We review the most prominent modeling approaches in social epistemology aimed at understand- ing the functioning of epistemic communities and provide a philosophy of science perspective on the use and interpretation of such simple toy models, thereby suggesting how they could be integrated with conceptual and empirical work. We highlight the need for better integration of such models with relevant findings from disciplines such as social psychology and organization studies.

I examine how particular social arrangements and incentive structures encourage the honest reporting of experimental results and minimize fraudulent scientific work. In particular I investigate how epistemic communities can achieve this goal by promoting members to police the community. Using some basic tools from game theory, I explore a simple model in which scientists both conduct research and have the option of investigating the findings of their peers. I find that this system of peer policing can in many (...) cases ensure high levels of honesty. (shrink)

This commentary focuses on the notion of ‘epistemic community’ and its role in underpinning the general argument that Karen Frost-Arnold presents in Who Should You Be Online? (OUP, 2023). The first section presents the general argument of WSYBO, outlining the general structure of the book and its central concepts. In the second section, three possible senses of ‘epistemic community’ are distinguished – systemic, aggregate and group-oriented. The third section explores tensions around a variety of group-oriented (...) class='Hi'>epistemic community. It will address two ways in which certain closed epistemic communities organized around a shared identity can deviate from the epistemic ideals that guide Frost-Arnold's project. Some enclosed epistemic communities can be organized around exclusionary dynamics. Other enclosed epistemic communities may organize and grant membership around debates or controversies, affecting the deliberative quality of those debates. The epistemic potential of closed epistemic communities organized around a shared identity depends largely on avoiding these two deviations. En este artículo se analliza el concepto de 'comunidad epistémica' usado por Karen Frost-Arnold en Who Should You Be Online? (OUP, 2023). La primera sección sitúa este concepto en el argumento general del libro. La segunda sección separa tres posibles sentidos de 'comunidad epistémica' - sistémico, agregativo y grupal - e integra esos sentidos en el argumento general desarrollado en WSYBO. La tercera sección se centra en el sentido que considero más problemático, el sentido grupal. Se argumenta que, aunque algunos grupos cerrados contribuyen a generar conocimiento dentro de una comunidad epistémica, esas ventaja opera dentro de un abánico de posibilidades bastante estrecho, limitado tanto por la posibilidad de estructurarse como un grupo excluyentes como por la possibilidad de conformar grupos que vician debates desde dinámicas de pertenencia grupal. This commentary focuses on the notion of ‘epistemic community’ and its role in underpinning the general argument that Karen Frost-Arnold presents in Who Should You Be Online? (OUP, 2023). The first section presents the general argument of WSYBO, outlining the general structure of the book and its central concepts. In the second section, three possible senses of ‘epistemic community’ are distinguished – systemic, aggregate and group-oriented. The third section explores tensions around a variety of group-oriented epistemic community. It will address two ways in which certain closed epistemic communities organized around a shared identity can deviate from the epistemic ideals that guide Frost-Arnold's project. Some enclosed epistemic communities can be organized around exclusionary dynamics. Other enclosed epistemic communities may organize and grant membership around debates or controversies, affecting the deliberative quality of those debates. The epistemic potential of closed epistemic communities organized around a shared identity depends largely on avoiding these two deviations. (shrink)

(2013). Groups as Epistemic Communities: Social Forces and Affect as Antecedents to Knowledge. Social Epistemology: Vol. 27, No. 1, pp. 3-20. doi: 10.1080/02691728.2012.760660.

The ‘epistemic calculus of groups’ posits functions to group-generated knowledge. In this article, those same epistemic group functions are now re-evaluated as means by which group members may tackle two contemporary and increasing challenges, or even obstructions, to knowledge. These obstructions, namely the liminality, the increasingly transitional nature of both ‘common sense’ and ‘common word meanings,’ occur, as our mass and social media practices change. Can groups still remain as ‘epistemic communities’ and regenerate common sense or common (...) word meanings? As a response to media developments and to counterarguments by the analytic social epistemologists, I reconceptualize the functions of the ´epistemic calculus of groups´ as skills, and present a synthetic approach toward thinking in small groups to enable the regeneration of common meanings. As a basis in the analysis of the notions of common sense and common word meanings, I use the theory of psychologic: a theory built on formal logic. F... (shrink)

