22 found
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  1. Is Technology Value-Neutral?Boaz Miller - 2021 - Science, Technology, and Human Values 46 (1):53-80.
    According to the Value-Neutrality Thesis, technology is morally and politically neutral, neither good nor bad. A knife may be put to bad use to murder an innocent person or to good use to peel an apple for a starving person, but the knife itself is a mere instrument, not a proper subject for moral or political evaluation. While contemporary philosophers of technology widely reject the VNT, it remains unclear whether claims about values in technology are just a figure of speech (...)
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  2. When is consensus knowledge based? Distinguishing shared knowledge from mere agreement.Boaz Miller - 2013 - Synthese 190 (7):1293-1316.
    Scientific consensus is widely deferred to in public debates as a social indicator of the existence of knowledge. However, it is far from clear that such deference to consensus is always justified. The existence of agreement in a community of researchers is a contingent fact, and researchers may reach a consensus for all kinds of reasons, such as fighting a common foe or sharing a common bias. Scientific consensus, by itself, does not necessarily indicate the existence of shared knowledge among (...)
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  3. Justified Belief in a Digital Age: On the Epistemic Implications of Secret Internet Technologies.Boaz Miller & Isaac Record - 2013 - Episteme 10 (2):117 - 134.
    People increasingly form beliefs based on information gained from automatically filtered Internet ‎sources such as search engines. However, the workings of such sources are often opaque, preventing ‎subjects from knowing whether the information provided is biased or incomplete. Users’ reliance on ‎Internet technologies whose modes of operation are concealed from them raises serious concerns about ‎the justificatory status of the beliefs they end up forming. Yet it is unclear how to address these concerns ‎within standard theories of knowledge and justification. (...)
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  4. 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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  5. When Is Scientific Dissent Epistemically Inappropriate?Boaz Miller - 2021 - Philosophy of Science 88 (5):918-928.
    Normatively inappropriate scientific dissent prevents warranted closure of scientific controversies and confuses the public about the state of policy-relevant science, such as anthropogenic climate change. Against recent criticism by de Melo-Martín and Intemann of the viability of any conception of normatively inappropriate dissent, I identify three conditions for normatively inappropriate dissent: its generation process is politically illegitimate, it imposes an unjust distribution of inductive risks, and it adopts evidential thresholds outside an accepted range. I supplement these conditions with an inference-to-the-best-explanation (...)
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  6. Can Artificial Entities Assert?Ori Freiman & Boaz Miller - 2018 - In Sanford C. Goldberg (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Assertion. Oxford University Press. pp. 415-436.
    There is an existing debate regarding the view that technological instruments, devices, or machines can assert ‎or testify. A standard view in epistemology is that only humans can testify. However, the notion of quasi-‎testimony acknowledges that technological devices can assert or testify under some conditions, without ‎denying that humans and machines are not the same. Indeed, there are four relevant differences between ‎humans and instruments. First, unlike humans, machine assertion is not imaginative or playful. Second, ‎machine assertion is prescripted and (...)
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  7. Why knowledge is the property of a community and possibly none of its members.Boaz Miller - 2015 - Philosophical Quarterly 65 (260):417-441.
    Mainstream analytic epistemology regards knowledge as the property of individuals, rather ‎than groups. Drawing on insights from the reality of knowledge production and dissemination ‎in the sciences, I argue, from within the analytic framework, that this view is wrong. I defend ‎the thesis of ‘knowledge-level justification communalism’, which states that at least some ‎knowledge, typically knowledge obtained from expert testimony, is the property of a ‎community and possibly none of its individual members, in that only the community or some ‎members (...)
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  8. Responsible Epistemic Technologies: A Social-Epistemological Analysis of Autocompleted Web Search.Boaz Miller & Isaac Record - 2017 - New Media and Society 19 (12):1945-1963.
    Information providing and gathering increasingly involve technologies like search ‎engines, which actively shape their epistemic surroundings. Yet, a satisfying account ‎of the epistemic responsibilities associated with them does not exist. We analyze ‎automatically generated search suggestions from the perspective of social ‎epistemology to illustrate how epistemic responsibilities associated with a ‎technology can be derived and assigned. Drawing on our previously developed ‎theoretical framework that connects responsible epistemic behavior to ‎practicability, we address two questions: first, given the different technological ‎possibilities available (...)
