Epistemic Agents

{{Topic |Question=Who can be a bearer of a mosaic? Can a community be a bearer of a mosaic? Can an individual be a bearer of a mosaic? Can an instrument' be a bearer of a mosaic? |Topic Type=Descriptive |Description=An agent is defined as an entity with a capacity to act. 1 The actions in question for an epistemic agent are epistemic actions such as taking stances towards epistemic elements or being the bearer of a scientific mosaic. The question at issue is who or what can be an epistemic agent. Can individuals be epistemic agents, or communities, or perhaps artificial systems such as databases or instruments? For example, consider a community that delegates authority over a certain topic to its sub-community. Then this sub-community delegates authority over a sub-topic of this topic to its sub-sub-community. Finally, this sub-sub-community delegates one very specific question to a single expert. Does this mean that an individual scientist can be an epistemic agent? |Parent Topic=Ontology of Scientific Change |Authors List=Kevin Zheng, Hakob Barseghyan, |Formulated Year=2016 |Academic Events=Scientonomy Seminar 2016, |Prehistory=For most of the history of western science and philosophy, human individuals were treated as the primary epistemic agents. Exceptions include discussions of when one should accept the testimony of others in the works of [[David Hume]} (1711-1776) and Thomas Reid (1710-1796). 2

In the nineteenth century, the British philosopher and political economist John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) argued, in a political essay called On Liberty, 3 that because individual human knowers are fallible, the critical discussion of ideas is necessary to help individuals avoid the falsity or partiality of beliefs framed in the context of only one point of view. The achievement of knowledge is thus a social rather than an individual matter. 4 The American philosopher and logician Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) emphasized the instigation of doubt and critical interaction within a community as means to knowledge. He formulated a consensual theory of truth, in which the acceptance of the truth of a proposition depends on the agreement of a community of inquirers. For Peirce then, communities are epistemic agents that can take stances towards propositions. 54

The epidemiologist Ludwig Fleck(1896-1961) made one of the earliest attempts to understand scientific change, specifically, as a social process involving communities as epistemic agents. In Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (1935) 6, he argued that cognition was necessarily a collective social activity, since it depends on prior knowledge obtained from other people. New ideas arise within collective epistemic agents which he called thought collectives; groups of people who participate in the mutual exchange of ideas. As an emergent consequence of mutual understandings and misunderstandings within such a group, a particular thought style arises, which determines how individual members of the thought collective think and perceive within the relevant domain. Scientific facts are socially constructed by thought collectives interacting with the world through observation and experiment, and can be revised or abandoned based on these interactions. 67 |Related Topics=Scientific Community, Applicability of the Laws of Scientific Change, Scientific Mosaic, Epistemic Stances Towards Theories, |Page Status=Needs Editing }}