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Topological variability of collectives and its import for social epistemology

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Author

  • George Masterton

Summary, in English

Social epistemology studies knowledge and justified belief acquisition through organized group cooperation. To do this, the way such group cooperation is structured has to be modeled. The obvious way of modeling a group structure is with a directed graph; unfortunately, most types of social cooperation directed at epistemological aims are variably implementable, including in their structural expression. Furthermore, the frequency with which a practice is implemented in a certain way can vary with topology. This entails that the topology of social practices directed toward epistemological ends has to be modeled by a set of directed graphs, or their equivalent, together with a probability distribution over that set. In theory, this is eminently possible; however, there are considerable practical obstacles to the specification of a practice's topology in this way. This paper examines these practical difficulties and concludes that todays sampling protocols are either far too slow to handle pratices with 10 or more participants, or else prone to produce misleading evaluations.

Publishing year

2014

Language

English

Pages

2433-2443

Publication/Series

Synthese

Volume

191

Issue

11

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Springer

Topic

  • Philosophy

Keywords

  • Social networks
  • Social epistemology
  • Directed graph
  • Graph isomorphism

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 0039-7857