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  1. On the acceptability of arguments and its fundamental role in nonmonotonic reasoning, logic programming and n-person games.Phan Minh Dung - 1995 - Artificial Intelligence 77 (2):321-357.
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  • The Epistemic Benefit of Transient Diversity.Kevin J. S. Zollman - 2010 - Erkenntnis 72 (1):17-35.
    There is growing interest in understanding and eliciting division of labor within groups of scientists. This paper illustrates the need for this division of labor through a historical example, and a formal model is presented to better analyze situations of this type. Analysis of this model reveals that a division of labor can be maintained in two different ways: by limiting information or by endowing the scientists with extreme beliefs. If both features are present however, cognitive diversity is maintained indefinitely, (...)
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  • Laudan's Progress and Its ProblemsProgress and Its Problems. Larry Laudan.Ernan McMullin - 1979 - Philosophy of Science 46 (4):623-644.
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  • Epistemic Landscapes and the Division of Cognitive Labor.Michael Weisberg & Ryan Muldoon - 2009 - Philosophy of Science 76 (2):225-252.
    Because of its complexity, contemporary scientific research is almost always tackled by groups of scientists, each of which works in a different part of a given research domain. We believe that understanding scientific progress thus requires understanding this division of cognitive labor. To this end, we present a novel agent-based model of scientific research in which scientists divide their labor to explore an unknown epistemic landscape. Scientists aim to climb uphill in this landscape, where elevation represents the significance of the (...)
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  • Robustness Analysis.Michael Weisberg - 2006 - Philosophy of Science 73 (5):730-742.
    Modelers often rely on robustness analysis, the search for predictions common to several independent models. Robustness analysis has been characterized and championed by Richard Levins and William Wimsatt, who see it as central to modern theoretical practice. The practice has also been severely criticized by Steven Orzack and Elliott Sober, who claim that it is a nonempirical form of confirmation, effective only under unusual circumstances. This paper addresses Orzack and Sober's criticisms by giving a new account of robustness analysis and (...)
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  • (1 other version)The communication structure of epistemic communities.Kevin J. S. Zollman - 2007 - Philosophy of Science 74 (5):574-587.
    Increasingly, epistemologists are becoming interested in social structures and their effect on epistemic enterprises, but little attention has been paid to the proper distribution of experimental results among scientists. This paper will analyze a model first suggested by two economists, which nicely captures one type of learning situation faced by scientists. The results of a computer simulation study of this model provide two interesting conclusions. First, in some contexts, a community of scientists is, as a whole, more reliable when its (...)
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  • (6 other versions)Structure of scientific revolutions, the (ch. 9 only).Thomas Kuhn - unknown
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  • Epistemic Landscapes, Optimal Search, and the Division of Cognitive Labor.Jason McKenzie Alexander, Johannes Himmelreich & Christopher Thompson - 2015 - Philosophy of Science 82 (3):424-453,.
    This article examines two questions about scientists’ search for knowledge. First, which search strategies generate discoveries effectively? Second, is it advantageous to diversify search strategies? We argue pace Weisberg and Muldoon, “Epistemic Landscapes and the Division of Cognitive Labor”, that, on the first question, a search strategy that deliberately seeks novel research approaches need not be optimal. On the second question, we argue they have not shown epistemic reasons exist for the division of cognitive labor, identifying the errors that led (...)
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  • The Epistemic Division of Labor Revisited.Johanna Thoma - 2015 - Philosophy of Science 82 (3):454-472.
    Some scientists are happy to follow in the footsteps of others; some like to explore novel approaches. It is tempting to think that herein lies an epistemic division of labor conducive to overall scientific progress: the latter point the way to fruitful areas of research, and the former more fully explore those areas. Weisberg and Muldoon’s model, however, suggests that it would be best if all scientists explored novel approaches. I argue that this is due to implausible modeling choices, and (...)
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  • (2 other versions)Robustness and Idealizations in Agent-Based Models of Scientific Interaction.Daniel Frey & Dunja Šešelja - 2019 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 71 (4):1411-1437.
    The article presents an agent-based model of scientific interaction aimed at examining how different degrees of connectedness of scientists impact their efficiency in knowledge acquisition. The model is built on the basis of Zollman’s ABM by changing some of its idealizing assumptions that concern the representation of the central notions underlying the model: epistemic success of the rivalling scientific theories, scientific interaction and the assessment in view of which scientists choose theories to work on. Our results suggest that whether and (...)
