Synthese 191 (11):2445-2470 (2014)
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Abstract |
Pluralistic ignorance is a socio-psychological phenomenon that involves a systematic discrepancy between people’s private beliefs and public behavior in certain social contexts. Recently, pluralistic ignorance has gained increased attention in formal and social epistemology. But to get clear on what precisely a formal and social epistemological account of pluralistic ignorance should look like, we need answers to at least the following two questions: What exactly is the phenomenon of pluralistic ignorance? And can the phenomenon arise among perfectly rational agents? In this paper, we propose answers to both these questions. First, we characterize different versions of pluralistic ignorance and define the version that we claim most adequately captures the examples cited as paradigmatic cases of pluralistic ignorance in the literature. In doing so, we will stress certain key epistemic and social interactive aspects of the phenomenon. Second, given our characterization of pluralistic ignorance, we argue that the phenomenon can indeed arise in groups of perfectly rational agents. This, in turn, ensures that the tools of formal epistemology can be fully utilized to reason about pluralistic ignorance
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Keywords | Pluralistic ignorance Epistemic rationality Social behavior Rational interaction Private beliefs Public beliefs |
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DOI | 10.1007/s11229-014-0434-1 |
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References found in this work BETA
The Grammar of Society: The Nature and Dynamics of Social Norms.Cristina Bicchieri - 2005 - Cambridge University Press.
Putting Logic in its Place: Formal Constraints on Rational Belief.David Christensen - 2004 - Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Putting Logic in Its Place. Formal Constraints on Rational Belief.David Christensen - 2007 - Erkenntnis 67 (1):143-146.
Putting Logic in Its Place. Formal Constraints on Rational Belief.David Christensen - 2008 - Critica 40 (120):141-148.
Knowledge Transmissibility and Pluralistic Ignorance: A First Stab.Vincent F. Hendricks - 2010 - Metaphilosophy 41 (3):279-291.
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Citations of this work BETA
A Logic for Diffusion in Social Networks.Zoé Christoff & Jens Ulrik Hansen - 2015 - Journal of Applied Logic 13 (1):48-77.
Arguments From Authority and Expert Opinion in Computational Argumentation Systems.Douglas Walton & Marcin Koszowy - 2017 - AI and Society 32 (4):483-496.
Can Asserting That P Improve the Speaker's Epistemic Position (And Is That a Good Thing)?Sanford C. Goldberg - 2017 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 95 (1):157-170.
On the Nature of Belief in Pluralistic Ignorance.Marco Antonio Joven-Romero - 2018 - Contemporary Pragmatism 15 (1):23-45.
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