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SOC_EPISTEM_TO_ME

                                             July    11, 2014
                                             October  3, 2018

  This file is CLOSED, the live 
  version is SEP_SOCIAL_EPISTEMOLOGY.


Some notes on "Social Epistemology", from    
the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:            
                                                            [link]
The author of the "Social Epistemology" article
at the "Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy" site
is very funny in that western philosopher way--
he wants an unassailable logical edifice, he's
going to derive all human knowledge from
explicit, incontrovertable first principles.

He gets all question markey if anyone, say, tries to
scientifically prove that scientific proofs have problems:
Aha, isn't that a contradiction!?

But really, if you could do it, that
would be a proof by contradiction.

A lot of it is pretty dull, but there's some
*good* dull stuff:

  "Under majority voting, by contrast, the positive
  reliability of the group also approaches 1 as the group
  size increases, as shown in the famous 'Condorcet jury
  theorem.'  Generalizing a bit, if individuals are
  independent, fallible, but biased toward the truth,
  majority voting outperforms both unanimity and
  dictatorial procedures in terms of maximizing the
  group's positive and negative reliability on p. Hence,
  for purposes of attaining 'knowledge' (especially under
  Nozick's 1981 definition of 'knowledge'), the best of
  the three aggregation procedures is majority voting."


  "Another lesson that List (2005) derives from the formal
  analysis of aggregation procedures concerns prospective
  veritistic gains from 'distribution.' When an epistemic task is
  complex in that it requires judgments on several propositions,
  different individuals within the group may have different levels
  of expertise on different propositions. Suppose a system allows
  the group to be partitioned into subgroups, where members of
  each subgroup specialize on one premise. Each subgroup makes
  collective judgments on its designated premise and then a
  collective judgment is derived on the conclusion from the
  subgroup judgments on the premises. There are scenarios under
  which such a 'distributed' procedure outperforms the regular,
  non-distributed (premise-based) procedure."

In other words: subcommittes and majority votes!

    That's so boring it's fantastic:
    It means everyone is already          It's one drawback is that it's
    familiar with it, and anything at     so boring it bores people--
    all like it will be easily            it might be adviseable to
    understood.                           disguise it.

So run with that.                            At the artsy, underground
                                             Cellspace, the collective would
                                             spin-off "clusters" of people
                                             interested in specific areas...
                                             in essence, sub-committees in
This article has an extensive                all but name.
bibliography, with much I could
add to my reading list.

Some selections:

    Goldman, Alvin (1978), "Epistemics: The Regulative Theory of Cognition,"
    The Journal of Philosophy, 75: 509–523.

    Goldman, Alvin (2001), "Experts: Which Ones Should You Trust?" Philosophy
    and Phenomenological Research, 63: 85–110.

    Goldman, Alvin (2006, in press), "The Social Epistemology of Blogging,"
    in Information Technology and Moral Philosophy, eds. J. van den Hoven and
    J. Weckert, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Goldman, Alvin and Cox, James (1996), "Speech, Truth, and the Free Market
    for Ideas," Legal Theory, 2: 1–32.

    Goldman, Alvin and Shaked, Moshe (1991), "An Economic Model of Scientific
    Activity and Truth Acquisition," Philosophical Studies, 63: 31–55.

    Shapley, Lloyd and Grofman, Bernard (1984), "Optimizing Group Judgmental
    Accuracy in the Presence of Interdependence," Public Choice, 43:
    329–343.

    Longino, Helen (1990), Science as Social Knowledge, Princeton: Princeton
    University Press.

    Longino, Helen (2002), The Fate of Knowledge, Princeton: Princeton
    University Press.

    Thagard, Paul (1997), "Collaborative Knowledge," Noûs, 31: 242–261.

    List, Christian (2005), "Group Knowledge and Group Rationality: A
    Judgment Aggregation Perspective," Episteme: A Journal of Social
    Epistemology, 2 (1): 25–38.

    List, Christian and Pettit, Philip (2002), "Aggregating Sets of
    Judgments: An Impossibility Result," Economics and Philosophy, 18:
    89–110.

    List, Christian and Pettit, Philip (2004), "Aggregating Sets of
    Judgments: Two Impossibility Results Compared," Synthese, 140 (1–2):
    207–235.







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