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  1. A Simulation Approach to Veritistic Social Epistemology.Erik J. Olsson - 2011 - Episteme 8 (2):127-143.
    In a seminal book, Alvin I. Goldman outlines a theory for how to evaluate social practices with respect to their “veritistic value”, i.e., their tendency to promote the acquisition of true beliefs in society. In the same work, Goldman raises a number of serious worries for his account. Two of them concern the possibility of determining the veritistic value of a practice in a concrete case because we often don't know what beliefs are actually true, and even if we did, (...)
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  • 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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  • Meta-Induction and Social Epistemology: Computer Simulations of Prediction Games.Gerhard Schurz - 2009 - Episteme 6 (2):200-220.
    The justification of induction is of central significance for cross-cultural social epistemology. Different ‘epistemological cultures’ do not only differ in their beliefs, but also in their belief-forming methods and evaluation standards. For an objective comparison of different methods and standards, one needs (meta-)induction over past successes. A notorious obstacle to the problem of justifying induction lies in the fact that the success of object-inductive prediction methods (i.e., methods applied at the level of events) can neither be shown to be universally (...)
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  • Knowledge in a social world.Alvin I. Goldman - 1991 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    Knowledge in a Social World offers a philosophy for the information age. Alvin Goldman explores new frontiers by creating a thoroughgoing social epistemology, moving beyond the traditional focus on solitary knowers. Against the tides of postmodernism and social constructionism Goldman defends the integrity of truth and shows how to promote it by well-designed forms of social interaction. From science to education, from law to democracy, he shows why and how public institutions should seek knowledge-enhancing practices. The result is a bold, (...)
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  • (1 other version)A nonpragmatic vindication of probabilism.James M. Joyce - 1998 - Philosophy of Science 65 (4):575-603.
    The pragmatic character of the Dutch book argument makes it unsuitable as an "epistemic" justification for the fundamental probabilist dogma that rational partial beliefs must conform to the axioms of probability. To secure an appropriately epistemic justification for this conclusion, one must explain what it means for a system of partial beliefs to accurately represent the state of the world, and then show that partial beliefs that violate the laws of probability are invariably less accurate than they could be otherwise. (...)
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  • Betting on Theories.Patrick Maher - 1993 - Cambridge, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.
    This book is a major contribution to decision theory, focusing on the question of when it is rational to accept scientific theories. The author examines both Bayesian decision theory and confirmation theory, refining and elaborating the views of Ramsey and Savage. He argues that the most solid foundation for confirmation theory is to be found in decision theory, and he provides a decision-theoretic derivation of principles for how many probabilities should be revised over time. Professor Maher defines a notion of (...)
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  • We ought to agree: A consequence of repairing Goldman's group scoring rule.Matthew Kopec - 2012 - Episteme 9 (2):101-114.
    In Knowledge in a Social World, Alvin Goldman presents a framework to quantify the epistemic effects that various policies, procedures, and behaviors can have on a group of agents. In this essay, I show that the framework requires some modifications when applied to agents with credences. The required modifications carry with them an interesting consequence, namely, that any group whose members disagree can become more accurate by forming a consensus through averaging their credences. I sketch a way that this result (...)
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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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  • (1 other version)The law of group polarization.Cass Sunstein - 2002 - Journal of Political Philosophy 10 (2):175–195.
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  • Publish Late, Publish Rarely! : Network Density and Group Performance in Scientific Communication.Staffan Angere & Erik J. Olsson - 2017 - In Thomas Boyer-Kassem, Conor Mayo-Wilson & Michael Weisberg (eds.), Scientific Collaboration and Collective Knowledge. New York, USA: Oxford University Press.
    Research programs regularly compete to achieve the same goal, such as the discovery of the structure of DNA or the construction of a TEA laser. The more the competing programs share information, the faster the goal is likely to be reached, to society’s benefit. But the “priority rule”-the scientific norm according to which the first program to reach the goal in question must receive all the credit for the achievement-provides a powerful disincentive for programs to share information. How, then, is (...)
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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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  • Attitudes Toward Epistemic Risk and the Value of Experiments.Don Fallis - 2007 - Studia Logica 86 (2):215-246.
    Several different Bayesian models of epistemic utilities (see, e. g., [37], [24], [40], [46]) have been used to explain why it is rational for scientists to perform experiments. In this paper, I argue that a model-suggested independently by Patrick Maher [40] and Graham Oddie [46]-that assigns epistemic utility to degrees of belief in hypotheses provides the most comprehensive explanation. This is because this proper scoring rule (PSR) model captures a wider range of scientifically acceptable attitudes toward epistemic risk than the (...)
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  • Trust and the value of overconfidence: a Bayesian perspective on social network communication.Aron Vallinder & Erik J. Olsson - 2014 - Synthese 191 (9):1991-2007.
    The paper presents and defends a Bayesian theory of trust in social networks. In the first part of the paper, we provide justifications for the basic assumptions behind the model, and we give reasons for thinking that the model has plausible consequences for certain kinds of communication. In the second part of the paper we investigate the phenomenon of overconfidence. Many psychological studies have found that people think they are more reliable than they actually are. Using a simulation environment that (...)
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  • Truth Approximation, Social Epistemology, and Opinion Dynamics.Igor Douven & Christoph Kelp - 2011 - Erkenntnis (2):271-283.
    This paper highlights some connections between work on truth approximation and work in social epistemology, in particular work on peer disagreement. In some of the literature on truth approximation, questions have been addressed concerning the efficiency of research strategies for approximating the truth. So far, social aspects of research strategies have not received any attention in this context. Recent findings in the field of opinion dynamics suggest that this is a mistake. How scientists exchange and take into account information about (...)
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  • A Bayesian Simulation Model of Group Deliberation and Polarization.Erik J. Olsson - 2013 - Springer.
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  • The kind of group you want to belong to: Effects of group structure on group accuracy.Martin L. Jönsson, Ulrike Hahn & Erik J. Olsson - 2015 - Cognition 142 (C):191-204.
    There has been much interest in group judgment and the so-called 'wisdom of crowds'. In many real world contexts, members of groups not only share a dependence on external sources of information, but they also communicate with one another, thus introducing correlations among their responses that can diminish collective accuracy. This has long been known, but it has-to date-not been examined to what extent different kinds of communication networks may give rise to systematically different effects on accuracy. We argue that (...)
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  • Norms of assertion and communication in social networks.Erik J. Olsson & Aron Vallinder - 2013 - Synthese 190 (13):2557-2571.
    Epistemologists can be divided into two camps: those who think that nothing short of certainty or (subjective) probability 1 can warrant assertion and those who disagree with this claim. This paper addressed this issue by inquiring into the problem of setting the probability threshold required for assertion in such a way that that the social epistemic good is maximized, where the latter is taken to be the veritistic value in the sense of Goldman (Knowledge in a social world, 1999). We (...)
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  • Group polarization: a critical review and meta-analysis.Daniel Isenberg - 1986 - Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 50 (6):1141.
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  • The Bi-directional Relationship between Source Characteristics and Message Content.Peter J. Collins, Ulrike Hahn, Ylva von Gerber & Erik J. Olsson - 2015 - Frontiers in Psychology 9.
    Much of what we believe we know, we know through the testimony of others. While there has been long-standing evidence that people are sensitive to the characteristics of the sources of testimony, for example in the context of persuasion, researchers have only recently begun to explore the wider implications of source reliability considerations for the nature of our beliefs. Likewise, much remains to be established concerning what factors influence source reliability. In this paper, we examine, both theoretically and empirically, the (...)
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