• Work

• External Shocks

• Reshaping organizational forms

Industry influencing collective scientific reasoning: A Bayesian, agent-based exploration Socially situating NormAN: Standpoints and epistemic diversity in a Bayesian, agent-based model.

In basic, everyday contexts, to selectively share only subsets of evidence not representative of ones doxastic attitudes towards the questions they are evidence for, is to act in violation of norms of assertion. Science is a social endeavour in which individuals researching and sharing small pieces of large puzzles posed by the world are central epistemic activities, and so it might stand to reason that scientists, too, should select which evidence to assert based on their beliefs about the conclusions it supports. This paper explores why this translation of norms between contexts is not straightforward, taking the perspective of veritistic social epistemology and using an agent-based model of evidence exchange that grounds collective inquiry in a principled way of generating evidence distributions. We provide simulation data to argue that for plausible problems and evidence distributions, basing evidence assertion on hypothesis beliefs tends to undermine collective inquiry, and norms of scientific assertion should best be understood as latching on to relevant features of the evidence itself, selecting based on preferences in a speed-accuracy trade-off. Above and beyond these results, we make a general case for this method for the future study of norms of scientific assertion. Currently under review at Synthese; joint work with with Ulrike Hahn, Rafael Fuchs, Kirsty Phillips & Leon Assaad.

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• Simulation

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