doing so, agnotological practices result not only in epistemic harms but also in social ones. A way to prevent or minimise such harms is to impede these ignorance-producing practices. In this paper, I explore various challenges to such a proposal. I first argue that reliably identifying agnotological practices in a way that permits the prevention of relevant harms is (...)
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  • Culture and cognitive science.Jesse Prinz - forthcoming - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Defining Fake News.Glenn Https://Orcidorg Anderau - 2021 - Kriterion – Journal of Philosophy 35 (3):197-215.
    Fake news is a worrying phenomenon which is growing increasingly widespread, partly because of the ease with which it is disseminated online. Combating the spread of fake news requires a clear understanding of the nature of fake news. However, the use of the term in everyday language is heterogenous and has no fixed meaning. Despite increasing philosophical attention to the topic, there is no consensus on the correct definition of “fake news” within philosophy either. This paper aims to bring clarity (...)
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  • Against Publishing Without Belief: Fake News, Misinformation, and Perverse Publishing Incentives.Rima Basu - forthcoming - In Sanford C. Goldberg & Mark Walker (eds.), Attitude in Philosophy. Oxford University Press.
    The problem of fake news and the spread of misinformation has garnered a lot of attention in recent years. The incentives and norms that give rise to the problem, however, are not unique to journalism. Insofar as academics and journalists are working towards the same goal, i.e., publication, they are both under pressures that pervert. This chapter has two aims. First, to integrate conversations in philosophy of science, epistemology, and metaphilosophy to draw out the publishing incentives that promote analogous problems (...)
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  • (1 other version)Powerful Deceivers and Public Reason Liberalism: An Argument for Externalization.Sean Donahue - 2021 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 1 (1):1-18.
    Public reason liberals claim that legitimate rules must be justifiable to diverse perspectives. This Public Justification Principle threatens that failing to justify rules to reprehensible agents makes them illegitimate. Although public reason liberals have replies to this objection, they cannot avoid the challenge of powerful deceivers. Powerful deceivers trick people who are purportedly owed public justification into considering otherwise good rules unjustified. Avoiding this challenge requires discounting some failures of justification according to what caused people’s beliefs. I offer a conception (...)
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  • A Common-Sense Pragmatic Theory of Truth.John Capps - 2020 - Philosophia 48 (2):463-481.
    Truth is a fundamental philosophical concept that, despite its common and everyday use, has resisted common-sense formulations. At this point, one may legitimately wonder if there even is a common-sense notion of truth or what it could look like. In response, I propose here a common-sense account of truth based on four “truisms” that set a baseline for how to go about building an account of truth. Drawing on both ordinary language philosophy and contemporary pragmatic approaches to truth, I defend (...)
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  • The Less Said The Better: Dewey, Neurath, and Mid-Century Theories of Truth.John Capps - 2022 - Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 104 (1):164-191.
    John Dewey’s theory of truth is widely viewed as proposing to substitute “warranted assertibility” for “truth,” a proposal that has faced serious objections since the late 1930s. By examining Dewey’s theory in its historical context – and, in particular, by drawing parallels with Otto Neurath’s concurrent attempts to develop a non-correspondence, non-formal theory of truth – I aim to shed light on Dewey’s underlying objectives. Dewey and Neurath were well-known to each other and, as their writing and correspondence make clear, (...)
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  • Arational belief convergence.Charles Lassiter - 2019 - Synthese 198 (7):6329-6350.
    This model explores consensus among agents in a population in terms of two properties. The first is a probability of belief change. This value indicates how likely agents are to change their mind in interactions. The other is the size of the agents audience: the proportion of the population the agent has access to at any given time. In all instances, the agents converge on a single belief, although the agents are arational. I argue that this generates a skeptical hypothesis: (...)
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  • The Humility Heuristic, or: People Worth Trusting Admit to What They Don’t Know.Mattias Skipper - 2020 - Social Epistemology 35 (3):323-336.
    People don't always speak the truth. When they don't, we do better not to trust them. Unfortunately, that's often easier said than done. People don't usually wear a ‘Not to be trusted!’ badge on their sleeves, which lights up every time they depart from the truth. Given this, what can we do to figure out whom to trust, and whom not? My aim in this paper is to offer a partial answer to this question. I propose a heuristic—the “Humility Heuristic”—which (...)