Studies of epistemic communities and collaborative research in the social sciences have deepened the understanding of how science works, and more specifically how the social dimensions of scientific practice both enable and impede social scientists in realizing their epistemic goals. Two types of studies of epistemic communities are distinguished: general theories of epistemic communities aim to construct accounts of theoretical change applicable to all social scientific specialties, whereas historical studies emphasize the contingencies that affect specific social (...) scientific disciplines, subfields, or institutions. Although collaborative research plays a less pronounced role in the social sciences than in the natural sciences, collaboration has enabled social scientists to investigate topics that would otherwise be difficult to investigate. (shrink)

The messy politics of combating the COVID-19 pandemic, compounded by the confusion caused by the global (dis)infodemic, have propelled conspiracism from the fringes of society into the public mainstream. Despite the growing political impact of digitally enabled conspiracy theories, they are predominantly delegitimized on three fronts – as psychopathology, pseudoscience, and/or parapolitics. In contrast, this article employs three non-pathologizing conceptual counteroffers borrowed from critical theory, deconstructionist historiography, and citizenship studies – namely, cognitive mapping, narrative emplotment, and performative citizenship – to (...) politicize conspiracy theorizing ‘from below’. Using QAnon as a case-in-point, the article introduces two novel concepts that invite a sociological approach to conspiracism: first, the epistemic communities of the unreal, which designates the participatory, interactive, and decentralized nature of collaboratively creating unreal explanations of the real world; and second, grassroots conspiracism, which denotes the ways in which these bottom-up, horizontal, and collective meaning-making practices and knowledge-production processes are expanding spaces of and for politics. (shrink)

In Clough’s reply paper to me (http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-1aN), she laments how feminist calls for diversity within scientific communities are inadvertently sidelined by our shared feminist empiricist prescriptions. She offers a novel justification for diversity within epistemic communities and challenges me to accept this addendum to my prior prescriptions for biomedical research communities (Goldenberg 2013) on the grounds that they are consistent with the epistemic commitments that I already endorse. In this response, I evaluate and accept her challenge.

ABSTRACT One of the promises of the internet was its power to unite individual knowers with one another, democratizing knowledge and spurring our collective efforts toward truth. In what sense is our current epistemic life a collective effort? This article examines the idea of the epistemic community. I contrast epistemic community with a collection of individual epistemic agents aiming for truth. I propose that this latter conception of epistemic life permits neglecting our (...) class='Hi'>epistemic and moral duties. I argue that healthy epistemic community requires joint commitments to truth and epistemic trust, and where epistemic trust requires conditions of mutual epistemic respect. (shrink)

The Polymath Project is an online collaborative enterprise that was initiated in 2009, when Timothy Gowers asked whether and how groups could work together to solve mathematical problems that “do not naturally split up into a vast number of subtasks.” Gowers proposed to answer this question himself by actually trying to set up such a collaboration, based on interactions taking place in the comment-threads of a series of posts on a WordPress blog. Hence, the first project officially started in early (...) 2009, to be proclaimed successful only 6 weeks later (Gowers and Nielsen 2009). From its inception until April 2018, 15 more Polymath problems (and a handful of smaller or related ones) have been launched. These projects have attracted attention from different scholarly communities, including the philosophy of mathematical practices, from the perspective of which the Polymath Project can be seen as a vast repository of mathematics in action. This chapter continues previous work by its authors on the topic in question and topics related. More specifically, for the purposes of this volume, it is our aim to both summarize and expand upon these earlier contributions. The starting point is the above observation that in the past decade, the issue of “massively collaborative mathematics” (to be qualified below) has drawn quite some attention. However, does it also warrant intensive philosophical attention in particular? For, as exciting as these developments might be from mathematical and other points of view, the enhanced possibilities that have come with it do not per se give rise to any philosophical import. In Van Bendegem (2011), one of us has indeed tentatively argued for the philosophical relevance of these new dynamics of proof construction flowing from the wide availability and efficiency of Internet technology. We shall below briefly rehearse and update the argument given there. (shrink)

Much of contemporary knowledge is generated by groups not single individuals. A natural question to ask is, what features make groups better or worse at generating knowledge? This paper surveys research that spans several disciplines which focuses on one aspect of epistemic communities: the way they communicate internally. This research has revealed that a wide number of different communication structures are best, but what is best in a given situation depends on particular details of the problem being confronted by (...) the group. (shrink)

