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  1. Jury Theorems for Peer Review.Marcus Arvan, Liam Kofi Bright & Remco Heesen - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    Peer review is often taken to be the main form of quality control on academic research. Usually journals carry this out. However, parts of maths and physics appear to have a parallel, crowd-sourced model of peer review, where papers are posted on the arXiv to be publicly discussed. In this paper we argue that crowd-sourced peer review is likely to do better than journal-solicited peer review at sorting papers by quality. Our argument rests on two key claims. First, crowd-sourced peer (...)
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  2. Cumulative Advantage and the Incentive to Commit Fraud in Science.Remco Heesen - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    This paper investigates how the credit incentive to engage in questionable research practices interacts with cumulative advantage, the process whereby high-status academics more easily increase their status than low-status academics. I use a mathematical model to highlight two dynamics that have not yet received much attention. First, due to cumulative advantage, questionable research practices may pay off over the course of an academic career even if they are not attractive at the level of individual publications. Second, because of the role (...)
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  3. Can Real Social Epistemic Networks Deliver the Wisdom of Crowds?Emily Sullivan, Max Sondag, Ignaz Rutter, Wouter Meulemans, Scott Cunningham, Bettina Speckmann & Mark Alfano - forthcoming - In Tania Lombrozo, Joshua Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, Volume 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    In this paper, we explain and showcase the promising methodology of testimonial network analysis and visualization for experimental epistemology, arguing that it can be used to gain insights and answer philosophical questions in social epistemology. Our use case is the epistemic community that discusses vaccine safety primarily in English on Twitter. In two studies, we show, using both statistical analysis and exploratory data visualization, that there is almost no neutral or ambivalent discussion of vaccine safety on Twitter. Roughly half the (...)
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  4. Support for Geometric Pooling.Jean Baccelli & Rush T. Stewart - 2023 - Review of Symbolic Logic 16 (1):298-337.
    Supra-Bayesianism is the Bayesian response to learning the opinions of others. Probability pooling constitutes an alternative response. One natural question is whether there are cases where probability pooling gives the supra-Bayesian result. This has been called the problem of Bayes-compatibility for pooling functions. It is known that in a common prior setting, under standard assumptions, linear pooling cannot be nontrivially Bayes-compatible. We show by contrast that geometric pooling can be nontrivially Bayes-compatible. Indeed, we show that, under certain assumptions, geometric and (...)
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  5. 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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  6. Rational Polarization.Kevin Dorst - 2023 - Philosophical Review 132 (3):355-458.
    Predictable polarization is everywhere: we can often predict how people’s opinions, including our own, will shift over time. Extant theories either neglect the fact that we can predict our own polarization, or explain it through irrational mechanisms. They needn’t. Empirical studies suggest that polarization is predictable when evidence is ambiguous, that is, when the rational response is not obvious. I show how Bayesians should model such ambiguity and then prove that—assuming rational updates are those which obey the value of evidence—ambiguity (...)
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  7. Bayesian belief protection: A study of belief in conspiracy theories.Nina Poth & Krzysztof Dolega - 2023 - Philosophical Psychology 36 (6):1182-1207.
    Several philosophers and psychologists have characterized belief in conspiracy theories as a product of irrational reasoning. Proponents of conspiracy theories apparently resist revising their beliefs given disconfirming evidence and tend to believe in more than one conspiracy, even when the relevant beliefs are mutually inconsistent. In this paper, we bring leading views on conspiracy theoretic beliefs closer together by exploring their rationality under a probabilistic framework. We question the claim that the irrationality of conspiracy theoretic beliefs stems from an inadequate (...)
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  8. Perspectives on Scientific Error.Don van Ravenzwaaij, Marjan Bakker, Remco Heesen, Felipe Romero, Noah van Dongen, Sophia Crüwell, Sarahanne Field, Leonard Held, Marcus Munafò, Merle-Marie Pittelkow, Leonid Tiokhin, Vincent Traag, Olmo van den Akker, Anna van 'T. Veer & Eric Jan Wagenmakers - 2023 - Royal Society Open Science 10 (7):230448.
    Theoretical arguments and empirical investigations indicate that a high proportion of published findings do not replicate and are likely false. The current position paper provides a broad perspective on scientific error, which may lead to replication failures. This broad perspective focuses on reform history and on opportunities for future reform. We organize our perspective along four main themes: institutional reform, methodological reform, statistical reform and publishing reform. For each theme, we illustrate potential errors by narrating the story of a fictional (...)