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  • No-Regret Learning Supports Voters’ Competence.Petr Spelda, Vit Stritecky & John Symons - 2024 - Social Epistemology 38 (5):543-559.
    Procedural justifications of democracy emphasize inclusiveness and respect and by doing so come into conflict with instrumental justifications that depend on voters’ competence. This conflict raises questions about jury theorems and makes their standing in democratic theory contested. We show that a type of no-regret learning called meta-induction can help to satisfy the competence assumption without excluding voters or diverse opinion leaders on an a priori basis. Meta-induction assigns weights to opinion leaders based on their past predictive performance to determine (...)
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  • Optimism for Naturalized Social Metaphysics: A Reply to Hawley.Daniel Saunders - 2019 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 50 (2):138-160.
    Metaphysics has undergone two major innovations in recent decades. First, naturalistic metaphysicians have argued that our best science provides an important source of evidence for metaphysical theories. Second, social metaphysicians have begun to explore the nature of social entities such as groups, institutions, and social categories. Surprisingly, these projects have largely kept their distance from one another. Katherine Hawley has recently argued that, unlike the natural sciences, the social sciences are not sufficiently successful to provide evidence about the metaphysical nature (...)
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  • Diversity and homophily in social networks.Sina Fazelpour & Hannah Rubin - unknown
    Diversity of social identities can improve the performance of groups through varied cognitive and communicative pathways. Recently, research efforts have focused on identifying when we should expect to see these potential benefits in real-world settings. While most research to date has studied this topic at individual and interpersonal levels, in this paper, we develop an agent-based model to explore how various aspects of homophily, the tendency of individuals to associate with similar others, affects performance at a larger scale. Study 1 (...)
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  • (3 other versions)Social epistemology.Alvin Goldman - 2006 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Social epistemology is the study of the social dimensions of knowledge or information. There is little consensus, however, on what the term "knowledge" comprehends, what is the scope of the "social", or what the style or purpose of the study should be. According to some writers, social epistemology should retain the same general mission as classical epistemology, revamped in the recognition that classical epistemology was too individualistic. According to other writers, social epistemology should be a more radical departure from classical (...)
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  • The wisdom-of-crowds: an efficient, philosophically-validated, social epistemological network profiling toolkit.Colin Klein, Marc Cheong, Marinus Ferreira, Emily Sullivan & Mark Alfano - 2023 - In Hocine Cherifi, Rosario Nunzio Mantegna, Luis M. Rocha, Chantal Cherifi & Salvatore Miccichè (eds.), Complex Networks and Their Applications XI: Proceedings of The Eleventh International Conference on Complex Networks and Their Applications: COMPLEX NETWORKS 2022 — Volume 1. Springer.
    The epistemic position of an agent often depends on their position in a larger network of other agents who provide them with information. In general, agents are better off if they have diverse and independent sources. Sullivan et al. [19] developed a method for quantitatively characterizing the epistemic position of individuals in a network that takes into account both diversity and independence; and presented a proof-of-concept, closed-source implementation on a small graph derived from Twitter data [19]. This paper reports on (...)
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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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  • Schlechte Nachrichten: Fake News in Politik und Öffentlichkeit.Romy Jaster & David Lanius - 2020 - In Michael Harnischmacher, Elfi Heinke, Ralf Hohlfeld & Michael Sengl (eds.), Fake News und Desinformation: Herausforderungen für die vernetzte Gesellschaft und die empirische Forschung. Baden-Baden: Nomos. pp. 245-267.
    Das Funktionieren moderner Demokratien hängt von der Informiertheit der Öffentlichkeit ab. Durch den Erfolg von Fake News und post-faktischer Politik ist die Informiertheit der Öffentlichkeit jedoch in Gefahr, zumal parallele Öffentlichkeiten zunehmend sogenannte alternative analoge und digitale Medienangebote nutzen. In diesem Beitrag untersuchen wir, wie sich Fake News verbreiten und Einfluss auf Öffentlichkeit und Politik gewinnen. Dazu analysieren wir das Zusammenspiel einer Reihe kognitiver Verzerrungen mit der Funktionsweise sozialer Medien sowie die strukturellen Anreize, die der digitalisierte Medienkapitalismus setzt. Beides spielt (...)
