Patterns of Rationality by Tommaso Bertolotti

Author:Tommaso Bertolotti
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

The benefits of gossip, which have been fascinating sociobiology, can indeed be framed properly through an epistemological modeling. As shown in the precedent sections, individuals pay the abduct ive costs of gossip, thus allowing—for the benefit of an abstract subject (the group )—a crystallization of information that is “decently warranted,” in the epistemological sense that it has been more corroborated than falsified so far. The epistemic asymmetry between the consistency of the IKB with respect to the GKB was already introduced in Sect. 7.2.3, but there seems to be an asymmetry concerning the inferential level as well: albeit gossip maintains a chiefly abduct ive and hypothetical dimension, two broad inferential areas can be individuated, at least from a theoretical perspective. The inferences performed at group level (that is, on the information belonging to the Group Knowledge Base ) are not anymore chiefly simple fallac ies regarding the person, but rather more plausible abduct ions performed on rich clues such as the persistence and diffusion of information and its corroboration by independent sources, to reach decently plausible conclusions (“This is the third time that somebody, for different reasons, tells me that Petra could be having an affair: I’m starting to believe you might be right...”): it is as if a group member was able to tell the difference between information that consist in the personal elaborated addition to her Individual Knowledge Base , thus concerned by a certain epistemic regime, and information that belongs to her Individual Knowledge Base in virtue of belonging to the Group Knowledge Base . The epistemic value of the information acquired through gossip, therefore, depends on how easily an agent can access to the Group Knowledge Base and update her own Knowledge Base : it is strategically effective to rely on gossip only if the agent can operationalize in a different way those beliefs that are abduct ively produced at individual level (still to be forwarded, for them to be assessed, to the Group Knowledge Base ) and those that are abduct ively produced by the epistemic community relying on different clues. Groups, as instantiating epistemic synerg ies (gossip, in this case), behave smartly if their members can make the distinction I just sketched out, and can mostly rely on best-updated Knowledge Base s.

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