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  9. Aggregating agents with opinions about different propositions.Richard Pettigrew - 2022 - Synthese 200 (5):1-25.
    There are many reasons we might want to take the opinions of various individuals and pool them to give the opinions of the group they constitute. If all the individuals in the group have probabilistic opinions about the same propositions, there is a host of pooling functions we might deploy, such as linear or geometric pooling. However, there are also cases where different members of the group assign probabilities to different sets of propositions, which might overlap a lot, a little, (...)
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  10. Argumentative landscapes: the function of models in social epistemology.N. Emrah Aydinonat, Samuli Reijula & Petri Ylikoski - 2021 - Synthese 199 (1-2):369-395.
    We argue that the appraisal of models in social epistemology requires conceiving of them as argumentative devices, taking into account the argumentative context and adopting a family-of-models perspective. We draw up such an account and show how it makes it easier to see the value and limits of the use of models in social epistemology. To illustrate our points, we document and explicate the argumentative role of epistemic landscape models in social epistemology and highlight their limitations. We also claim that (...)
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  11. Consensus versus Unanimity: Which Carries More Weight?Finnur Dellsén - 2021 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    Around 97% of climate scientists endorse anthropogenic global warming (AGW), the theory that human activities are partly responsible for recent increases in global average temperatures. Clearly, this widespread endorsement of AGW is a reason for non-experts to believe in AGW. But what is the epistemic significance of the fact that some climate scientists do not endorse AGW? This paper contrasts expert unanimity, in which virtually no expert disagrees with some theory, with expert consensus, in which some non-negligible proportion either rejects (...)
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  12. Disagreement in a Group: Aggregation, Respect for Evidence, and Synergy.Anna-Maria A. Eder - 2021 - In Fernando Broncano-Berrocal & Adam Carter (eds.), The Epistemology of Group Disagreement. Routledge. pp. 184-210.
    When members of a group doxastically disagree with each other, decisions in the group are often hard to make. The members are supposed to find an epistemic compromise. How do members of a group reach a rational epistemic compromise on a proposition when they have different (rational) credences in the proposition? I answer the question by suggesting the Fine-Grained Method of Aggregation, which is introduced in Brössel and Eder 2014 and is further developed here. I show how this method faces (...)
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  13. The Necessity of Commensuration Bias in Grant Peer Review.Remco Heesen - 2021 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 8 (39):423--443.
    Peer reviewers at many funding agencies and scientific journals are asked to score submissions both on individual criteria and overall. The overall scores should be some kind of aggregate of the criteria scores. Carole Lee identifies this as a potential locus for bias to enter the peer review process, which she calls commensuration bias. Here I view the aggregation of scores through the lens of social choice theory. I argue that, when reviewing grant proposals, it is in many cases impossible (...)
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  14. Is Peer Review a Good Idea?Remco Heesen & Liam Kofi Bright - 2021 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 72 (3):635-663.
    Prepublication peer review should be abolished. We consider the effects that such a change will have on the social structure of science, paying particular attention to the changed incentive structure and the likely effects on the behaviour of individual scientists. We evaluate these changes from the perspective of epistemic consequentialism. We find that where the effects of abolishing prepublication peer review can be evaluated with a reasonable level of confidence based on presently available evidence, they are either positive or neutral. (...)
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  15. Arbitrariness and Uniqueness.Christopher J. G. Meacham - 2021 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 102 (4):665-685.
    Evidential Uniqueness is the thesis that, for any batch of evidence, there’s a unique doxastic state that a subject with that evidence should have. One of the most common kinds of objections to views that violate Evidential Uniqueness are arbitrariness objections – objections to the effect that views that don’t satisfy Evidential Uniqueness lead to unacceptable arbitrariness. The goal of this paper is to examine a variety of arbitrariness objections that have appeared in the literature, and to assess the extent (...)
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  16. Persistent Disagreement and Polarization in a Bayesian Setting.Michael Nielsen & Rush T. Stewart - 2021 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 72 (1):51-78.
    For two ideally rational agents, does learning a finite amount of shared evidence necessitate agreement? No. But does it at least guard against belief polarization, the case in which their opinions get further apart? No. OK, but are rational agents guaranteed to avoid polarization if they have access to an infinite, increasing stream of shared evidence? No.
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  17. The Humility Heuristic, or: People Worth Trusting Admit to What They Don’t Know.Mattias Skipper - 2021 - 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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  18. Introducing the Argumentation Framework within Agent-Based Models to Better Simulate Agents’ Cognition in Opinion Dynamics: Application to Vegetarian Diet Diffusion.Patrick Taillandier, Nicolas Salliou & Rallou Thomopoulos - 2021 - Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation 24 (2).