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  9. The Social Epistemology of Consensus and Dissent.Boaz Miller - 2019 - In Miranda Fricker, Peter Graham, David Henderson & Nikolaj Jang Pedersen (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Social Epistemology. New York, USA: Routledge. pp. 228-237.
    This paper reviews current debates in social epistemology about the relations ‎between ‎knowledge ‎and consensus. These relations are philosophically interesting on their ‎own, but ‎also have ‎practical consequences, as consensus takes an increasingly significant ‎role in ‎informing public ‎decision making. The paper addresses the following questions. ‎When is a ‎consensus attributable to an epistemic community? Under what conditions may ‎we ‎legitimately infer that a consensual view is knowledge-based or otherwise ‎epistemically ‎justified? Should consensus be the aim of scientific inquiry, and (...)
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  10. Scientific Consensus and Expert Testimony in Courts: Lessons from the Bendectin Litigation.Boaz Miller - 2016 - Foundations of Science 21 (1):15-33.
    A consensus in a scientific community is often used as a resource for making informed public-policy decisions and deciding between rival expert testimonies in legal trials. This paper contains a social-epistemic analysis of the high-profile Bendectin drug controversy, which was decided in the courtroom inter alia by deference to a scientific consensus about the safety of Bendectin. Drawing on my previously developed account of knowledge-based consensus, I argue that the consensus in this case was not knowledge based, hence courts’ deference (...)
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  11. What is Hacking’s argument for entity realism?Boaz Miller - 2016 - Synthese 193 (3):991-1006.
    According to Ian Hacking’s Entity Realism, unobservable entities that scientists carefully manipulate to study other phenomena are real. Although Hacking presents his case in an intuitive, attractive, and persuasive way, his argument remains elusive. I present five possible readings of Hacking’s argument: a no-miracle argument, an indispensability argument, a transcendental argument, a Vichian argument, and a non-argument. I elucidate Hacking’s argument according to each reading, and review their strengths, their weaknesses, and their compatibility with each other.
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  12. Epistemic Equality: Distributive Epistemic Justice in the Context of Justification.Boaz Miller & Meital Pinto - 2022 - Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 32 (2):173-203.
    Social inequality may obstruct the generation of knowledge, as the rich and powerful may bring about social acceptance of skewed views that suit their interests. Epistemic equality in the context of justification is a means of preventing such obstruction. Drawing on social epistemology and theories of equality and distributive justice, we provide an account of epistemic equality. We regard participation in, and influence over a knowledge-generating discourse in an epistemic community as a limited good that needs to be justly distributed (...)
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  13. Science, values, and pragmatic encroachment on knowledge.Boaz Miller - 2014 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 4 (2):253-270.
    Philosophers have recently argued, against a prevailing orthodoxy, that standards of knowledge partly depend on a subject’s interests; the more is at stake for the subject, the less she is in a position to know. This view, which is dubbed “Pragmatic Encroachment” has historical and conceptual connections to arguments in philosophy of science against the received model of science as value free. I bring the two debates together. I argue that Pragmatic Encroachment and the model of value-laden science reinforce each (...)
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  14. Trust and Distributed Epistemic Labor‎.Boaz Miller & Ori Freiman - 2019 - In Judith Simon (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Trust and Philosophy. Routledge. pp. ‎341-353‎.
    This chapter explores properties that bind individuals, knowledge, and communities, together. Section ‎‎1 introduces Hardwig’s argument from trust in others’ testimonies as entailing that trust is the glue ‎that binds individuals into communities. Section 2 asks “what grounds trust?” by exploring assessment ‎of collaborators’ explanatory responsiveness, formal indicators such as affiliation and credibility, ‎appreciation of peers’ tacit knowledge, game-theoretical considerations, and the role moral character ‎of peers, social biases, and social values play in grounding trust. Section 3 deals with establishing (...)
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  15. Catching the WAVE: The Weight-Adjusting Account of Values and Evidence.Boaz Miller - 2014 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 47:69-80.
    It is commonly argued that values “fill the logical gap” of underdetermination of theory by evidence, namely, values affect our choice between two or more theories that fit the same evidence. The underdetermination model, however, does not exhaust the roles values play in evidential reasoning. I introduce WAVE – a novel account of the logical relations between values and evidence. WAVE states that values influence evidential reasoning by adjusting evidential weights. I argue that the weight-adjusting role of values is distinct (...)