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  • Conservatism and the Scientific State of Nature.Erich Kummerfeld & Kevin J. S. Zollman - 2016 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 67 (4):1057-1076.
    Those who comment on modern scientific institutions are often quick to praise institutional structures that leave scientists to their own devices. These comments reveal an underlying presumption that scientists do best when left alone—when they operate in what we call the ‘scientific state of nature’. Through computer simulation, we challenge this presumption by illustrating an inefficiency that arises in the scientific state of nature. This inefficiency suggests that one cannot simply presume that science is most efficient when institutional control is (...)
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  • Value of cognitive diversity in science.Samuli Pöyhönen - 2017 - Synthese 194 (11):4519-4540.
    When should a scientific community be cognitively diverse? This article presents a model for studying how the heterogeneity of learning heuristics used by scientist agents affects the epistemic efficiency of a scientific community. By extending the epistemic landscapes modeling approach introduced by Weisberg and Muldoon, the article casts light on the micro-mechanisms mediating cognitive diversity, coordination, and problem-solving efficiency. The results suggest that social learning and cognitive diversity produce epistemic benefits only when the epistemic community is faced with problems of (...)
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  • What Is the Epistemic Function of Highly Idealized Agent-Based Models of Scientific Inquiry?Daniel Frey & Dunja Šešelja - 2018 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 48 (4):407-433.
    In this paper we examine the epistemic value of highly idealized agent-based models of social aspects of scientific inquiry. On the one hand, we argue that taking the results of such simulations as informative of actual scientific inquiry is unwarranted, at least for the class of models proposed in recent literature. Moreover, we argue that a weaker approach, which takes these models as providing only “how-possibly” explanations, does not help to improve their epistemic value. On the other hand, we suggest (...)
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  • Epistemic justification in the context of pursuit: a coherentist approach.Dunja Šešelja & Christian Straßer - 2014 - Synthese 191 (13):3111-3141.
    The aim of this paper is to offer an account of epistemic justification suitable for the context of theory pursuit, that is, for the context in which new scientific ideas, possibly incompatible with the already established theories, emerge and are pursued by scientists. We will frame our account paradigmatically on the basis of one of the influential systems of epistemic justification: Laurence Bonjour’s coherence theory of justification. The idea underlying our approach is to develop a set of criteria which indicate (...)
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  • Scientific Networks on Data Landscapes: Question Difficulty, Epistemic Success, and Convergence.Patrick Grim, Daniel J. Singer, Steven Fisher, Aaron Bramson, William J. Berger, Christopher Reade, Carissa Flocken & Adam Sales - 2013 - Episteme 10 (4):441-464.
    A scientific community can be modeled as a collection of epistemic agents attempting to answer questions, in part by communicating about their hypotheses and results. We can treat the pathways of scientific communication as a network. When we do, it becomes clear that the interaction between the structure of the network and the nature of the question under investigation affects epistemic desiderata, including accuracy and speed to community consensus. Here we build on previous work, both our own and others’, in (...)
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  • Epistemic effects of scientific interaction: approaching the question with an argumentative agent-based model.AnneMarie Borg, Daniel Frey, Dunja Šešelja & Christian Straßer - 2018 - Historical Social Research 43 (1):285-309.
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  • Indices of theory promise.Laurie Anne Whitt - 1992 - Philosophy of Science 59 (4):612-634.
    Figuring prominently in their decisions regarding which theories to pursue are scientists' appeals to the promise or lack of promise of those theories. Yet philosophy of science has had little to say about how one is to assess theory promise. This essay identifies several indices that might be consulted to determine whether or not a theory is promising and worthy of pursuit. Various historical examples of appeals to such indices are introduced.
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  • Threshold Phenomena in Epistemic Networks.Patrick Grim - 2006 - In Proceedings, AAAI Fall Symposium on Complex Adaptive Systems and the Threshold Effect. AAAI Press.
