Applying Formal Social Epistemology to the Real World
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11308540 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Carlo Martini (0000-0001-9061-8020, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2012 |
| Volume | 34 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 383-398 |
| Publication date | 2012-11-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Analyse & Kritik (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0171-5860 • E-ISSN: 2365-9858 |
| Publisher | Walter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE) |
| DOI | 10.1515/auk-2012-0214 |
| OpenAlex | W2347196948 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 5 |
The claim that diversity and independence have a net positive epistemic effect on the judgments of groups has been recently defended formally by Scott Page, among others, and popularized in Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds. In Meta-Induction and the Wisdom of Crowds Thorn and Schurz take issue with the claim that more diversity and independence in groups leads to better collective judgments. I argue that Thorn and Schurz's arguments are helpful in clarifying a number of over-generalizations about diversity and independence that are often circulated in the social epistemology literature. I also argue that the relevant formal arguments are easily misunderstood when presented 'in a vacuum', that is, without a context of application in mind. I provide a different approach to understanding formal results in social epistemology: With the help of concrete scenarios and the formal literature, I focus on a trade-off between independence and dependence in groups. I show that the approach works well also for another principle in social epistemology; namely, the principle that 'more heads are better than few
Context (archaeology · Crowds · Diversity (politics · Epistemology · Focus (optics · Formal epistemology · Independence (probability theory · Social epistemology · Sociology · Computer Science · Critical Realism in Sociology · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics · Feminist Epistemology and Gender Studies · Mathematics · Philosophy
| Highly cited | No |
|---|