Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dlnhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T15:44:03.641Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Epistemic Systems*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 January 2012

Roger Koppl
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Epistemic systems are social processes generating judgments of truth and falsity. I outline a mathematical theory of epistemic systems that applies widely. Areas of application include pure science, torture, police forensics, espionage, auditing, clinical medical testing, democratic procedure, and the market economy. I examine torture and police forensics in relative detail. This paper is an exercise in comparative institutional epistemics, which considers how the institutions of an epistemic system influence its performance as measured by such things as error rates and the volume of judgments generated.

Type
Research Article
Information
Episteme , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , June 2006 , pp. 91 - 106
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2006

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Akerlof, George A. 1970. “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 84(3): 488–500, 1970.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Asch, S. E. (1951). “Effects of group pressure upon the modification and distortion of judgement.” In Guetzkow, H. (ed.) Groups, leadership and men. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie PressGoogle Scholar
Bagaric, Mirko and Clarke, Julie. 2005. “Not enough (official) torture in the world? The circumstances in which torture is morally justifiable,” University of San Francisco Law Review, 39(1): 1–39.Google Scholar
Bloom, Andres, DeJong, Douglas, Kim, Yong-Gwan, and Sprinkle, Geoffrey. 1998. “Experimental Evidence on the Evolution of Meaning of Messages in Sender-Receiver Games,” The American Economic Review, 88(5): 1323–1340.Google Scholar
Bloor, David. 1976. Knowledge and Social Imagery. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Butos, William and Koppl, Roger. 2003. “Science as a Spontaneous Order: An Essay in the Economics of Science,” in Jensen, H. S., Vendeloe, M., and Richter, L., ed. The Evolution of Scientific Knowledge, Edward Elgar, 2003.Google Scholar
Carnap, Rudolf. 1950. Logical Foundations of Probability. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Crawford, Vincent P. and Joel, Sobel. 1950. “Strategic Information Transmission,” Econometrica, 50(6): 1431–1451.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
David, Paul. 2002. “Cooperation, Creativity and Closure in Scientific Research Networks: Modeling the Simpler Dynamics of Invisible Colleges,” manuscript.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldman, Alvin. 2001. “Social Epistemology,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2001 Edition), Edward Zalta, N. (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2001/entries/epistemology-social/>..>Google Scholar
Goldman, Alvin. 1999. Knowledge in a Social World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldman, Alvin. 1978. “Epistemics: The Regulative Theory of Cognition,” The Journal of Philosophy 75: 509–523.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Green, Jerry R. and Stokey, Nancy L.. 1980. “A Two-Person Game of Information Transmission,” Discussion paper 418, Center for Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences at Northwestern University.Google Scholar
Hayek, F. A. 1935. Collectivist economic planning: Critical studies on the possibilities of socialism. London: George Routledge & Sons, Ltd.Google Scholar
Hume, David. 1777. Essays Political, Moral, and Literary available online at http://www.econlib.org/library/LFBooks/Hume/hmMPL.html.Google Scholar
Keynes, John Maynard. 1921. A Treatise on Probability. Reprinted as Volume VIII of Moggridge, D. E. ed. The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1973.Google Scholar
Keynes, John Maynard. 1936. The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. Reprinted as Volume VII of Moggridge, D. E. ed. The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1973.Google Scholar
Koppl, Roger. 2005. “How to Improve Forensic Science,” European Journal of Law and Economics, 2005, 20(3): 255–286.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Koppl, Roger and Langlois, Richard N.. 2001. “Organizations and Language Games,” Journal of Management and Governance, 5: 287–305.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kornhauser, L. A. 1992. “Modelling Collegial Courts. II. Legal Doctrine,” Journal of Law, Economics and Organization 8: 441–470.Google Scholar
Kornhauser, L. A., and Sager, L. G.. 1986. “Unpacking the Court,” Yale Law Journal 96: 82–117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Langlois, Richard N. 2002, “Modularity in Technology and Organization”, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 49(1): 19–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lewis, David. 1969. Convention: A Philosophical Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
List, Christian. 2005. “The Discursive Dilemma and Public Reason,” Ethics, forthcoming. (A draft of this paper is available at http://personal.lse.ac.uk/list/PDF-files/PublicReason.pdf.)Google Scholar
List, C., and Pettit, P.. 2002. “Aggregating Sets of Judgments: An Impossibility Result,” Economics and Philosophy 18: 89–110CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mackay, Charles. 1852. Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. London: Office of the National Illustrated Library, 1852. [Online] available from http://www.econlib.org/library/Mackay/macEx15.html; accessed 5 February 2004.Google Scholar
Mannheim, Karl. 1936[1985]. Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.Google Scholar
Parnas, D. L. 1972. “On the Criteria for Decomposing Systems into Modules”, Communications of the ACM, 15(12): 1053–1058.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rejali, Darius. 2004a. “Torture's Dark Allure,” Salon.com, 18 June 2004.Google Scholar
Rejali, Darius. 2004b. “Does Torture Work?” Salon.com, 21 June 2004.Google Scholar
Rejali, Darius. Forthcoming. Torture and Democracy, Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Risinger, Michael, Saks, Michael J., Thompson, William C., and Rosenthal, Robert. 2002. “The Daubert/Kumho Implications of Observer Effects in Forensic Science: Hidden Problems of Expectation and Suggestion,” California Law Review 90: 1–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Saks, Michael J. et al. 2001. “Model Prevention and Remedy of Erroneous Convictions Act,” Arizona State Law Journal, 33: 665–718.Google Scholar
Savage, , Leonard, J. 1954 [1972]. The Foundations of Statistics, second revised edition. New York: Dover Publications, Inc.Google Scholar
Schattschneider, Doris. 1978. “Tiling the Plane with Congruent Pentagons,” Mathematics Magazine, 51(1): 29–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schelling, Thomas C. 1960. The Strategy of Conflict. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Shackle, G. L. S. 1972. Epistemics and Economics. London: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Silver, James. 2004. “Why America's Top Liberal Lawyer Wants to Legalise Torture,” SCOTSMAN (Scotland), May 22, 2004, available at http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=582662004 (quoting Alan Dershowitz).Google Scholar
Smith, Adam. 1982. Lectures on Jurisprudence, Indianapolis, Indiana: Liberty Fund, Inc.Google Scholar
Spence, Michael. 1973. “Job Market Signaling,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 87(3): 355–374.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wantchekon, Leonard and Healy, Andrwe. 1999. “The ‘Game’ of Torture,” The Journal of Conflict Resolution, 43(5): 596–609.CrossRefGoogle Scholar