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  1. Meta-Induction and the Wisdom of Crowds.Paul D. Thorn & Gerhard Schurz - 2012 - Analyse & Kritik 34 (2):339-366.
    Meta-induction, in its various forms, is an imitative prediction method, where the prediction methods and the predictions of other agents are imitated to the extent that those methods or agents have proven successful in the past. In past work, Schurz demonstrated the optimality of meta-induction as a method for predicting unknown events and quantities. However, much recent discussion, along with formal and empirical work, on the Wisdom of Crowds has extolled the virtue of diverse and independent judgment as essential to (...)
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  • Explaining the Success of Induction.Igor Douven - 2023 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 74 (2):381-404.
    It is undeniable that inductive reasoning has brought us much good. At least since Hume, however, philosophers have wondered how to justify our reliance on induction. In important recent work, Schurz points out that philosophers have been wrongly assuming that justifying induction is tantamount to showing induction to be reliable. According to him, to justify our reliance on induction, it is enough to show that induction is optimal. His optimality approach consists of two steps: an analytic argument for meta-induction (that (...)
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  • The meta-inductive justification of induction.Tom F. Sterkenburg - 2020 - Episteme 17 (4):519-541.
    I evaluate Schurz's proposed meta-inductive justification of induction, a refinement of Reichenbach's pragmatic justification that rests on results from the machine learning branch of prediction with expert advice. My conclusion is that the argument, suitably explicated, comes remarkably close to its grand aim: an actual justification of induction. This finding, however, is subject to two main qualifications, and still disregards one important challenge. The first qualification concerns the empirical success of induction. Even though, I argue, Schurz's argument does not need (...)
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  • Optimality justifications: new foundations for foundation-oriented epistemology.Gerhard Schurz - 2018 - Synthese 195 (9):3877-3897.
    In this paper a new conception of foundation-oriented epistemology is developed. The major challenge for foundation-oriented justifications consists in the problem of stopping the justificational regress without taking recourse to dogmatic assumptions or circular reasoning. Two alternative accounts that attempt to circumvent this problem, coherentism and externalism, are critically discussed and rejected as unsatisfactory. It is argued that optimality arguments are a new type of foundation-oriented justification that can stop the justificational regress. This is demonstrated on the basis of a (...)
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  • Robustness, Diversity of Evidence, and Probabilistic Independence.Jonah N. Schupbach - 2015 - In Uskali Mäki, Stéphanie Ruphy, Gerhard Schurz & Ioannis Votsis (eds.), Recent Developments in the Philosophy of Science. Cham: Springer. pp. 305-316.
    In robustness analysis, hypotheses are supported to the extent that a result proves robust, and a result is robust to the extent that we detect it in diverse ways. But what precise sense of diversity is at work here? In this paper, I show that the formal explications of evidential diversity most often appealed to in work on robustness – which all draw in one way or another on probabilistic independence – fail to shed light on the notion of diversity (...)
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  • Wise Crowds, Clever Meta-Inductivists.Paul D. Thorn - 2015 - In Uskali Mäki, Stéphanie Ruphy, Gerhard Schurz & Ioannis Votsis (eds.), Recent Developments in the Philosophy of Science. Cham: Springer. pp. 71-86.
    Formal and empirical work on the Wisdom of Crowds has extolled the virtue of diverse and independent judgment as essential to the maintenance of ‘wise crowds’. In other words, com-munication and imitation among members of a group may have the negative effect of decreasing the aggregate wisdom of the group. In contrast, it is demonstrable that certain meta-inductive methods provide optimal means for predicting unknown events. Such meta-inductive methods are essentially imitative, where the predictions of other agents are imitated to (...)
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  • The Metainductive Justification of Induction: The Pool of Strategies.Tom F. Sterkenburg - 2019 - Philosophy of Science 86 (5):981-992.