    A small consortium of philosophers has begun work on the implications of epistemic networks (Zollman 2008 and forthcoming; Grim 2006, 2007; Weisberg and Muldoon forthcoming), building on theoretical work in economics, computer science, and engineering (Bala and Goyal 1998, Kleinberg 2001; Amaral et. al., 2004) and on some experimental work in social psychology (Mason, Jones, and Goldstone, 2008). This paper outlines core philosophical results and extends those results to the specific question of thresholds. Epistemic maximization of certain types does show (...)
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  • Rationality and irrationality in the history of continental drift: Was the hypothesis of continental drift worthy of pursuit?Dunja Šešelja & Erik Weber - 2012 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 43 (1):147-159.
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  • Method Pluralism, Method Mismatch, & Method Bias.Adrian Currie & Shahar Avin - 2019 - Philosophers' Imprint 19.
    Pluralism about scientific method is more-or-less accepted, but the consequences have yet to be drawn out. Scientists adopt different methods in response to different epistemic situations: depending on the system they are interested in, the resources at their disposal, and so forth. If it is right that different methods are appropriate in different situations, then mismatches between methods and situations are possible. This is most likely to occur due to method bias: when we prefer a particular kind of method, despite (...)
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  • Abstract argumentation and explanation applied to scientific debates.Dunja Šešelja & Christian Straßer - 2013 - Synthese 190 (12):2195-2217.
    argumentation has been shown to be a powerful tool within many fields such as artificial intelligence, logic and legal reasoning. In this paper we enhance Dung’s well-known abstract argumentation framework with explanatory capabilities. We show that an explanatory argumentation framework (EAF) obtained in this way is a useful tool for the modeling of scientific debates. On the one hand, EAFs allow for the representation of explanatory and justificatory arguments constituting rivaling scientific views. On the other hand, different procedures for selecting (...)
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  • Examining Network Effects in an Argumentative Agent-Based Model of Scientific Inquiry.AnneMarie Borg, Daniel Frey, Dunja Šešelja & Christian Straßer - 2017 - In Alexandru Baltag, Jeremy Seligman & Tomoyuki Yamada, Logic, Rationality, and Interaction (LORI 2017, Sapporo, Japan). Springer. pp. 391--406.
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  • Preferential attachment and the search for successful theories.J. McKenzie Alexander - 2013 - Philosophy of Science 80 (5):769-782.
    Multiarm bandit problems have been used to model the selection of competing scientific theories by boundedly rational agents. In this paper, I define a variable-arm bandit problem, which allows the set of scientific theories to vary over time. I show that Roth-Erev reinforcement learning, which solves multiarm bandit problems in the limit, cannot solve this problem in a reasonable time. However, social learning via preferential attachment combined with individual reinforcement learning which discounts the past, does.
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  • Some lessons from simulations of scientific disagreements.Dunja Šešelja - 2019 - Synthese 198 (Suppl 25):6143-6158.
    This paper examines lessons obtained by means of simulations in the form of agent-based models about the norms that are to guide disagreeing scientists. I focus on two types of epistemic and methodological norms: norms that guide one’s attitude towards one’s own theory, and norms that guide one’s attitude towards the opponent’s theory. Concerning I look into ABMs that have been designed to examine the context of peer disagreement. Here I challenge the conclusion that the given ABMs provide a support (...)
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  • Sustaining a rational disagreement.Christoph Kelp & Igor Douven - 2011 - In Henk W. De Regt, Stephan Hartmann & Samir Okasha, EPSA Philosophy of Science: Amsterdam 2009. Springer. pp. 101--110.
    Much recent discussion in social epistemology has focussed on the question of whether peers can rationally sustain a disagreement. A growing number of social epistemologists hold that the answer is negative. We point to considerations from the history of science that favor rather the opposite answer. However, we also explain how the other position can appear intuitively attractive.
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  • Heuristic Reevaluation of the Bacterial Hypothesis of Peptic Ulcer Disease in the 1950s.Dunja Šešelja & Christian Straßer - 2014 - Acta Biotheoretica 62 (4):429-454.
    Throughout the first half of the twentieth century the research on peptic ulcer disease focused on two rivaling hypothesis: the “acidity” and the “bacterial” one. According to the received view, the latter was dismissed during the 1950s only to be revived with Warren’s and Marshall’s discovery of Helicobacter pylori in the 1980s. In this paper we investigate why the bacterial hypothesis was largely abandoned in the 1950s, and whether there were good epistemic reasons for its dismissal. Of special interest for (...)
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