Bruner shows that in cultural interactions, members of minority groups will learn to interact with members of majority groups more quickly—minorities tend to meet majorities more often as a brute fact of their respective numbers—and, as a result, may come to be disadvantaged in situations where they divide resources. In this paper, we discuss the implications of this effect for epistemic communities. We use evolutionary game theoretic methods to show that minority groups can end up disadvantaged in academic interactions (...) like bargaining and collaboration as a result of this effect. These outcomes are more likely, in our models, the smaller the minority group. They occur despite assumptions that majority and minority groups do not differ with respect to skill level, personality, preference, or competence of any sort. Furthermore, as we will argue, these disadvantaged outcomes for minority groups may negatively impact the progress of epistemic communities. (shrink)

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 members are less aware of their colleagues' experimental results. Second, there is a robust tradeoff between the reliability of a community and the speed with which it reaches a correct conclusion. ‡The author would like to thank Brian Skyrms, Kyle Stanford, Jeffrey Barrett, Bruce Glymour, and the participants in the Social Dynamics Seminar at University of California–Irvine for their helpful comments. Generous financial support was provided by the School of Social Science and Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences at UCI. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, Baker Hall 135, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890; e-mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

This article focuses on epistemic challenges related to the democratisation of scientific knowledge production, and to the limitations of current social accounts of objectivity. A process of ’democratisation’ can be observed in many scientific and academic fields today. Collaboration with extra-academic agents and the use of extra-academic expertise and knowledge has become common, and researchers are interested in promoting socially inclusive research practices. As this development is particularly prevalent in policy-relevant research, it is important that the new, more democratic (...) forms of research be objective. In social accounts of objectivity only epistemic communities are taken to be able to produce objective knowledge, or the entity whose objectivity is to be assessed is precisely such a community. As I argue, these accounts do not allow for situations where it is not easy to identify the relevant epistemic community. Democratisation of scientific knowledge production can lead to such situations. As an example, I discuss attempts to link indigenous oral traditions to floods and tsunamis that happened hundreds or even thousands of years ago. (shrink)

How do “international” epistemic communities shape regulatory contests between transnational firms and civil society organizations in the Global South? With the establishment of the World Trade Organization, member states committed to basing trade-restrictive national regulations on science-based “international” standards set by “international” standard-setting bodies. Yet we know little about how the WTO regime has shaped the operation of epistemic communities within standard-setting bodies and, in turn, how standard-setting bodies articulate with national policy-making processes in the Global South. Building (...) on work in the new political sociology of science, I argue that neoliberal globalization and the establishment of the WTO have created incentives for Western epistemic communities to at once cast themselves as “international” under the WTO regime and orient their scientific agendas toward the priorities of transnational firms. Moreover, this transformation of epistemic communities has created opportunities for transnational firms facing contentious policy environments in the Global South to effectively outsource regulatory decision-making to “international” epistemic communities that can claim legal status under the WTO regime. Empirically, I focus on the case of one Western epistemic community—the Association of Analytical Communities International—and its claim to epistemic jurisdiction over pesticide residue standards for soft drinks in India. (shrink)

In a post-truth era, taking seriously the assertions of political figures and what other people say on the internet strikes many as irrational and gullible. Let us call this reaction the “incredulous reaction.” In this paper, I consider a common response to the targets of the incredulous reaction: excluding them from activities like debate and discounting their beliefs as relevant to our own. This exclusion is motivated by the assumption that those who continue to place epistemic trust in a (...) post-truth society are acting irrationally. I begin with an argument that we can justifiably exclude irrational persons from our epistemic activities. I then present a conflict that emerges when we take the wellbeing of our epistemic community to be an end in and of itself, and not merely a means for pursuing other epistemic goods. I propose that healthy epistemic communities depend on networks of epistemic trust and on ensuring their members are treated with the epistemic respect they deserve. If we were to adopt the development of a healthy epistemic community as a goal, then excluding others may no longer be a justifiable choice. (shrink)

I discuss pedagogical issues that concern incest survivors. As teachers, we need to understand the ways in which the legacy of incest variously affects survivors' educational experiences and to be aware that the interplay of trust, knowledge, and power may be particularly complex for survivors. I emphasize the responsibility teachers have to create classrooms that are inclusive of survivors, while raising concerns about the practice of personal disclosure and assumptions about trust and safety in the classroom.