    This paper introduces a generic agent-based model simulating the exchange and the diffusion of pro and con arguments. It is applied to the case of the diffusion of vegetarian diets in the context of a potential emergence of a second nutrition transition. To this day, agent-based simulation has been extensively used to study opinion dynamics. However, the vast majority of existing models have been limited to extremely abstract and simplified representations of the diffusion process. These simplifications impairs the realism of (...)
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  19. Agent-Based Models of Dual-Use Research Restrictions.Elliott Wagner & Jonathan Herington - 2021 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 72 (2):377-399.
    Scientific research that could cause grave harm, either through accident or intentional malevolence, is known as dual-use research. Recent high-profile cases of dual-use research in the life sciences have led to debate about the extent to which restrictions on the conduct and dissemination of such research may impede scientific progress. We adapt formal models of scientific networks to systematically explore the effects that different regulatory schemes may have on a community’s ability to learn about the world. Our results suggest that, (...)
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  20. Toward a general theory of knowledge.Luis M. Augusto - 2020 - Journal of Knowledge Structures and Systems 1 (1):63-97.
    For millennia, knowledge has eluded a precise definition. The industrialization of knowledge (IoK) and the associated proliferation of the so-called knowledge communities in the last few decades caused this state of affairs to deteriorate, namely by creating a trio composed of data, knowledge, and information (DIK) that is not unlike the aporia of the trinity in philosophy. This calls for a general theory of knowledge (ToK) that can work as a foundation for a science of knowledge (SoK) and additionally distinguishes (...)
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  21. A deference model of epistemic authority.Sofia Ellinor Bokros - 2020 - Synthese 198 (12):12041-12069.
    How should we adjust our beliefs in light of the testimony of those who are in a better epistemic position than ourselves, such as experts and other epistemic superiors? In this paper, I develop and defend a deference model of epistemic authority. The paper attempts to resolve the debate between the preemption view and the total evidence view of epistemic authority by taking an accuracy-first approach to the issue of how we should respond to authoritative and expert testimony. I argue (...)
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  22. Disagreement in science: introduction to the special issue.Finnur Dellsén & Maria Baghramian - 2020 - Synthese 198 (S25):6011-6021.
    Introduction to the Synthese Special Issue on Disagreement in Science.
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  23. The Reference Class Problem for Credit Valuation in Science.Carole J. Lee - 2020 - Philosophy of Science 87 (5):1026-1036.
    Scholars belong to multiple communities of credit simultaneously. When these communities disagree about a scholarly achievement’s credit assignment, this raises a puzzle for decision and game theor...
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  24. Undesigned Coincidences and Coherence for an Hypothesis.Lydia McGrew - 2020 - Erkenntnis 85 (4):801-828.
    Testimonial evidence that is particularly helpful to confirmation combines agreement on some content with variation of detail. I examine the phenomenon of “undesigned coincidences” from a probabilistic point of view to explain how varied reports, including those that dovetail in detail, assist confirmation of an hypothesis. The formal analysis uses recent work in probability theory surrounding the concepts of dependence, independence, and varied evidence. I also discuss the connection between these types of report connections and an hypothesis about the reliability (...)
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  25. A puzzle about experts, evidential screening-off and conditionalization.Ittay Nissan-Rozen - 2020 - Episteme 17 (1):64-72.
    I present a puzzle about the epistemic role beliefs about experts' beliefs play in a rational agent's system of beliefs. It is shown that accepting the claim that an expert's degree of belief in a proposition, A, screens off the evidential support another proposition, B, gives to A in case the expert knows and is certain about whether B is true, leads in some cases to highly unintuitive conclusions. I suggest a solution to the puzzle according to which evidential screening (...)
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  26. On the Possibility of Testimonial Justice.Rush T. Stewart & Michael Nielsen - 2020 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 98 (4):732-746.
    Recent impossibility theorems for fair risk assessment extend to the domain of epistemic justice. We translate the relevant model, demonstrating that the problems of fair risk assessment and just credibility assessment are structurally the same. We motivate the fairness criteria involved in the theorems as also being appropriate in the setting of testimonial justice. Any account of testimonial justice that implies the fairness/justice criteria must be abandoned, on pain of triviality.
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  27. Theory-choice, transient diversity and the efficiency of scientific inquiry.AnneMarie Borg, Daniel Frey, Dunja Šešelja & Christian Straßer - 2019 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 9 (2):26.
