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Virtues for agents in directed social networks

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Abstract

In the age of the Internet, people have increased access to information along multiple dimensions. It might seem that we are on our way to an epistemic utopia in which we spend less time and effort on basic cognitive tasks while devoting more time and effort to complex deliberation. However, though there are many accurate sources on the Internet, they must be sifted from the spammers, concern trolls, practical jokers, conspiracy theorists, counterintelligence sock-puppets, and outright liars who also proliferate online. We can approach this problem via the individual or via the network, asking two questions. First, holding the topology of the network constant, which moral and epistemic dispositions (e.g., trust, distrust, skepticism, curiosity) are conducive to successful inquiry by nodes at different positions within it? Second, holding the distribution of people’s epistemic dispositions constant, which network topologies are more likely to produce epistemic goods and avoid epistemic ills? To answer these questions, we need to combine virtue-theoretic reflection on individual dispositions with a nuanced understanding of the dynamics of networks. In this paper, I highlight and explore some important properties of such networks and connect those properties with dispositions that make someone an excellent member of an epistemic network.

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Notes

  1. See Alfano and Klein (2019) for more.

  2. See Alfano (2013, 2014, 2015, 2016), Alfano and Skorburg (2017a, b), and Alfano and Robinson (2017).

  3. For those who are not extremely online, spammers send a large number of irrelevant messages, often with the hope of getting money or other resources from recipients. Concern trolls pretend to care about a movement in complicated ways in order to distract advocates for that movement from their main task into pointless infighting. Counterintelligence sock-puppets are employed by their governments to impersonate citizens of other countries or dissidents within their own countries in order to muddy the epistemic and political waters.

  4. For more on the notion of epistemic vulnerability, see Gilson (2011) and Chinnery (2013).

  5. http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database. Accessed 15 September 2015.

  6. https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-releases-2015-preliminary-statistics-for-law-enforcement-officers-killed-in-the-line-of-duty. Accessed 15 September 2015.

  7. http://www.gallup.com/poll/186308/americans-say-crime-rising.aspx. Accessed 15 September 2016.

  8. For a book-length case study of this, see Benkler et al. (2020).

  9. For further thoughts on the potential benefits of severing connections of trustful communication in certain contexts, see Peels and Blaauw (2016).

  10. Thanks to Dennis Whitcomb for this formulation.

  11. The literature on transactive memories (Dixon and Gould 1996) may also be construed in terms of virtuous (and vicious) echoes. Thanks to Alessandra Tanesini for pointing this out.

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Acknowledgements

This publication was supported by a subaward agreement from the University of Connecticut with funds provided by Grant No. 58942 from John Templeton Foundation and by grants from the John Templeton Foundation (#61378) and the Australian Research Council (DP190101507). Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of UConn or John Templeton Foundation.

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    Mark Alfano

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Alfano, M. Virtues for agents in directed social networks. Synthese 199, 8423–8442 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03169-6

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