Despite the increasingly diversified discourses in international commercial arbitration, this device of socio-legal regulation remains a relatively under-theorized subject. In particular, far too little attention has been paid to analyzing international commercial arbitration through critical approaches such as Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL). TWAIL is broadly understood as a methodological reorientation in international law by highlighting the historical links between the foundations of this field of law and the history of capitalism and imperialism as well as the colonial (...) and Eurocentric legacies in the structure and operation of the current international legal regime. With this in mind, two fronts in international commercial arbitration invite a reexamination through a TWAIL perspective and by drawing on the concept of hegemony. One front is the transnational account of arbitration, and the other one is the epistemic community of arbitration. By examining these two notions through a narrative of hegemony of Western legal traditions, we posit that any effective attempt at redefining or reforming arbitral governance structure towards sustaining diversity requires a deeper understanding of historical and current world power structures and creating a vision for the prospect of dehegemonization. (shrink)

People often deny having meant what the audience understood. Such denials occur in both interpersonal and institutional contexts, such as in political discourse, the interpretation of laws and the perception of lies. In practice, denials have a wide range of possible effects on the audience, such as conversational repair, reinterpretation of the original utterance, moral judgements about the speaker, and rejection of the denial. When are these different reactions triggered? What factors make denials credible? There are surprisingly few experimental studies (...) directly targeting such questions. Here, we present two pre-registered experiments focusing on (i) the speaker’s incentives to mislead their audience, and (ii) the impact of speaker denials on audiences’ moral and epistemic assessments of what has been said. We find that the extent to which speakers are judged responsible for the audience’s interpretations is modulated by their (the speakers’) incentives to mislead, but not by denials themselves. We also find that people are more willing than we expected to revise their interpretation of the speaker’s utterance when they learn that the ascribed meaning is false, regardless of whether the speaker is known to have had incentives to deceive their audience. In general, these findings are consistent with the idea that communicators are held responsible for the cognitive effects they trigger in their audience; rather than being responsible for, more narrowly, only the effects of what was “literally” said. In light of our findings, we present a new, cognitive analysis of how audiences react to denials, drawing in particular on the Relevance Theory approach to communication. We distinguish in particular: (a) the spontaneous and intuitive re-interpretation of the original utterance in light of a denial; (b) the attribution of responsibility to the speaker for the cognitive effects of what is communicated; and (c) the reflective attribution of a particular intention to the speaker, which include argumentative considerations, higher-order deniability, and reputational concerns. Existing experimental work, including our own, aims mostly at (a) and (b), and does not adequately control for (c). Deeper understanding of what can be credibly denied will be hindered unless and until this methodological problem is resolved. (shrink)

The Hong and Page ‘diversity trumps ability’ result has been used to argue for the more general claim that a diverse set of agents is epistemically superior to a comparable group of experts. Here we extend Hong and Page’s model to landscapes of different degrees of randomness and demonstrate the sensitivity of the ‘diversity trumps ability’ result. This analysis offers a more nuanced picture of how diversity, ability, and expertise may relate. Although models of this sort can indeed be suggestive (...) for diversity policies, we advise against interpreting such results overly broadly. (shrink)

This paper explores the complex institutional processes that comprise the global governance of cyberinfrastructure and examines the impact of these elite regime formation processes on developing countries and transnational civil society organizations. Based on a concurrent, mixed-methods study of the United Nations-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), we find that policy-actors from developing countries and civil society organizations have been less effective than other actors in influencing these processes. Finally, we recommend future research on the use of ICTs (...) to strengthen the effective participation of developing countries and transnational civil society organizations in these processes. (shrink)

Despite US policy documents which recommend that in areas of environmental risk, interaction between scientific experts and the public move beyond the so-called “Decide, Announce, and Defend model,” many current public involvement policies still do not guarantee meaningful public participation. In response to this problem, various attempts have been made to define what counts as sufficient or meaningful participation and free informed consent from those affected. Though defining “meaningfulness” is a complex task, this paper explores one under-examined dimension that concerns (...) the relationship between consent and the idea that citizens should be sufficiently informed: epistemic capacity. This paper will look at some of the work on meaningful participation and consent, give a definition of epistemic capacity, and argue that only a community with sufficient epistemic capacity can have the understanding and competence to give informed enough consent and thus participate meaningfully. (shrink)

Epistemic injustice occurs when someone is wronged in their capacity as a knower.[1] More and more attention is being paid to the epistemic injustices that exist in our scientific practices. In a recent paper, Fabien Medvecky argues that science communication is fundamentally epistemically unjust. In what follows we briefly explain his argument before raising several challenges to it.