    Recent studies of scientific interaction based on agent-based models suggest that a crucial factor conducive to efficient inquiry is what Zollman has dubbed ‘transient diversity’. It signifies a process in which a community engages in parallel exploration of rivaling theories lasting sufficiently long for the community to identify the best theory and to converge on it. But what exactly generates transient diversity? And is transient diversity a decisive factor when it comes to the efficiency of inquiry? In this paper we (...)
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  28. Epistemically Different Epistemic Peers.Mariangela Zoe Cocchiaro & Bryan Frances - 2019 - Topoi 40 (5):1063-1073.
    For over a decade now epistemologists have been thinking about the peer disagreement problem of whether a person is reasonable in not lowering her confidence in her belief P when she comes to accept that she has an epistemic peer on P who disbelieves P. However, epistemologists have overlooked a key realistic way how epistemic peers can, or even have to, differ epistemically—a way that reveals the inadequacy of both conformist and non-conformist views on peer disagreement by uncovering how the (...)
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  29. Trial by Statistics: Is a High Probability of Guilt Enough to Convict?Marcello Di Bello - 2019 - Mind 128 (512):1045-1084.
    Suppose one hundred prisoners are in a yard under the supervision of a guard, and at some point, ninety-nine of them collectively kill the guard. If, after the fact, a prisoner is picked at random and tried, the probability of his guilt is 99%. But despite the high probability, the statistical chances, by themselves, seem insufficient to justify a conviction. The question is why. Two arguments are offered. The first, decision-theoretic argument shows that a conviction solely based on the statistics (...)
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  30. Evidence of Evidence as Higher Order Evidence.Anna-Maria A. Eder & Peter Brössel - 2019 - In Mattias Skipper & Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen (eds.), Higher-Order Evidence: New Essays. Oxford University Press. pp. 62-83.
    In everyday life and in science we acquire evidence of evidence and based on this new evidence we often change our epistemic states. An assumption underlying such practice is that the following EEE Slogan is correct: 'evidence of evidence is evidence' (Feldman 2007, p. 208). We suggest that evidence of evidence is best understood as higher-order evidence about the epistemic state of agents. In order to model evidence of evidence we introduce a new powerful framework for modelling epistemic states, Dyadic (...)
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  31. Thomas Boyer-Kassem, Conor Mayo-Wilson, and Michael Weisberg, eds., Scientific Collaboration and Collective Knowledge: New Essays. New York: Oxford University Press (2017), 240 pp., $85.00 (cloth). [REVIEW]Remco Heesen - 2019 - Philosophy of Science 86 (1):192-198.
    Review of the volume "Scientific Collaboration and Collective Knowledge: New Essays", edited by Thomas Boyer-Kassem, Conor Mayo-Wilson, and Michael Weisberg.
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  32. The credit incentive to be a maverick.Remco Heesen - 2019 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 76:5-12.
    There is a commonly made distinction between two types of scientists: risk-taking, trailblazing mavericks and detail-oriented followers. A number of recent papers have discussed the question what a desirable mixture of mavericks and followers looks like. Answering this question is most useful if a scientific community can be steered toward such a desirable mixture. One attractive route is through credit incentives: manipulating rewards so that reward-seeking scientists are likely to form the desired mixture of their own accord. Here I argue (...)
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  33. Epistemic Diversity and Editor Decisions: A Statistical Matthew Effect.Remco Heesen & Jan-Willem Romeijn - 2019 - Philosophers' Imprint 19.
    This paper offers a new angle on the common idea that the process of science does not support epistemic diversity. Under minimal assumptions on the nature of journal editing, we prove that editorial procedures, even when impartial in themselves, disadvantage less prominent research programs. This purely statistical bias in article selection further skews existing differences in the success rate and hence attractiveness of research programs, and exacerbates the reputation difference between the programs. After a discussion of the modeling assumptions, the (...)
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  34. On the Accuracy of Group Credences.Richard Pettigrew - 2019 - Oxford Studies in Epistemology 6.
    We often ask for the opinion of a group of individuals. How strongly does the scientific community believe that the rate at which sea levels are rising has increased over the last 200 years? How likely does the UK Treasury think it is that there will be a recession if the country leaves the European Union? What are these group credences that such questions request? And how do they relate to the individual credences assigned by the members of the particular (...)
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  35. Don’t forget forgetting: the social epistemic importance of how we forget.Daniel J. Singer, Aaron Bramson, Patrick Grim, Bennett Holman, Karen Kovaka, Jiin Jung & William J. Berger - 2019 - Synthese 198 (6):5373-5394.
