Reconciling truthfulness and relevance as epistemic and decision-theoretic utility.

Epistemic Infrastructure: Building Shared Truth in an Era of Disaggregation

The Construct of Collective Perception

Epistemic Courage and Open-Mindedness

Epistemic courage requires me to sometimes adopt a belief even in the face of doubts. Open-mindedness requires me to be able to reconsider my beliefs. It is generally assumed that we should have bo...

Why major life decisions should be approached with ‘epistemic humility’ | Psyche Videos

At a crossroads in life? No matter how much you deliberate, one unknowable remains: the person you will be on the other side

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.

AI Epistemic Risks: Emerging Mechanisms & Evidence

<p>Advances in artificial intelligence pose risks to humanity's collective capacity to form accurate beliefs, reason well, and maintain a healthy information en

A Knowledge Commons for the 21st Century

Truth-seeking infrastructure at scale

A Bayesian Truth Serum for Subjective Data

Subjective judgments, an essential information source for science and policy, are problematic because there are no public criteria for assessing judgmental truthfulness. I present a scoring method for eliciting truthful subjective data in situations ...

Unsimple Truths: Science, Complexity, and Policy

Amazon.com: Unsimple Truths: Science, Complexity, and Policy eBook : Mitchell, Sandra D.: Kindle Store

Epistemic courage

"'Epistemic Courage' is a timely and thought-provoking exploration of the ethics of belief. Drawing on a wide range of examples, from conspiracy theories to medical misinformation, Ichikawa shows why epistemology is no mere academic abstraction - the question of what to believe couldn't be more urgent. And, he argues, many mainstream ideas about what to believe - those emphasizing the importance of ensuring that one doesn't believe with insufficient evidence - are incomplete and distorting in important and harmful ways. A skeptical, negative bias about belief is connected to a conservative bias that reinforces the status quo. Throughout the book, Ichikawa argues that we need to shift our focus from avoiding false beliefs to actively seeking out true ones. Throughout the book, Ichikawa uses engaging and timely examples to illustrate his points. He tackles important questions, such as how moral considerations interact with evidential ones in deciding what to believe, and how to navigate the complex ethical issues around testimony, rape culture, and epistemic injustice. Accessible and rigorous, 'Epistemic Courage' invites readers to consider the importance of belief, and how it shapes our lives and the world around us. With its insightful analysis and compelling case studies, this book is an essential read for philosophers and anyone else interested in belief, social justice, and the pursuit of truth."--

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...

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

Metacognitive experiences as information: Processing fluency in consumer judgment and decision making

Abstract Thinking is accompanied by metacognitive experiences of ease or difficulty. People draw on these experiences as a source of information that can complement or challenge the implications of declarative information. We conceptualize the operation of metacognitive experiences within the framework of feelings‐as‐information theory and review their implications for judgments relevant to consumer behavior, including popularity, trust, risk, truth, and beauty.

Metacognitive experiences as information: Processing fluency in consumer judgment and decision making

Abstract Thinking is accompanied by metacognitive experiences of ease or difficulty. People draw on these experiences as a source of information that can complement or challenge the implications of declarative information. We conceptualize the operation of metacognitive experiences within the framework of feelings‐as‐information theory and review their implications for judgments relevant to consumer behavior, including popularity, trust, risk, truth, and beauty.

The Source of Truth Problem is Getting Worse with Agents — Tonk

Intelligence depends on knowledge, but in practice that knowledge is fragmented across tools, people, and formats, creating conflicting versions of reality. What if we accepted that knowledge lives at the edge and focused instead on effectively sharing it?