We propose communication pattern logic. A communication pattern describes how processes or agents inform each other, independently of the information content. The full-information protocol in distributed computing is the special case wherein all agents inform each other. We study this protocol in distributed computing models where communication might fail: an agent is certain about the messages it receives, but it may be uncertain about the messages other agents have received. In a dynamic epistemic logic with distributed knowledge and with (...) modalities for communication patterns, the latter are interpreted by updating Kripke models. We propose an axiomatization of communication pattern logic, and we show that collective bisimilarity (comparing models on their distributed knowledge) is preserved when updating models with communication patterns. We can also interpret communication patterns by updating simplicial complexes, a well-known topological framework for distributed computing. We show that the different semantics correspond, and propose collective bisimulation between simplicial complexes. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss specific epistemic injustices suffered by gender minorities in the Philippines. We also show that societal changes have been evident throughout the years. We review some progressive Philippine Catholic communities' sustainable development efforts toward gender equality or toward the eradication of discrimination, marginalisation, and violence based on a person's sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression (SOGIE). Despite these epistemic injustices, we reveal that there are ways by which gender disorientations may be disrupted by (...) progressive Philippine Catholic groups and communities in the era of contemporary Christianities. (shrink)

In this paper, I present a case study in the field of crop protection and discuss its epistemological implications. Through the advent of a novel class of objects at the end of the 1970s in Europe and the USA, namely plant elicitors that trigger the plant’s own defence reactions, we witness how dissent between epistemic communities appears where assimilation had been the rule. The convergence between the industry and the academia as a coherent “phytosanitary universe”, despite the fact that (...) they are made of several epistemic communities, is put to the test by plant elicitors, which do not fit exactly within existing categories. The plasticity of plant elicitors who can serve both as epistemic things and technical objects does not suffice to qualify them as boundary objects bridging diverging communities. In particular, the specific arrangement of epistemic communities that they reveal can be described as Matryoshka dolls. This empirical account provides a fresh look at the relation between physical object... (shrink)

Charles S. Peirce’s critique of epistemic individualism, the attempt to make the individual the locus of knowledge, is a dominant theme in his writings. While scholars often mention this critique, there is, surprisingly, a lack of research on the topic. However, it is necessary to know what motivates Peirce’s critique of epistemic individualism to know why he aims to turn philosophy into a communal study. In this dissertation, I defend the claim that Peirce’s communal inferentialism allows us to (...) assess the rational merits of his critique of epistemic individualism and to grasp his insights into why philosophy must change its course. The questions that have guided the research are the following. What are the central reasons that support Peirce’s verdict that epistemic individualism is a dead-end for philosophy? What roles do Peirce’s fundamental commitments concerning the notion of the community of inquirers and the patterns of correct inference play in his critique? I defend the central claim in four chapters. In Chapter One, I reinvestigate Peirce’s critique in relation to Cartesianism, while in Chapter Two I take up Peirce’s case against nominalism. I begin with these topics since Peirce claims that these two positions in the history of philosophy are prime examples of epistemic individualism. In Chapter Three and Chapter Four, I show that the problem of epistemic individualism crops up again in Peirce’s two most influential papers, “The Fixation of Belief” and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear.” I provide a communal inferentialist reading of both papers. In this dissertation, I further show why, according to Peirce, our key epistemic notions, including knowledge and truth, cannot be individualistic but must be communal notions. (shrink)

