A stigmergic social epistemology--论文代写范文精选

一些人在正统的认识论倾向于不认可。出于同样的原因,许多相信社会学传统的人认为正统是冗余和过时的,无法解决所有普遍的社会性问题,最终将进行实践，对知识和真理践行。下面的paper代写范文进行论述。

Abstract
  Social theory in its attempt to make sense of the individual-group equation has often taken inspiration from natural history. Though biological inspired political theory has long since been discredited, evolutionary biology and entomology has inspired a lively multidisciplinary field of research termed biomimetics (Grosan & Abraham, 2006, p. 16). Biomimetic inspired computational modeling has epistemology and adaptive intelligence as a central interest. To be sure, some social epistemologists are aware of the suggestiveness of foraging/optimization theory (Goldman, 1999, pp. 172–173). 

  Given the rather amorphous and diffuse nature of social epistemology its domain, approach, structure and value are highly contested. This is reflected in the two approaches that inform social epistemology: the sociology of knowledge tradition and the classical analytical epistemology tradition with its new-found interest in the social dimensions to knowledge. Implicit in the former is that all knowledge is social in character and hence this tradition has a non-normative flavor to it: the tripartite concepts of truth, justification, and rationality, the sine qua non of orthodox epistemology going back to Plato, appear to be committed to normative nihilism.3 Indeed because of the downplaying or even dispensing of these concepts, some quarters within orthodox epistemology tend not even to recognize this project as epistemology. 

  By the same token, many within the sociology of knowledge tradition consider the orthodox project as redundant and outmoded, unable to address the all pervasive role sociality has on human experience, its manifold practices and ultimately on knowledge and truth. We have chosen to employ the distinction of philosophical social epistemology (PSE) to stand for the tradition variously known as ‘‘orthodox,’’ ‘‘analytical,’’ ‘‘classical’’ or ‘‘veritistic’’ social epistemology, and sociological social epistemology (SSE) to denote the sociological tradition. This is not to say that the latter is not or cannot be philosophical – it merely marks a difference in structural emphasis. 

  While there is certainly a distinction to be drawn between PSE and SSE, the distinction is not as neat as many would like to believe: there are a bewildering number of cross-currents that feed into both variants of current social epistemology. Indeed, as we will illustrate, both PSE and SSE have strong stigmergic concerns. SSE, for instance Marxist-inspired explanations of human behavior, tends to be primarily immergent: to be under the influence of ‘‘false consciousness’’ is in essence to be subject to a distortive miscognition. It should be noted that while individualism is typically associated with an anti-collectivist critique, some Marxist theorists such John Elster accept methodological individualism to counter a Marxist functionalism that posits a purpose without a purposive actor (Elster, 1982). 

  Conversely, forms of holism are to be found in conservative social theory. PSE, on the other hand, seeks to redress classical epistemology’s myopia in giving some credence to the view that individual belief is mediated by a social context. In the complex term ‘‘social epistemology’’ does the element ‘‘social’’ denote a social aspect (the corollary being that there is a non-social aspect) or is all epistemology intrinsically social? How does one apportion the extent to which individuals’ cognitive states are causally dependent upon their social milieu? These are the central questions that animate meta-discussion of social epistemology and indeed in the philosophy of mind, manifest in the discussion between narrow and broad content in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind (in social epistemology see Gilbert, 2004 and Tuomela, 2004; in cognitive science/mind see Clark, 1996, 1997, 2001, 2003; Clark & Chalmers, 1998; Wilson, 2004). 

  Given the vast vocabulary denoting the multiplicity of intermediary institutions that comprises a social system the question is whether all statements about social institutions can be reduced without remainder to statements referring purely to individuals and their interactions. Methodological Individualism (MI) is the label for the view that such replacement is possible. Social Holism (SH) denies this possibility. It posits the idea that novel features are neither predictable nor reducible to simpler constituents. A more interesting distinction is between groups that have mental properties which their individual members do not share and the corollary of whether individuals manifest certain properties only as a part of a group (Wilson, 2004, p. 281). It is important to note that emergence (novel behavior emerging from a lower level specification of a system) and its corollary immergence (individual interaction informed by a global state of affairs)4 are concepts that go hand-in-hand: stigmergically speaking, there is a perpetual iterative looping (Kennedy et al., 2001, pp. 323– 324; Gureckis & Goldstone, 2006). This iterative looping attenuates the PSE and SSE fault-line.

  It is hardly contentious to make the claim that most of the knowledge we as individuals possess, is second-hand or emanates from some third party. This fact alone is not of concern – what is a critical concern is assessing the veritistic inducing merit of the formation, acquisition, mediation, transmission and dissemination of knowledge as mediated through the social network and its constituent nodal gatekeepers. This is implicit in three prominent areas of overlapping interest to PSE – testimony-based belief; the market place of commodities; and the technology and economics of communication (Goldman, 1999). We consider each in turn.

  By testimony we denote a broad notion of expertise, trust and authority. Specifically, stigmergy addresses the epidemiological character of knowledge that informs the degree of expertise, the degree of trust and the degree of authority that animates social nodes and social networks. First a little network theory. Newman (in press) outlines some standard centrality measures to assess networks. Closeness centrality and betweenness centrality run on the concept of network paths. A geodesic path is the shortest path between a pair of vertices, and the geodesic distance, the number of edges traversed along such a path. The closeness centrality of vertex i is the mean geodesic distance from vertex i to every other vertex. 

  Closeness centrality is lower for vertices that are more central, i.e. have a shorter network distance on average to other vertices. The between- ness centrality of vertex i is the fraction of geodesic paths between other vertices that i falls on. Stigmergically speaking, it measures the extent to which a node is directly connected only to those other nodes that are not directly connected to each other. Centrality measures examine which agent or node has central influence within a given network. The simplest centrality measure is degree centrality: the degree of a vertex in a network is the number of edges attached to it – nodes with more connections tend to be more powerful. 

  Degree centrality is illustrated by an example from drawn from Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point (cited in Solomon, 2006a). Gladwell analyses why Paul Revere’s ride and not William Dawes’ ride in the Americal War of Independence (both carrying news of British troop movements), became associated with the state of events. On Gladwell’s analysis Revere was a ‘‘connector’’ (a social node), and as such he knew who the ‘‘salesmen’’ were (who would be susceptible to propagate and in turn re-infect), but he also knew who the ‘‘Mavens’’ were (the first adopters). 

  This phenomenon, epidemiological in character, has informed the recent notion of viral marketing. Like Sperber (1996) and Goldman (2001) we are skeptical about the strict replication of ideas as claimed by memetics: there do not appear to be any promising candidates to populate an ontology of cultural replication in an analogous way that there is in biology. The stigmergic interest lies in the stochastic spread of a marker through a population of strangers. The marketer’s hope is that a strong pheromone trail will translate into heightened awareness of a given product, which in turn will convert into sales. Such strategies, if successful, are both financially and logistically highly efficient. Amazon’s ‘‘recommendation’’ algorithm is probably the most well-known example of an epidemiological transmission – more on this in the next section.(paper代写)

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