HFIA03541U FILO, Social epistemology 1: Introduction to Social Epistemology: Collective Wisdom

The course will provide an introduction to the rapidly emerging field of social epistemology by way of an in depth discussion of the theoretical foundation of collective wisdom. Collective wisdom is the idea that diverse groups of cognitive agents can cognitively outperform even the best experts, at least in an important range of cases. Various reasons why this is so has been suggested, among them that a collective of agents can bring a variety of different perspectives to bear on a particular problem, that they can exploit certain advantageous divisions of labour, or that aggregation of many voices increases the cognitive power of the aggregate voice. So, diverse groups of cognitive agents are performing better than individuals and homogeneous groups, be it in science and academia, in organisations, in politics, or in public democratic deliberation. The advantages of collective wisdom has recently been explored and defended in the context of deliberative democracy by Helen Landemore, and the course will start with a close reading of Landemore's contribution in her book Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many (Princeton University Press 2013). In the second part of the course we turn to adjecent foundational questions in social epistemology