Epistemic Agents

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?

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?

In the scientonomic context, this question was first formulated by Hakob Barseghyan in 2018. The question is currently accepted as a legitimate topic for discussion by Scientonomy community.

In Scientonomy, the accepted answers to the question can be summarized as follows:

• The subtypes of epistemic agent are epistemic community and individual epistemic agent.

Broader History

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

Scientonomic History

Acceptance Record

Here is the complete acceptance record of this question (it includes all the instances when the question was accepted as a legitimate topic for discussion by a community):

Community	Accepted From	Acceptance Indicators	Still Accepted	Accepted Until	Rejection Indicators
Scientonomy	8 October 2018	Subtypes of Epistemic Agent became accepted by virtue of the acceptance of Epistemic Agent. The publication of Barseghyan (2018) is an indication of the acceptance of the term.	Yes

All Theories

The following theories have attempted to answer this question:

Theory	Formulation	Formulated In
Epistemic Community Is a Subtype of Epistemic Agent (Barseghyan-2018)	Epistemic Community is a subtype of Epistemic Agent, i.e. epistemic agent is a supertype of epistemic community.	2018
Individual Epistemic Agent Is a Subtype of Epistemic Agent (Patton-2019)	Individual Epistemic Agent is a subtype of Epistemic Agent, i.e. epistemic agent is a supertype of individual epistemic agent.	2019

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Accepted Theories

The following theories have been accepted as answers to this question:

Community	Theory	Accepted From	Accepted Until
Scientonomy	Epistemic Community Is a Subtype of Epistemic Agent (Barseghyan-2018)	8 October 2018
Scientonomy	Individual Epistemic Agent Is a Subtype of Epistemic Agent (Patton-2019)	10 January 2022

Suggested Modifications

Here is a list of modifications concerning this topic:

Modification	Community	Date Suggested	Summary	Verdict	Verdict Rationale	Date Assessed
Sciento-2019-0015	Scientonomy	26 December 2019	Accept that there are two types of epistemic agents – individual and communal. Also accept the question of applicability of the laws of scientific change to individuals as a legitimate topic of scientonomic inquiry.	Accepted	It was agreed during seminar discussions that the "modification aims to codify our de facto communal stance towards the ontology of epistemic agents".c1 This is confirmed by the fact that several recent articles take this ontology of epistemic agents for granted (e.g., Barseghyan and Levesley (2021), Machado-Marques and Patton (2021)).89 Even as early as 2017, several of Loiselle's examples of authority delegation concern individual experts (see Loiselle (2017)).10	10 January 2022

Current View

In Scientonomy, the accepted answers to the question are Epistemic Community Is a Subtype of Epistemic Agent (Barseghyan-2018) and Individual Epistemic Agent Is a Subtype of Epistemic Agent (Patton-2019).

Epistemic Community Is a Subtype of Epistemic Agent (Barseghyan-2018) states: "Epistemic Community is a subtype of Epistemic Agent, i.e. epistemic agent is a supertype of epistemic community."

According to Barseghyan, epistemic community is an epistemic agent, i.e. it is capable of taking epistemic stances towards epistemic elements.11

Individual Epistemic Agent Is a Subtype of Epistemic Agent (Patton-2019) states: "Individual Epistemic Agent is a subtype of Epistemic Agent, i.e. epistemic agent is a supertype of individual epistemic agent."

According to Patton, individuals are "capable of taking epistemic stances towards epistemic elements, with reason, based on a semantic understanding of the elements and their available alternatives, and with the goal of producing knowledge".12p. 82

Related Topics

This question is a subquestion of Ontology of Scientific Change.