Epistemic Free Riding
نویسنده
چکیده
In epistemology and philosophy of science there has been a growing interest in group inquiry and ways that it might differ fundamentally from individual inquiry. The interest in this topic is understandable. Science is predominately collaborative work. If we want to understand the epistemic success of science, we need to understand group inquiry and it is an important part of this to learn whether it differs from individual inquiry. Philip Kitcher (1990) initiated the focus on scenarios where the norms or best epistemic practices for individuals working alone might come apart from the norms or best epistemic practices for individuals working in groups. Kitcher shows how it is possible for individual scientists who care only about things such as fame and money to nevertheless structure their inquiry in a way that is conducive to finding the truth. Others have carried this work further looking at various ways that group inquiry can differ in important ways from individual inquiry.1 Uniting much of this work under one heading, Mayo-Wilson et al. (2011) have recently investigated different versions of what they call the Independence Thesis, roughly, the claim that rational individuals can form irrational groups and that rational groups might be composed of irrational individuals. In this paper, my goal is to show that some surprising empirical evidence about group problem-solving reveals that groups will often face cases where it is epistemically best for each individual to do one thing, even though this is ultimately epistemically worse for the group. Thus, I will be presenting an epistemic analogue of a free riding scenario. Free riding is familiar in the practical domain, but has seldom been discussed in the epistemic domain, so it is of some interest to investigate whether there are such scenarios. More than that, however, I’ll show how the particular epistemic free riding
منابع مشابه
An Epistemic Free-Riding Problem?
An Epistemic Free-Riding Problem? Christian List and Philip Pettit 1 August 2003 Karl Popper noted that, when social scientists are members of the society they study, they may affect that society. If the individuals to whom a theory initially applies come to understand that theory, then this understanding may affect their behaviour in such a way that the theory ceases to be applicable. This may...
متن کاملCoordination of Information Sharing and Cooperative Advertising in a Decentralized Supply Chain with Competing Retailers Considering Free Riding Behavior
This paper studies a decentralized supply chain in which a manufacturer sells a common generic product through two traditional and online retailers under free riding market. We assume that the traditional retailer provides the value added services but the online retailer does not. Factors such as retail prices, local advertising of the retailers, global advertising of the manufacturer and servi...
متن کاملWHY FREE RIDE? Strategies and Learning in Public Goods Experiments
The free riding hypothesis has been the subject of laboratory experiments for more than a decade. While the extent of free riding has often varied across experiments, three observations are consistently replicated. First, there is no significant evidence of free riding in single-shot games. Marwell and Ames (1981) for instance, found that subjects generally provide the public good at levels hal...
متن کاملHow Does Free Riding on Customer Service Affect Competition?
T free-riding problem occurs if the presales activities needed to sell a product can be conducted separately from the actual sale of the product. Intuitively, free riding should hurt the retailer that provides that service, but the author shows analytically that free riding benefits not only the free-riding retailer, but also the retailer that provides the service when customers are heterogeneo...
متن کامل