The author analyses the problem of the communication from the epistemological point of view, noting that the interest to the theme is obviously determined by the enormous ambiguity and by the disciplinary vagueness of the communication's notion itself. It is argued that it is the philosophical conceptualization of the communication that allows in a certain sense to «save» philosophy itself. The author notes that the philosophical studies of communication as if return the relevance to the classical philosophical problems: to the (...) (communicative) sphere, (communicative) time, (social) causality, (collective) subject and object, filling them with the meaningful characteristics and testing their concepts by the experience of the functioning of real society and communication. He concludes that the epistemological content of the concept of communication is comes together with several aspects of human cognition. The first aspect has to do with the dimensions for defining the adequacy for determination of the statement made by the Other (i.e. the other participant), given that the content of the Other's consciousness is unavailable. The second aspect is related to the principle of a double purpose of any communication: on the one hand, integration and mutual understanding and, on the other, informational description of the subject of the message. The third aspect is that communication is based on the most important epistemological distinction between knowledge and ignorance, i.e. on the predominance of any information to one participant of the communication and of its uncertainty to the other participant, and that such a situation actually conditions the formation of communication systems, as well as of a wide variety of forms of sociality. The author also addresses the problem of whether contemporary media make communication at all possible since they decrease the impact that the secrecy of the Other's consciousness has on communication by triggering a communicative act. (shrink)

Community leaders in Colombia have historically suffered processes of microaggressions and intimidation that threaten the free exercise of their voice in the processes of production of knowledge and in the participation of the planning of their territories. In this article, we explore the case study of the Network of Community Researchers (NCR), also known in Spanish as Red de Investigadores Comunitarios, promoted by the University of Antioquia, Colombia. The NCR is a commitment to the co-production of knowledge about (...) human security from below between community researchers and academics. This article analyses the contribution of the NCR to the human security of Medellin and a specific collection of capabilities for epistemic liberation of community researchers: the capability to be recognised as a producer of valid knowledge, to do through communicative openness, to learn from collective knowledge and to transform through collective action. The expansion of these four capabilities evidence processes of resistance and hermeneutic insurrection of some community leaders and activists who participate in the NCR. The analysis shows the contribution of the NCR to facilitate and generate a safe space in which community researchers communicate knowledge and practices and share experiences, risks, struggles, fears and collective dreams of transformation. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to investigate the consequences of the bibliometrics-based evaluation system of scientific production on the contents and methods of sciences. The research has been conducted by means of in-depth interviews to a multi-disciplinary panel of Italian researchers. We discuss the implications of bibliometrics-based evaluation on the choice of the research topic, on the experimental practices, on the dissemination habits. We observe that the validation of the bibliometrics-based evaluation practices relies on the acceptance and diffusion within (...) the scientific community, and that these practices are self-sustained through their wide application. We discuss possible evolving scenarios, also considering the recent development of digital archives. (shrink)

This paper argues that the value of openness to epistemic plurality and the value of social responsiveness are essential for epistemic agents such as scientists who are expected to carry out non-epistemic missions. My chief philosophical claim is that the two values should play a joint role in their communication about earthquake-related damages when their knowledge claims are advisory. That said, I try to defend a minimal normative account of science in the context of communication. I show (...) that these epistemic agents when acting as communicators may encounter various epistemic and practical uncertainties in making their knowledge claims. Using four vignettes, I show that the value of openness to epistemic plurality and the value of social responsiveness may best serve their epistemic and practical purposes across different contexts by reducing their epistemic and practical risks associated with the knowledge claims they communicated. The former may reduce the risks of prematurely excluding epistemic alternatives and is conducive to two types of epistemic plurality; the latter is supposed to reduce the risks of making self-defeating advisory claims and harmful wishful speaking by minimizing the values in tension that can be embedded in the social roles the epistemic agents play. (shrink)

The ability to observe is the ability to reliably detect, but that is not all observation is. A thermometer reliably detects temperature yet does not observe the temperature, whereas I do, even though in terms of reliability I cannot match the thermometer. An observation is detection accompanied by active classification and, typically, the subsequent formation of opinion. Even when we say of an animal that it can see something we mean more than that it reliably detects things of a certain (...) sort but also that it deals with such things as objects, gauging their usefulness or lack thereof in relation to its interests and to other aspects of the world. This crucial addendum to the notion of observation can be enshrined in slogan: observers are potential believers. This marks the difference between mere detecting mechanisms and observers.The contemporary scientific anti-realism of one such as van Fraassen, which is developed in detail under the label of “constructive empiricism” in van Fraassen (1980), can be characterized in terms of detecting mechanisms. (shrink)

