On the Assessed Strength of Agents' Bias

Landes, Jürgen and Osimani, Barbara (2020): On the Assessed Strength of Agents' Bias. In: Journal for General Philosophy of Science

Abstract

Recent work in social epistemology has shown that, in certain situations, less communication leads to better outcomes for epistemic groups. In this paper, we show that, ceteris paribus, a Bayesian agent may believe less strongly that a single agent is biased than that an entire group of independent agents is biased. We explain this initially surprising result and show that it is in fact a consequence one may conceive on the basis of commonsense reasoning.

• Item Type: Journal article
• Faculties: Philosophy, Philosophy of Science and Religious Science > Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (MCMP)
• Subjects: 100 Philosophy and Psychology > 100 Philosophy
• ISSN: 0925-4560
• Language: English