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SOCIAL_EPISTEMOLOGY

                                                         June 30, 2014
                                                         July 11, 2014
Once upon a time I was wondering
if anyone had used the phrase
"Social Epistemology" yet.                        GARDNER
                                                  NEED_TO_KNOW
It turns out it has *two* journals
dedicated to it.
                                          The two journals have a slightly
So it is indeed a term in use             different emphasis:
in the pro-Philosophy biz, and
it's often used in much the               "Social Epistemology" is apparently
same sense that I use it:                 more interdisciplinary, open to
                                          articles with an applied slant,
  "How do we know
   what we know?"                         "Epistme" is more theoretical,
                                          closed to all but the analytic
                                          philosophy discipline (an
                                          anti-social social epistemology
                                          journal).

            My loyalities would usually go with the
            interdisciplinary, but in this case it was
            founded by an "intelligent design" advocate,     His worry seems
            and myself I'm interested in "how do we know     to be that if
            what we know?".  The question "how do we end     humanity is not
            up believing ridiculous nonsense?" is only       divine, we will
            tangentially related.                            all end up
                                                             Soylent Green.

                And Episteme
                has a nicely
                pretentious
                ring about it.


                    Episteme: Social Epistemology journal:
                    [link]


Interestingly enough, the "Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy"
article on "Social Epsitemology" has a number of practical        [ref]
hints for solving immediate problems in my grand schemes:

    " ... it is sometimes possible to
  demonstrate mathematically that a
  certain practice would have certain
  veritistic properties ..."

     I love it when they talk French.


They say that Goldman has shown:

  " ...  that a particular
  (difficult to instantiate)       To me, that immediately
  practice of Bayesian inference   suggests implementing
  has a general propensity, on     some sort of "ask the           Bayesian
  average, to increase the         Bayesian oracle" software       windows
  veritistic properties of one's   (perhaps a web site?)
  beliefs ... "                    that steps you through          Bayesian
                                   the process.                    Moon
  (Goldman 1999: 115–123)
                                   But then, there's the           Bayesian
                                   "debiasing" training            area
                                   described in Tetlock's
                                   "Superforecasting":

                                   SUPERFORECASTING

Further they allude to a proof that:

"... a certain mode of amalgamating expert
opinions in a group yields greater group
accuracy than other modes of amalgamation."

(Shapley and Grofman 1984; Goldman 1999: 81–82).

   That's even more interesting.
   A reference that needs consultation...


There are some even more explicit hints
that follow though, that indicate that the          See:
obvious, most boring choices you can make
in this field turn out to be correct:               SOC_EPISTEM_TO_ME
I mean, committees and subcomittees, no
less.


  I find that tremendously exciting.
  I can stop fucking around with a          Of course, it might be
  quest for novelty, and just               adviseable to some minor
  implement something simple that'll        variation so I'll have an
  make sense to most people without         excuse to call "subcomittees"
  much explanation.                         by a different name.

  Yow.                                         At Cellspace, they liked
                                               "clusters".

                                                   CELLSPACE


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