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  16. Taking iPhone Seriously: Epistemic Technologies and the Extended Mind.Isaac Record & Boaz Miller - forthcoming - In Duncan Pritchard, Jesper Kallestrup‎, Orestis Palermos & J. Adam Carter‎ (eds.), Extended ‎Epistemology. Oxford University Press.
    David Chalmers thinks his iPhone exemplifies the extended mind thesis by meeting the criteria ‎that he and Andy Clark established in their well-known 1998 paper. Andy Clark agrees. We take ‎this proposal seriously, evaluating the case of the GPS-enabled smartphone as a potential mind ‎extender. We argue that the “trust and glue” criteria enumerated by Clark and Chalmers are ‎incompatible with both the epistemic responsibilities that accompany everyday activities and the ‎practices of trust that enable users to discharge them. Prospects (...)
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  17. “Trust Me—I’m a Public Intellectual”: Margaret Atwood’s and David Suzuki’s Social Epistemologies of Climate Science.Boaz Miller - 2015 - In Michael Keren & Richard Hawkins (eds.), Speaking Power to Truth: Digital Discourse and the Public Intellectual. Athabasca University Press‎. pp. 113-128.
    Margaret Atwood and David Suzuki are two of the most prominent Canadian public ‎intellectuals ‎involved in the global warming debate. They both argue that anthropogenic global ‎warming is ‎occurring, warn against its grave consequences, and urge governments and the ‎public to take ‎immediate, decisive, extensive, and profound measures to prevent it. They differ, ‎however, in the ‎reasons and evidence they provide in support of their position. While Suzuki ‎stresses the scientific ‎evidence in favour of the global warming theory and the (...)
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  18. The Rationality Principle Idealized.Boaz Miller - 2012 - Social Epistemology 26 (1):3-30.
    According to Popper's rationality principle, agents act in the most adequate way according to the objective situation. I propose a new interpretation of the rationality principle as consisting of an idealization and two abstractions. Based on this new interpretation, I critically discuss the privileged status that Popper ascribes to it as an integral part of all social scientific models. I argue that as an idealization, the rationality principle may play an important role in the social sciences, but it also has (...)
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  19. What Does it Mean that PRIMES is in P: Popularization and Distortion Revisited.Boaz Miller - 2009 - Social Studies of Science 39 (2):257-288.
    In August 2002, three Indian computer scientists published a paper, ‘PRIMES is in P’, online. It presents a ‘deterministic algorithm’ which determines in ‘polynomial time’ if a given number is a prime number. The story was quickly picked up by the general press, and by this means spread through the scientific community of complexity theorists, where it was hailed as a major theoretical breakthrough. This is although scientists regarded the media reports as vulgar popularizations. When the paper was published in (...)
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  20. Social Epistemology as a New Paradigm for Journalism and Media Studies.Yigal Godler, Zvi Reich & Boaz Miller - forthcoming - New Media and Society.
    Journalism and media studies lack robust theoretical concepts for studying journalistic knowledge ‎generation. More specifically, conceptual challenges attend the emergence of big data and ‎algorithmic sources of journalistic knowledge. A family of frameworks apt to this challenge is ‎provided by “social epistemology”: a young philosophical field which regards society’s participation ‎in knowledge generation as inevitable. Social epistemology offers the best of both worlds for ‎journalists and media scholars: a thorough familiarity with biases and failures of obtaining ‎knowledge, and a strong (...)
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  21. Wrong on the Internet: Why some common prescriptions for addressing the spread of misinformation online don’t work.Isaac Record & Boaz Miller - 2022 - Communique 105:22-27.
    Leading prescriptions for addressing the spread of fake news, misinformation, and other forms of epistemically toxic content online target either the platform or platform users as a single site for intervention. Neither approach attends to the intense feedback between people, posts, and platforms. Leading prescriptions boil down to the suggestion that we make social media more like traditional media, whether by making platforms take active roles as gatekeepers, or by exhorting individuals to behave more like media professionals. Both approaches are (...)
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  22. Essays in Collective Epistemology, edited by Jennifer Lackey: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. vii + 253, £40. [REVIEW]Boaz Miller - 2017 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 95 (2):402-405.
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