Related papers: How Intellectual Communities Progress
Scientific discovery is a complex cognitive process that has driven human knowledge and technological progress for centuries. While artificial intelligence (AI) has made significant advances in automating aspects of scientific reasoning,…
The emergence of "big data" offers unprecedented opportunities for not only accelerating scientific advances but also enabling new modes of discovery. Scientific progress in many disciplines is increasingly enabled by our ability to examine…
It is claimed elsewhere that the conscious states of humans must have evolved together with their biological states, and that an ongoing interaction between the two must have occurred to insure that they mirror one another in any species. A…
In this Chapter, I will explore the use of modeling in order to understand how Science works. I will discuss the modeling of scientific communities, providing a general, non-comprehensive overview of existing models, with a focus on the use…
Many see modern science as having serious defects, intellectual, social, moral. Few see this as having anything to do with the philosophy of science. I argue that many diverse ills of modern science are a consequence of the fact that the…
We study distributed knowledge, which is what privately informed agents come to know by communicating freely with one another and sharing everything they know. Knowledge is not necessarily partitional: agents may be boundedly rational and…
We stand at the foot of a significant inflection in the trajectory of scientific discovery. As society continues on its fast-paced digital transformation, so does humankind's collective scientific knowledge and discourse. We now read and…
Institutions and their aggregates are not the right units of analysis for developing a science policy with cognitive goals in view. Institutions, however, can be compared in terms of their performance with reference to their previous…
Philosophers have recently focused on critical, epistemological challenges that arise from the opacity of deep neural networks. One might conclude from this literature that doing good science with opaque models is exceptionally challenging,…
Epistemic modal logic normally views an epistemic situation as a Kripke model. We consider a more basic approach: to view an epistemic situation as a set W of possible states/worlds -- maximal consistent sets of propositions -- with…
Epistemic logic has become a major field of philosophical logic ever since the groundbreaking work by Hintikka (1962). Despite its various successful applications in theoretical computer science, AI, and game theory, the technical…
Scientific progress is inherently sequential: collective knowledge is updated as new studies enter the literature. We propose the sequential meta-analysis research trace (SMART), which quantifies the influence of each study at the time it…
There are many ways we can not know. Even in systems that we created ourselves, as, for example, systems in mathematical logic, Go\"edel and Tarski's theorems impose limits on what we can know. As we try to speak of the real world, things…
Mathematical proofs are both paradigms of certainty and some of the most explicitly-justified arguments that we have in the cultural record. Their very explicitness, however, leads to a paradox, because the probability of error grows…
We regularly encounter information on novel, emerging topics for which the body of knowledge is still evolving, which can be linked, for instance, to current events. A primary way to learn more about such topics is through web search.…
It appears paradoxical that science is producing outstanding new results and theories at a rapid rate at the same time that researchers are identifying serious problems in the practice of science that cause many reports to be irreproducible…
Pluralistic ignorance is a social-psychological phenomenon that occurs when individuals privately hold beliefs that differ from perceived group norms. Traditional models, based on opinion dynamics with private and public states, fail to…
In order to legitimate and defend democratic politics under conditions of computational capital, my aim is to contribute a notion of what I am calling explanatory publics. I will explore what is at stake when we question the social and…
Most educational literature on conceptual change concerns the process by which introductory students acquire scientific knowledge. However, with modern developments in science and technology, the social significance of learning successive…
We investigate the potential of deliberation to create consensus among fully-informed citizens. Our approach relies on two cognitive assumptions: i. citizens need a thinking frame (or perspective) to consider an issue; and ii. citizens…