    We motivate a picture of social epistemology that sees forgetting as subject to epistemic evaluation. Using computer simulations of a simple agent-based model, we show that how agents forget can have as large an impact on group epistemic outcomes as how they share information. But, how we forget, unlike how we form beliefs, isn’t typically taken to be the sort of thing that can be epistemically rational or justified. We consider what we take to be the most promising argument for (...)
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  36. Spatial opinion dynamics and the effects of two types of mixing.Bert Baumgaertner, Peter A. Fetros, Stephen M. Krone & Rebecca T. Tyson - 2018 - Physical Review E 98 (2):022310.
    Spatially situated opinions that can be held with different degrees of conviction lead to spatiotemporal patterns such as clustering (homophily), polarization, and deadlock. Our goal is to understand how sensitive these patterns are to changes in the local nature of interactions. We introduce two different mixing mechanisms, spatial relocation and nonlocal interaction (“telephoning”), to an earlier fully spatial model (no mixing). Interestingly, the mechanisms that create deadlock in the fully spatial model have the opposite effect when there is a sufficient (...)
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  37. A Role for Judgment Aggregation in Coauthoring Scientific Papers.Liam Kofi Bright, Haixin Dang & Remco Heesen - 2018 - Erkenntnis 83 (2):231-252.
    This paper addresses the problem of judgment aggregation in science. How should scientists decide which propositions to assert in a collaborative document? We distinguish the question of what to write in a collaborative document from the question of collective belief. We argue that recent objections to the application of the formal literature on judgment aggregation to the problem of judgment aggregation in science apply to the latter, not the former question. The formal literature has introduced various desiderata for an aggregation (...)
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  38. One standard to rule them all?Marc-Kevin Daoust - 2018 - Ratio 32 (1):12-21.
    It has been argued that an epistemically rational agent’s evidence is subjectively mediated through some rational epistemic standards, and that there are incompatible but equally rational epistemic standards available to agents. This supports Permissiveness, the view according to which one or multiple fully rational agents are permitted to take distinct incompatible doxastic attitudes towards P (relative to a body of evidence). In this paper, I argue that the above claims entail the existence of a unique and more reliable epistemic standard. (...)
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  39. The Epistemic Value of Expert Autonomy.Finnur Dellsén - 2018 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (2):344-361.
    According to an influential Enlightenment ideal, one shouldn't rely epistemically on other people's say-so, at least not if one is in a position to evaluate the relevant evidence for oneself. However, in much recent work in social epistemology, we are urged to dispense with this ideal, which is seen as stemming from a misguided focus on isolated individuals to the exclusion of groups and communities. In this paper, I argue that that an emphasis on the social nature of inquiry should (...)
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  40. When Expert Disagreement Supports the Consensus.Finnur Dellsén - 2018 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 96 (1):142-156.
    It is often suggested that disagreement among scientific experts is a reason not to trust those experts, even about matters on which they are in agreement. In direct opposition to this view, I argue here that the very fact that there is disagreement among experts on a given issue provides a positive reason for non-experts to trust that the experts really are justified in their attitudes towards consensus theories. I show how this line of thought can be spelled out in (...)
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  41. Voting, deliberation and truth.Stephan Hartmann & Soroush Rafiee Rad - 2018 - Synthese 195 (3):1-21.
    There are various ways to reach a group decision on a factual yes–no question. One way is to vote and decide what the majority votes for. This procedure receives some epistemological support from the Condorcet Jury Theorem. Alternatively, the group members may prefer to deliberate and will eventually reach a decision that everybody endorses—a consensus. While the latter procedure has the advantage that it makes everybody happy, it has the disadvantage that it is difficult to implement, especially for larger groups. (...)
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  42. Expediting the Flow of Knowledge Versus Rushing into Print.Remco Heesen - 2018 - PhilSci Archive.
    Recent empirical work has shown that many scientific results may not be reproducible. By itself, this does not entail that there is a problem. However, I argue that there is a problem: the reward structure of science incentivizes scientists to focus on speed and impact at the expense of the reproducibility of their work. I illustrate this using a well-known failure of reproducibility: Fleischmann and Pons' work on cold fusion. I then use a rational choice model to identify a set (...)
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  43. When journal editors play favorites.Remco Heesen - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (4):831-858.