The author analyses the problem of the communication from the epistemological point of view, noting that the interest to the theme is obviously determined by the enormous ambiguity and by the disciplinary vagueness of the communication's notion itself. It is argued that it is the philosophical conceptualization of the communication that allows in a certain sense to «save» philosophy itself. The author notes that the philosophical studies of communication as if return the relevance to the classical philosophical problems: to the (...) (communicative) sphere, (communicative) time, (social) causality, (collective) subject and object, filling them with the meaningful characteristics and testing their concepts by the experience of the functioning of real society and communication. He concludes that the epistemological content of the concept of communication is comes together with several aspects of human cognition. The first aspect has to do with the dimensions for defining the adequacy for determination of the statement made by the Other (i.e. the other participant), given that the content of the Other's consciousness is unavailable. The second aspect is related to the principle of a double purpose of any communication: on the one hand, integration and mutual understanding and, on the other, informational description of the subject of the message. The third aspect is that communication is based on the most important epistemological distinction between knowledge and ignorance, i.e. on the predominance of any information to one participant of the communication and of its uncertainty to the other participant, and that such a situation actually conditions the formation of communication systems, as well as of a wide variety of forms of sociality. The author also addresses the problem of whether contemporary media make communication at all possible since they decrease the impact that the secrecy of the Other's consciousness has on communication by triggering a communicative act. (shrink)

We suggest that developing automata theoretic foundations is relevant for knowledge theory, so that we study not only what is known by agents, but also the mechanisms by which such knowledge is arrived at. We define a class of epistemic automata, in which agents’ local states are annotated with abstract knowledge assertions about others. These are finite state agents who communicate synchronously with each other and information exchange is ‘perfect’. We show that the class of recognizable languages has good (...) closure properties, leading to a Kleene-type theorem using what we call regular knowledge expressions. These automata model distributed causal knowledge in the following way: each agent in the system has a partial knowledge of the temporal evolution of the system, and every time agents synchronize, they update each other’s knowledge, resulting in a more up-to-date view of the system state. Hence we show that these automata can be used to solve the satisfiability problem for a natural epistemic temporal logic for local properties. Finally, we characterize the class of languages recognized by epistemic automata as the regular consistent languages studied in concurrency theory. (shrink)

Scholars and practitioners have long viewed learners as works-in-progress and as somewhat empty vessels to be filled with appropriate knowledge and skills to become future expert practitioners. However, based on an ethnography of two engineering laboratories, I found that laboratory members regularly swap the roles of learner and instructor, regardless of their status as an undergraduate student, a graduate student, or a faculty member. Furthermore, undergraduate students make crucial contributions to their research communities in the form of knowledge, creativity, and (...) opportunities for other members to learn and build relationships through teaching. What, then, do the identities of “novice” and “expert” mean in practice? I argue that it is more productive to define the identity of a community based on mutual learning and epistemic exchange rather than on expertise. (shrink)

Mental healthcare research increasingly focuses the needs of trans people and, in doing so, acknowledges knowledge and epistemic resources developed in trans communities. In this article, we aim to raise awareness of an ethical issue described by Emmalon Davis that may arise in the context of engaging with community knowledge and epistemic resources: the risk of epistemic appropriation. It is composed of two harms (1) a detachment of epistemic resources developed in the originating community (...) and (2) a misdirection of these epistemic resources for epistemic goals of a dominant community. In this article, we map and discuss the ethical concerns in using knowledge originating in trans communities in terms of epistemic appropriation in the context of mental healthcare research. We first argue that misgendering, failing to reference non-academic sources and a lack of attribution in community authorship are forms of epistemicdetachment. Second, we problematize cases of epistemicmisdirectionof trans epistemic resources, focusing on the examples of detransition and transition regret. We discuss harms related to epistemic appropriation in relationship to risks to safety. The article aims to raise awareness about the risk of epistemic appropriation both in researchers engaging with trans knowledge as well as in mental healthcare workers who seek information on trans. (shrink)

