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134Understanding Polarization: Meanings, Measures, and Model EvaluationPhilosophy of Science 84 (1): 115-159. 2017.Polarization is a topic of intense interest among social scientists, but there is significant disagreement regarding the character of the phenomenon and little understanding of underlying mechanics. A first problem, we argue, is that polarization appears in the literature as not one concept but many. In the first part of the article, we distinguish nine phenomena that may be considered polarization, with suggestions of appropriate measures for each. In the second part of the article, we apply th…Read more
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38Philosophical Considerations of Political PolarizationIn David Bordonaba Plou, Víctor Fernández Castro & José Ramón Torices (eds.), The Political Turn in Analytic Philosophy: Reflections on Social Injustice and Oppression, De Gruyter. pp. 279-298. 2022.
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984Rational social and political polarizationPhilosophical Studies 176 (9): 2243-2267. 2019.Public discussions of political and social issues are often characterized by deep and persistent polarization. In social psychology, it’s standard to treat belief polarization as the product of epistemic irrationality. In contrast, we argue that the persistent disagreement that grounds political and social polarization can be produced by epistemically rational agents, when those agents have limited cognitive resources. Using an agent-based model of group deliberation, we show that groups of deli…Read more
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91Don’t forget forgetting: the social epistemic importance of how we forgetSynthese 198 (6): 5373-5394. 2019.We motivate a picture of social epistemology that sees forgetting as subject to epistemic evaluation. Using computer simulations of a simple agent-based model, we show that how agents forget can have as large an impact on group epistemic outcomes as how they share information. But, how we forget, unlike how we form beliefs, isn’t typically taken to be the sort of thing that can be epistemically rational or justified. We consider what we take to be the most promising argument for this claim and f…Read more
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44Correction to: Rational social and political polarizationPhilosophical Studies 176 (9): 2269-2269. 2019.In the original publication of the article, the Acknowledgement section was inadvertently not included. The Acknowledgement is given in this Correction.
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372Scientific Networks on Data Landscapes: Question Difficulty, Epistemic Success, and ConvergenceEpisteme 10 (4): 441-464. 2013.A scientific community can be modeled as a collection of epistemic agents attempting to answer questions, in part by communicating about their hypotheses and results. We can treat the pathways of scientific communication as a network. When we do, it becomes clear that the interaction between the structure of the network and the nature of the question under investigation affects epistemic desiderata, including accuracy and speed to community consensus. Here we build on previous work, both our own…Read more
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486Representation in Models of Epistemic DemocracyEpisteme 17 (4): 498-518. 2020.Epistemic justifications for democracy have been offered in terms of two different aspects of decision-making: voting and deliberation, or ‘votes’ and ‘talk.’ The Condorcet Jury Theorem is appealed to as a justification in terms votes, and the Hong-Page “Diversity Trumps Ability” result is appealed to as a justification in terms of deliberation. Both of these, however, are most plausibly construed as models of direct democracy, with full and direct participation across the population. In this pa…Read more
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442Understanding Polarization: Meaning, Measures, and Model EvaluationPhilosophy of Science 84 (1): 115-159. 2017.Polarization is a topic of intense interest among social scientists, but there is significant disagreement regarding the character of the phenomenon and little understanding of underlying mechanics. A first problem, we argue, is that polarization appears in the literature as not one concept but many. In the first part of the article, we distinguish nine phenomena that may be considered polarization, with suggestions of appropriate measures for each. In the second part of the article, we apply th…Read more
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33Tonic Immobility in PTSD: Exacerbation of Emotional Cardiac Defense ResponseFrontiers in Psychology 10. 2019.
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555Don’t forget forgetting: the social epistemic importance of how we forgetSynthese 198 (6): 5373-5394. 2019.We motivate a picture of social epistemology that sees forgetting as subject to epistemic evaluation. Using computer simulations of a simple agent-based model, we show that how agents forget can have as large an impact on group epistemic outcomes as how they share information. But, how we forget, unlike how we form beliefs, isn’t typically taken to be the sort of thing that can be epistemically rational or justified. We consider what we take to be the most promising argument for this claim …Read more
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469Diversity and Democracy: Agent-Based Modeling in Political PhilosophyHistorical Social Research 43 259-284. 2018.Agent-based models have played a prominent role in recent debates about the merits of democracy. In particular, the formal model of Lu Hong and Scott Page and the associated “diversity trumps ability” result has typically been seen to support the epistemic virtues of democracy over epistocracy (i.e., governance by experts). In this paper we first identify the modeling choices embodied in the original formal model and then critique the application of the Hong-Page results to philosophical debat…Read more
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222Philosophical Analysis in Modeling Polarization: Notes from a Work in ProgressIn Paul Youngman & Mirsad Hadzikadik (eds.), Complexity and the Human Experience: Modeling Complexity in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Pan Sanford. 2013.A first take, matured in later work, in modeling belief polarization.
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363Testing epistemic democracy’s claims for majority rulePolitics, Philosophy and Economics 19 (1): 22-35. 2019.While epistemic democrats have claimed that majority rule recruits the wisdom of the crowd to identify correct answers to political problems, the conjecture remains abstract. This article illustrates how majority rule leverages the epistemic capacity of the electorate to practically enhance the instrumental value of elections. To do so, we identify a set of sufficient conditions that effect such a majority rule mechanism, even when the decision in question is multidimensional. We then look to th…Read more
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Areas of Specialization
Trust |
Judgment Aggregation |
Epistemology of Disagreement |