Semble — Make sense of the web, together

A place for mapping the web, connecting ideas, and building shared knowledge.

A Novel Kuhnian Ontology for Epistemic Classification of STM...

Despite rapid gains in scale, research evaluation still relies on opaque, lagging proxies. To serve the scientific community, we pursue transparency: reproducible, auditable epistemic...

Why Crisis Resilience Depends on Epistemic Security

If we want to prevent tomorrow’s crises from spiraling out of control, we must recognize epistemic systems as critical infrastructure, writes Elizabeth Seger.

epistemic garden - mapping how ideas spread online

We're building tools to help communities understand their information landscape and protect against harmful coordinated narratives.

Trapped in the Loop: How Epistemic Closure Is Rewiring Reality - Revelatory · Relentless · Rectification · Redemptive

In a time when truth is fragmented and headlines are filtered through ideological lenses, a silent epidemic is taking hold: epistemic closure. While the term

Epistemic Infrastructure: Building Shared Truth in an Era of Disaggregation

The Construct of Collective Perception

Free Speech on the Internet: The Crisis of Epistemic Authority

Abstract. Much of our knowledge of the world comes not from direct sensory experience, but from reliance on epistemic authorities: individuals or institutions that tell us what we ought to believe. For example, what most of us believe about natural selection, climate change, or the Holocaust comes from our reliance on epistemic authorities (scientists, historians). Sustaining epistemic authority depends, crucially, on social institutions that inculcate reliable second-order norms about whom to believe about what. The traditional media were crucial, in the age of mass democracy, with promulgating and sustaining such norms. The internet has obliterated the intermediaries who made that possible, and, in the process, undermined the epistemic standing of actual experts. This essay considers some possible changes to existing free speech doctrine to remedy the epistemological crisis brought about by the internet.

On the epistemic structure of voluntary servitude in the infosphere

This paper introduces the concept of Voluntary Epistemic Servitude (VES) to describe a social-epistemic pathology generated by the contemporary infosphere. Drawing on Étienne de La Boétie’s Discours de la Servitude Volontaire as a theoretical resource, we argue that algorithmic systems produce conditions in which agents not only delegate their core belief-forming processes to nontransparent architectures but come to prefer and actively reproduce this delegation through social mechanisms structurally isomorphic to those La Boétie identified in political tyranny. We show that VES is irreducible to existing social-epistemic categories such as epistemic injustice (Fricker 2007), epistemic bubbles and echo chambers (Nguyen 2020), and veritistic failure (Goldman 1999) because it operates at the level of epistemic preference formation rather than credibility attribution or informational access. The paper identifies a preference-laundering mechanism by which algorithmic systems colonize the second-order epistemic desires of agents, thereby undermining the conditions of epistemic autonomy that social epistemology has largely presupposed. We further develop a precise account of reflective access that distinguishes algorithmic opacity from ordinary preference opacity, introduce the concept of epistemic counterfactual capacity with a modal analysis connecting it to Williamson’s (2000) safety condition, situate VES as a structurally induced epistemic vice (Cassam 2019) and a form of misaligned extended cognition (Clark and Chalmers 1998), and provide a typology of three algorithmic architectures through which VES operates. We conclude by stating an explicit normative bridge principle and drawing on La Boétie’s positive ideal of free horizontal epistemic bonds to sketch the preconditions for epistemic liberation in algorithmically mediated environments.

Some tools for collective epistemics

We’ve recently published a set of design sketches for AI tools that help with collective epistemics. …

A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden

A newly revived philosophy for publishing personal knowledge on the web

Semble — A social knowledge network for research

Follow your peers' research trails. Surface and discover new connections. Built on ATProto so you own your data.

Relying on Others: An Essay in Epistemology

Abstract. This book concerns the role others play in our attempts to acquire knowledge of the world. Two main forms of this reliance are examined: testimon