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  • Hijacking Epistemic Agency - How Emerging Technologies Threaten our Wellbeing as Knowers.John Dorsch - 2022 - Proceedings of the 2022 Aaai/Acm Conference on Ai, Ethics, and Society 1.
    The aim of this project to expose the reasons behind the pandemic of misinformation (henceforth, PofM) by examining the enabling conditions of epistemic agency and the emerging technologies that threaten it. I plan to research the emotional origin of epistemic agency, i.e. on the origin of our capacity to acquire justification for belief, as well as on the significance this emotional origin has for our lives as epistemic agents in our so-called Misinformation Age. This project has three objectives. First, I (...)
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  • Informational Quality Labeling on Social Media: In Defense of a Social Epistemology Strategy.John P. Wihbey, Matthew Kopec & Ronald Sandler - manuscript
    Social media platforms have been rapidly increasing the number of informational labels they are appending to user-generated content in order to indicate the disputed nature of messages or to provide context. The rise of this practice constitutes an important new chapter in social media governance, as companies are often choosing this new “middle way” between a laissez-faire approach and more drastic remedies such as removing or downranking content. Yet information labeling as a practice has, thus far, been mostly tactical, reactive, (...)
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  • Developing a Model of Groupstrapping: A Response to Baumgaertner and Nguyen.Kenneth Boyd - 2019 - Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 8 (8):32-39.
    In their responses to my article “Epistemically Pernicious Groups and the Groupstrapping Problem” (Boyd, 2018), Bert Baumgaertner (“Groupstrapping, Boostrapping, and Oops-strapping: A Reply to Boyd”) and C. Thi Nguyen (“Group-strapping, Bubble, or Echo Chamber?”) have raised interesting questions and opened lines of inquiry regarding my discussion of what I hope to be a way to help make sense of how members of groups can continue to hold beliefs that are greatly outweighed by countervailing evidence (e.g. antivaxxers, climate-change deniers, etc.). Here (...)
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  • Influence theory.Nicholas Rescher & Patrick Grim - 2023 - Synthese 201 (6):1-53.
    Influence theory is a systematic study of formal models of the communicative influence of one person or group of people on another person or group. In that sense influence theory is an overarching philosophical discipline that includes aspects of decision theory and game theory as sub-disciplines as well as established models of de facto segregation, cultural change, opinion polarization, and epistemic networks. What we offer here is a structured outline of formal results that have been scattered across a range of (...)
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  • Desinformação, negacionismo e a pandemia.Ernesto Perini-Santos - 2022 - Filosofia Unisinos 23 (1):1-15.
    Para qualquer tema sobre o qual não se é especialista, deve-se deferir a quem sabe mais. A deferência aos outros entra em conflito com expectativas de autonomia epistêmica e de divisão democrática do saber. Uma solução para esta tensão é ceder a estas expectativas, o que é equivalente a abandonar o conhecimento. Uma outra solução consiste em restringir seus efeitos a temas sobre os quais temos algum interesse prático. Esta proposta é instável, porque o interesse prático pode se estender a (...)
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  • What We Talk about When We Talk about Truth: Dewey, Wittgenstein, and the Pragmatic Test.John Capps - 2021 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 29 (2):159-180.
    Pragmatic theories of truth need to pass the pragmatic test: they need to make a difference. Unfortunately, defenders of the pragmatic theory have rarely applied this test. I argue that a Deweyan pragmatic account of truth passes the test by identifying the political and epistemic dangers of certain types of social networks that create a durable consensus around false beliefs. To better understand Dewey’s account of truth I propose an excursion through Wittgenstein’s later views on knowledge and certainty.
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  • What Kind of Explanations Do We Get from Agent-Based Models of Scientific Inquiry?Dunja Šešelja - 2022 - In Tomas Marvan, Hanne Andersen, Hasok Chang, Benedikt Löwe & Ivo Pezlar (eds.), Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science and Technology. London: College Publications.
    Agent-based modelling has become a well-established method in social epistemology and philosophy of science but the question of what kind of explanations these models provide remains largely open. This paper is dedicated to this issue. It starts by distinguishing between real-world phenomena, real-world possibilities, and logical possibilities as different kinds of targets which agent-based models can represent. I argue that models representing the former two kinds provide how-actually explanations or causal how-possibly explanations. In contrast, models that represent logical possibilities provide (...)
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