    Should editors of scientific journals practice triple-anonymous reviewing? I consider two arguments in favor. The first says that insofar as editors’ decisions are affected by information they would not have had under triple-anonymous review, an injustice is committed against certain authors. I show that even well-meaning editors would commit this wrong and I endorse this argument. The second argument says that insofar as editors’ decisions are affected by information they would not have had under triple-anonymous review, it will negatively affect (...)
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  44. Why the Reward Structure of Science Makes Reproducibility Problems Inevitable.Remco Heesen - 2018 - Journal of Philosophy 115 (12):661-674.
    Recent philosophical work has praised the reward structure of science, while recent empirical work has shown that many scientific results may not be reproducible. I argue that the reward structure of science incentivizes scientists to focus on speed and impact at the expense of the reproducibility of their work, thus contributing to the so-called reproducibility crisis. I use a rational choice model to identify a set of sufficient conditions for this problem to arise, and I argue that these conditions plausibly (...)
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  45. Epistemic Landscapes Reloaded: An Examination of Agent-Based Models in Social Epistemology.Manuela Fernández Pinto & Daniel Fernández Pinto - 2018 - Historical Social Research 43 (1):48-71.
    Weisberg and Muldoon’s epistemic landscape model (ELM) has been one of the most significant contributions to the use of agent-based models in philosophy. The model provides an innovative approach to establishing the optimal distribution of cognitive labor in scientific communities, using an epistemic landscape. In the paper, we provide a critical examination of ELM. First, we show that the computing mechanism for ELM is correct insofar as we are able to replicate the results using another programming language. Second, we show (...)
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  46. A higher-order approach to disagreement.Mattias Skipper Rasmussen, Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen & Jens Christian Bjerring - 2018 - Episteme 15 (1):80-100.
    While many philosophers have agreed that evidence of disagreement is a kind of higher-order evidence, this has not yet resulted in formally precise higher-order approaches to the problem of disagreement. In this paper, we outline a simple formal framework for determining the epistemic significance of a body of higher-order evidence, and use this framework to motivate a novel interpretation of the popular “equal weight view” of peer disagreement—we call it the Variably Equal Weight View (VEW). We show that VEW differs (...)
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  47. Another Approach to Consensus and Maximally Informed Opinions with Increasing Evidence.Rush T. Stewart & Michael Nielsen - 2018 - Philosophy of Science (2):236-254.
    Merging of opinions results underwrite Bayesian rejoinders to complaints about the subjective nature of personal probability. Such results establish that sufficiently similar priors achieve consensus in the long run when fed the same increasing stream of evidence. Initial subjectivity, the line goes, is of mere transient significance, giving way to intersubjective agreement eventually. Here, we establish a merging result for sets of probability measures that are updated by Jeffrey conditioning. This generalizes a number of different merging results in the literature. (...)
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  48. Probabilistic Opinion Pooling with Imprecise Probabilities.Rush T. Stewart & Ignacio Ojea Quintana - 2018 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 47 (1):17-45.
    The question of how the probabilistic opinions of different individuals should be aggregated to form a group opinion is controversial. But one assumption seems to be pretty much common ground: for a group of Bayesians, the representation of group opinion should itself be a unique probability distribution, 410–414, [45]; Bordley Management Science, 28, 1137–1148, [5]; Genest et al. The Annals of Statistics, 487–501, [21]; Genest and Zidek Statistical Science, 114–135, [23]; Mongin Journal of Economic Theory, 66, 313–351, [46]; Clemen and (...)
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  49. Crowdsourced science: sociotechnical epistemology in the e-research paradigm.David Watson & Luciano Floridi - 2018 - Synthese 195 (2):741-764.
    Recent years have seen a surge in online collaboration between experts and amateurs on scientific research. In this article, we analyse the epistemological implications of these crowdsourced projects, with a focus on Zooniverse, the world’s largest citizen science web portal. We use quantitative methods to evaluate the platform’s success in producing large volumes of observation statements and high impact scientific discoveries relative to more conventional means of data processing. Through empirical evidence, Bayesian reasoning, and conceptual analysis, we show how information (...)
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  50. Is evidence of evidence evidence? Screening-off vs. no-defeaters.Roche William - 2018 - Episteme 15 (4):451-462.
    I argue elsewhere (Roche 2014) that evidence of evidence is evidence under screening-off. Tal and Comesaña (2017) argue that my appeal to screening-off is subject to two objections. They then propose an evidence of evidence thesis involving the notion of a defeater. There is much to learn from their very careful discussion. I argue, though, that their objections fail and that their evidence of evidence thesis is open to counterexample.
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