Related papers: How Intellectual Communities Progress
We examine epistemological threats posed by human and LLM interaction. We develop collective epistemology as a theory of epistemic warrant distributed across human collectives, using bounded rationality and dual process theory as…
There is no agreed definition of intelligence, so it is problematic to simply ask whether brains, swarms, computers, or other systems are intelligent or not. To compare the potential intelligence exhibited by different cognitive systems, I…
A qualitatively new, much more liberal and efficient organisation of science is proposed and justified, in connection with growing debate about further role and development of fundamental science. Although the key ideas can be explained…
This paper makes a first step towards a logic of learning from experiments. For this, we investigate formal frameworks for modeling the interaction of causal and (qualitative) epistemic reasoning. Crucial for our approach is the idea that…
Rational speakers are supposed to know what they know and what they do not know, and to generate expressions matching the strength of evidence. In contrast, it is still a challenge for current large language models to generate corresponding…
Recent high-precision experimental confirmations of quantum complementarity have revitalized foundational debates about measurement, description, and realism. This article argues that complementarity is most productively interpreted as an…
In a post-industrial society, the workplace is dominated primarily by Knowledge Work, which is achieved mostly through human cognitive processing, such as analysis, comprehension, evaluation, and decision-making. Many of these processes…
We are at a stage in our evolution where we do not yet know if we will ever communicate with intelligent beings that have evolved on other planets, yet we are intelligent and curious enough to wonder about this. We find ourselves wondering…
Because there are similarities between the evaluation of alternative stories in criminal trials and the evaluation of scientific theories, scholars have looked to literature in epistemology and the philosophy of science for insights on the…
In this paper, the second of two companion pieces, we explore novel philosophical questions raised by recent progress in large language models (LLMs) that go beyond the classical debates covered in the first part. We focus particularly on…
It has long been known that scientific output proceeds on an exponential increase, or more properly, a logistic growth curve. The interplay between effort and discovery is clear, and the nature of the functional form has been thought to be…
Immersion in a creative task can be an intimate experience. It can feel like a mystery: intangible, inexplicable, and beyond the reach of science. However, science is making exciting headway into understanding creativity. While the mind of…
The concept of power can be explored at several scales: from physical action and process effectuation, all the way to complex social dynamics. A spectrum-wide analysis of power requires attention to the fundamental principles that constrain…
Success-driven social learning, in which individuals preferentially adopt the ideas and methods that appear most successful, is a foundational principle of collective behavior across systems ranging from ant colonies to scientific…
The crisis in the reproducibility of experiments invites a re-evaluation of methods of inquiry and validation procedures. The text challenges current assumptions of knowledge acquisition and introduces G-complexity for defining decidable…
Because human cognition is creative and socially situated, knowledge accumulates, diffuses, and gets applied in new contexts, generating cultural analogs of phenomena observed in population genetics such as adaptation and drift. It is…
Artificial intelligence is humanity's most promising technology because of the remarkable capabilities offered by foundation models. Yet, the same technology brings confusion and consternation: foundation models are poorly understood and…
How do movements and coalitions which engage with multiple social issues succeed in cross-issue solidarity, and when do they instead become fragmented? To address this, the mechanisms of cross-issue interaction have to be understood. Prior…
Inspired by e-participation systems, in this paper we propose a new model to represent human debates and methods to obtain collective conclusions from them. This model overcomes drawbacks of existing approaches by allowing users to…
Contemporary debates on "open science" mostly focus on the pub- lic accessibility of the products of scientific and academic work. In contrast, this paper presents arguments for "opening" the ongoing work of science. That is, this paper is…