This paper brings together two lines of thought. The first is the broadly contextualist idea that what is takes to satisfy central epistemic concepts such as the concept of knowledge or that of objectively justified belief may vary with the stakes faced in settings or contexts. Attributions of knowledge, for example, certify an agent to those who might treat them as a source on which to rely. Henderson and Horgan write of gate-keeping for an epistemic community. The (...) second line of thought turns on the idea that such central epistemic concepts are keyed to the conformity with epistemic norms for the fitting fixation of belief—and that the epistemic norms function in important ways as social norms by which folk regulate their epistemic lives as members of communities of interdependent agents. The two lines of thought are practically made for one another! I develop the connections and show how the results both vindicate and reinforce a form of contextualist epistemology, but refine and limit the range of contextual variation one should envision. (shrink)

In his paper “The Social Diffusion of Warrant and Rationality,” Sanford Goldberg argues that relying on testimony makes the warrant for our beliefs “socially diffuse” and that this diminishes our capacity to rationally police our beliefs. Thus, according to Goldberg, rationality itself is socially diffuse. I argue that while testimonial warrant may be socially diffuse (because it depends on the warrants of other epistemic agents) this feature has no special link to our capacity to rationally police our beliefs. Nevertheless, (...) I endorse Goldberg’s claim about rationality and I propose that a Foley-style account of rationality might help to better articulate Goldberg’s proposal. (shrink)

There is a tendency, a bad tendency, to make epistemic agency the central focus of epistemology. In brief, epistemologists have traditionally elevated epistemic agency as the crucial issue to be addressed, and ask all other epistemological questions in light of that issue. This is not surprising given the Cartesian influence on epistemology, but I argue that epistemic agency should not always be the central focus of epistemology. There are times when giving central place to epistemic agency (...) gets in the way of good epistemology. In this paper, I show how one approach to a communitarian epistemology falters precisely because of the primacy given to epistemic agency. Specifically, I take a close look at Lynn Hankinson Nelson?s notion of epistemological communities in terms of epistemic agency and analyze both its merits and its shortcomings. This is an important analysis for general consideration given the trend in non-traditional epistemologies to look towards social complexes as the real seats of knowledge. But this is also important because my analysis pushes one to consider an alternative framing concept for epistemology?that of epistemic practises instead of epistemic agency. (shrink)

There is a correlation between positions taken on some scientific questions and political leaning. One way to explain this correlation is the cultural cognition hypothesis (CCH): people's political leanings are causing them to process evidence to maintain fixed answers to the questions, rather than to seek the truth. Another way is the different background belief hypothesis (DBBH): people of different political leanings have different background beliefs which rationalize different positions on these scientific questions. In this article, I argue for two (...) things. I argue that two attempts by proponents of the CCH to discredit the DBBH fail. And I argue that this matters, because while the CCH makes epistemic paternalistic interventions seem called for (as some philosophers have argued compellingly), the DBBH does not. The DBBH makes it much easier to stay closer to an ideal of deliberative democracy. (shrink)

Dynamic epistemic logic is the logic of the effects of epistemic actions like making public announcements, passing private messages, revealing secrets, telling lies. This paper takes its starting point from the version of dynamic epistemic logic of [2], and demonstrates a tool that can be used for showing what goes on during a series of epistemic updates: the dynamic epistemic modelling tool DEMO [7, 9]. DEMO allows modelling epistemic updates, graphical display of update results, (...) graphical display of action models, formula evaluation in epistemic models, and translation of dynamic epistemic formulas to PDL [22] formulas. DEMO is written in Haskell. This paper intends to demonstrate its usefulness for visualizing the model transformations that take place during epistemic updating. (shrink)

In International Relations (IR) scholarship, the epistemic communities’ framework has gained relevance for explaining the roles of experts in the context of transnational global governance. However, IR scholars have criticized the framework for descriptive reasoning. This paper aims to strengthen its explanatory power by following rules of a systematic literature review and by using Desmond’s conception of professionalism to further develop Cross’s model of epistemic community. Desmond introduced his concept of professionalism as a response to bureaucratic and (...) market trends in scientific research and Cross developed her concept of professionalism as a comprehensive reconceptualization of Haas’s original model of an epistemic community. The results confirm compatibility between the two concepts. Following the structure of Cross’s model of professionalism, individual autonomy operationalizes selection and training, collective autonomy covers the face-to-face meetings, and the service provision operationalizes the common culture. (shrink)