Epistemic Community Is a Subtype of Epistemic Agent (Barseghyan-2018)

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This is a theory that states "Epistemic Community is a subtype of Epistemic Agent, i.e. epistemic agent is a supertype of epistemic community."

Epistemic Community Is a Subtype of Epistemic Agent (Barseghyan-2018) was formulated by Hakob Barseghyan in 2018.1 It is currently accepted by Scientonomy community as the best available answer to the question.

Scientonomic History

In The Laws of Scientific Change, Barseghyan presents communities as the sole bearer of mosaic.2p. xi The language of "mosaic bearers" was used until 2018, when the term epistemic agent was coined.1 Since then, the conversation has been about types of epistemic agents. Thus, the idea that epistemic communities are a subtype of epistemic agents can be traced back to 2018, when it superseded the idea that communities are bearers of a mosaic.

Acceptance Record

Here is the complete acceptance record of Epistemic Community Is a Subtype of Epistemic Agent (Barseghyan-2018):
CommunityAccepted FromAcceptance IndicatorsStill AcceptedAccepted UntilRejection Indicators
Scientonomy8 October 2018This is when the term epistemic agent was coined and, as a result, this formulation superseded the idea that communities are bearers of a mosaic.Yes

Questions Answered

Epistemic Community Is a Subtype of Epistemic Agent (Barseghyan-2018) is an attempt to answer the following questions: Subtypes of Epistemic Agent and Supertypes of Epistemic Community.

Description

According to Barseghyan, epistemic community is an epistemic agent, i.e. it is capable of taking epistemic stances towards epistemic elements.1


Reasons

Reason:

The notion of epistemic agency implies that an agent takes epistemic stances intentionally. That is:

  • the agent has a semantic understanding of the propositions that constitute the epistemic element in question, and of its alternatives, and
  • the agent is capable of choosing among them with reason, and with the goal of acquiring knowledge.

Communities can meet these conditions. An epistemic community, by definition, has a collective intentionality to know the world and can thus be said to pursue the goal of acquiring knowledge.3 In order for a community to be a communal epistemic agent, it must be the case that its epistemic stances belong to the community as a whole, rather than simply to its constituent members. To understand how this can be, we must consider some general properties of systems with multiple interacting parts. Such systems, if their parts are appropriately organized in relation to one another, often exhibit emergent properties.45678pp. 274-312 William Wimsatt defined the emergent properties of a system as those that depend on the way its parts are organized.78pp. 274-312 Aggregate systems as those in which the parts do not bear an organized relationship to one another. The parts all play similar causal roles and can be interchanged or rearranged without consequence. The behaviour of the whole is just an additive, statistical consequence of that of its parts and no emergent properties are present. A jumbled pile of electronic parts is an example of an aggregate system. Its properties, like its mass and its volume, are just the sum of the masses and volumes of all its parts. A composed system possesses new emergent properties due to the way in which its parts are organized in relation to one another. A radio assembled by arranging electronic parts in the proper relation to one another is an example of a composed system. The ability to be a radio is an emergent property because none of the radio's parts exhibit it by itself. The parts are organized so that each one plays its own distinctive, specialized role in producing the emergent property.

A number of authors have argued that epistemic communities are organized so as to give rise to emergent properties.91011121314 Wimsatt's ideas have been specifically applied to epistemic communities by Theiner and O'Connor. 14 An epistemic community is an organized system of individual epistemic agents, each of which makes its own distinctive contribution to the epistemic stances taken by the communal agent as a whole. These roles are determined by institutional and other forms of organization of the communal agent, and involve varied and complementary areas of specialized knowledge. Collective decision-making processes and institutional frameworks interact with and influence the views of individual community members. These allow a community to take epistemic stances towards epistemic elements that are distinct from those its individual members might take if left to their own devices. In an analysis of legal decision-making processes, Tollefsen 15 has shown that there are a variety of circumstances under which a community's epistemic stances are not the simple aggregate of its individual member's stances. Longino 161718 maintains that, when communities have normatively appropriate structures, critical interactions among community members holding different points of view mitigate the influence of individual subjective preferences and allow communities to achieve a level of objectivity in their taking of epistemic stances that are not generally possible for individual agents. Barseghyan 2pp. 43-52 has argued that the methods used by individual prominent scientists often, in fact, do not coincide with those of their community and that a community's acceptance of a theory is a function of the methods employed by that community rather than individual idiosyncrasies. Thus, it appears that most epistemic communities fit the requirements for communal epistemic agents.

This reason for Epistemic Community Is a Subtype of Epistemic Agent (Barseghyan-2018) was formulated by Paul Patton in 2019.19

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References

  1. a b c  Barseghyan, Hakob. (2018) Redrafting the Ontology of Scientific Change. Scientonomy 2, 13-38. Retrieved from https://scientojournal.com/index.php/scientonomy/article/view/31032.
  2. a b  Barseghyan, Hakob. (2015) The Laws of Scientific Change. Springer.
  3. ^  Overgaard, Nicholas. (2017) A Taxonomy for the Social Agents of Scientific Change. Scientonomy 1, 55-62. Retrieved from https://www.scientojournal.com/index.php/scientonomy/article/view/28234.
  4. ^  Bedau, Mark. (2003) Downward causation and autonomy of weak emergence. Principia 6, 5-50.
  5. ^  Kim, Jaegwon. (1999) Making sense of emergence. Philosophical Studies 95 (1), 3-36.
  6. ^  O'Connor, Timothy and Yu Wong, Hong. (2015) Emergent properties. In Zalta (Ed.) (2017). Retrieved from http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2015/entries/properties-emergent/.
  7. a b  Wimsatt, William C. (2006) Aggregate, composed, and evolved systems: Reductionistic heuristics as means to more holistic theories. Biology and Philosophy 21, 667-702.
  8. a b  Wimsatt, William C. (2007) Reengineering philosophy for limited beings: Piecewise approximations to reality. Harvard University Press.
  9. ^  List, Christian and Pettit, Philip. (2006) Group agency and supervenience. The Southern Journal of Philosophy 44 (S1), 85-105.
  10. ^  Palermos, Spyridon Orestis and Pritchard, Duncan. (2016) The distribution of epistemic agency. In Reider (2016), 109-126.
  11. ^  Palermos, Spyridon Orestis. (2016) The dynamics of group cognition. Minds and Machines 26 (4), 409-440.
  12. ^  Theiner, Georg. (2015) Group-sized distributed cognitive systems. In Ludwig and Jankovic (2015), 233-248.
  13. ^  Allen, Colin; Theiner, Georg and Goldstone, Robert. (2010) Recognizing Group Cognition. Cognitive Systems Research 11, 378-395.
  14. a b  Theiner, Georg and O'Connor, Timothy. (2010) The Emergence of Group Cognition. In Corradini and O'Connor (2010), 78-120.
  15. ^  Tollefsen, Deborah. (2004) Collective Epistemic Agency. Southwest Philosophy Review 20 (1), 2-12.
  16. ^  Longino, Helen. (1990) Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry. Princeton University Press.
  17. ^  Longino, Helen. (2019) The Social Dimensions of Scientific Knowledge. In Zalta (Ed.) (2017).
  18. ^  Longino, Helen. (1996) Cognitive and Non-cognitive Values in Science: Rethinking the Dichotomy. In Nelson and Nelson (1996), 39-58.
  19. ^  Patton, Paul. (2019) Epistemic Tools and Epistemic Agents in Scientonomy. Scientonomy 3, 63-89. Retrieved from https://scientojournal.com/index.php/scientonomy/article/view/33621.