    This article poses a challenge to Schurz’s proposed metainductive justification of induction. It is argued that Schurz’s argument requires a notion of optimality that can deal with an expanding pool of prediction strategies.
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  • TTB vs. Franklin's Rule in Environments of Different Redundancy.Gerhard Schurz & Paul D. Thorn - 2014 - Frontiers in Psychology 5:15-16.
    This addendum presents results that confound some commonly made claims about the sorts of environments in which the performance of TTB exceeds that of Franklin's rule, and vice versa.
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  • Meta-induction in epistemic networks and the social spread of knowledge.Gerhard Schurz - 2012 - Episteme 9 (2):151-170.
    Indicators of the reliability of informants are essential for social learning in a society that is initially dominated by ignorance or superstition. Such reliability indicators should be based on meta-induction over records of truth-success. This is the major claim of this paper, and it is supported in two steps. One needs a non-circular justification of the method of meta-induction, as compared to other learning methods. An approach to this problem has been developed in earlier papers and is reported in section (...)
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  • Prediction with expert advice applied to the problem of prediction with expert advice.Daniel A. Herrmann - 2022 - Synthese 200 (4):1-24.
    We often need to have beliefs about things on which we are not experts. Luckily, we often have access to expert judgements on such topics. But how should we form our beliefs on the basis of expert opinion when experts conflict in their judgments? This is the core of the novice/2-expert problem in social epistemology. A closely related question is important in the context of policy making: how should a policy maker use expert judgments when making policy in domains in (...)
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  • The ecological rationality of explanatory reasoning.Igor Douven - 2020 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 79 (C):1-14.
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  • The Revenge of Ecological Rationality: Strategy-Selection by Meta-Induction Within Changing Environments.Gerhard Schurz & Paul D. Thorn - 2016 - Minds and Machines 26 (1-2):31-59.
    According to the paradigm of adaptive rationality, successful inference and prediction methods tend to be local and frugal. As a complement to work within this paradigm, we investigate the problem of selecting an optimal combination of prediction methods from a given toolbox of such local methods, in the context of changing environments. These selection methods are called meta-inductive strategies, if they are based on the success-records of the toolbox-methods. No absolutely optimal MI strategy exists—a fact that we call the “revenge (...)
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  • Does Meta-induction Justify Induction: Or Maybe Something Else?J. Brian Pitts - 2023 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 54 (3):393-419.
    According to the Feigl–Reichenbach–Salmon–Schurz pragmatic justification of induction, no predictive method is guaranteed or even likely to work for predicting the future; but if anything will work, induction will work—at least when induction is employed at the meta-level of predictive methods in light of their track records. One entertains a priori all manner of esoteric prediction methods, and is said to arrive a posteriori at the conclusion, based on the actual past, that object-level induction is optimal. Schurz’s refinements largely solve (...)
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  • The No Free Lunch Theorem: Bad News for (white's Account of) the Problem of Induction.Gerhard Schurz - 2021 - Episteme 18 (1):31-45.
    White (2015) proposes an a priori justification of the reliability of inductive prediction methods based on his thesis of induction-friendliness. It asserts that there are by far more induction-friendly event sequences than induction-unfriendly event sequences. In this paper I contrast White's thesis with the famous no free lunch (NFL) theorem. I explain two versions of this theorem, the strong NFL theorem applying to binary and the weak NFL theorem applying to real-valued predictions. I show that both versions refute the thesis (...)
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  • Truth tracking performance of social networks: how connectivity and clustering can make groups less competent.Ulrike Hahn, Jens Ulrik Hansen & Erik J. Olsson - 2020 - Synthese 197 (4):1511-1541.
    Our beliefs and opinions are shaped by others, making our social networks crucial in determining what we believe to be true. Sometimes this is for the good because our peers help us form a more accurate opinion. Sometimes it is for the worse because we are led astray. In this context, we address via agent-based computer simulations the extent to which patterns of connectivity within our social networks affect the likelihood that initially undecided agents in a network converge on a (...)
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