CfP: Joint GAP-GWP Colloquium: Belief Aggregation and Epistemic Diversity in Science (GAP.10, Cologne, September 18, 2018)

Submitted by Gerhard Schurz (DCLPS, University of Duesseldorf).

 

Call for Participation

 

Joint GAP-GWP Colloquium. Belief Aggregation and Epistemic Diversity in Science

 

Date. September 18, 2018, 09:00-12:00
Venue. GAP.10, University of Cologne, Universitaetsstr. 35, Hoersaal C

 

Aims & Scope. Individuals acting within a group very often try to come up with a joint decision. Sometimes they do so by first deliberating, sometimes no process of deliberation is implemented. Sometimes they aggregate by voting procedures, sometimes they apply principles of justice etc. Formal problems of such aggregations are well known, spanning from impossibility results to problems of intuitively plausible constraints that lead to the characterization of implausible aggregation rules. The underlying assumption of aggregation, namely that prima facie groups of individual beliefs should be amalgamated to a single belief, a group belief, is not tackled very often. However, there is a dialectic tension between epistemic diversity and belief aggregation. On the one side, epistemic diversity may have positive effects, e.g. wise-crowd effects or Condorcet effects, which exploit the fact that the average belief of a group may have a significantly higher reliability than the individual beliefs. On the other side this process of aggregation decreases epistemic diversity within a group and thus undermines the epistemic benefits of these effects, especially within a dynamical perspective. In this colloquium questions concerning the interrelation between diversity of beliefs and belief aggregation as well as its application in different fields of research are discussed.

 

Programme.

  • Brief Introduction
  • Jan-Willem Romeijn: Epistemic Diversity and Editor Decisions
    Comment by Corina Strößner
    General Discussion
  • Stephan Hartmann: Deliberation, Epistemic Diversity and the Anchoring Effect
    Comment by Vlasta Sikimic
    General Discussion
  • Christian List: Arrow’s Theorem in Social and Individual Epistemology
    Comment by Christian J. Feldbacher-Escamilla
    General Discussion

Please find the abstracts to the talks here.

 

Organizers. Christian J. Feldbacher-Escamilla and Gerhard Schurz (DCLPS, University of Duesseldorf)

 

Societies. GAP (German Society for Analytic Philosophy) and GWP (German Society for Philosophy of Science)