<i>Science and sanity</i>: A social epistemology of misinformation, disinformation, and the limits of knowledge
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent challenges to scientific authority in relation to the COVID pandemic, climate change, and the proliferation of conspiracy theories raise questions about the nature of knowledge and conviction. This article considers problems of social epistemology that are central to current predicaments about popular or public knowledge and the status of science. From the perspective of social epistemology, knowing and believing are not simply individual cognitive processes but based on participation in social systems, networks, and niches. As such, knowledge and conviction can be understood in terms of the dynamics of epistemic communities, which create specific forms of authority, norms, and practices that include styles of reasoning, habits of thought and modes of legitimation. Efforts to understand the dynamics of delusion and pathological conviction have something useful to teach us about our vulnerability as knowers and believers. However, this individual psychological account needs to be supplemented with a broader social view of the politics of knowledge that can inform efforts to create a healthy information ecology and strengthen the civil institutions that allow us to ground our action in well-informed picture of the world oriented toward mutual recognition, respect, diversity, and coexistence.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".