From their beginnings in 1908, U.S. credit unions have grown into a trillion-dollar industry with more than 100 million members. Despite many similarities, credit unions have always differed fundamentally from banks. One fundamental difference was that share accounts in credit unions, unlike bank deposits, were not debt. Thus, credit unions had opt...
AbstractIn much of the current academic and public discussion, conspiracy theories are portrayed as a negative phenomenon, linked to misinformation, mistrust in experts and institutions, and political propaganda. Rather surprisingly, however, philosophers working on this topic have been reluctant to incorporate a negatively evaluative aspect when e...
Abstract Questions about how closure is achieved in disputes involving new observational or experimental claims have highlighted the role of bodily knowledge possibly irreducible to written experimental protocols and instructions how to build and operate instruments. This essay asks similar questions about a scenario that is both related and signif...
This essay is about the unique role of proper nouns at the intersection of knowledge and property, both tangible and intangible. Nouns are central to any form of property and credit, from a person's name listed on a property deed or copyright registration, to the name of an artist to whom a work is attributed, or that of a scientist after whom a di...
Research devoted to characterizing phenomena is underappreciated in philosophical accounts of scientific inquiry. This paper develops a diachronic analysis of research over 100 years that led to the recognition of two related electrophysiological phenomena, the membrane potential and the action potential. A diachronic perspective allows for reconci...
The United States’ long-standing approach to the People’s Republic of China—“engagement”—is at an end, replaced by a tougher approach, labeled “strategic competition.” Foregrounding the role of knowledge communities in the making of US foreign policy, I show that engagement’s demise followed less a rational process responding to shifts in Chinese b...
Why do people who disagree about one subject tend to disagree about other subjects as well? In this paper, we introduce a model to explore this phenomenon of ‘epistemic factionization’. Agents attempt to discover the truth about multiple propositions by testing the world and sharing evidence gathered. But agents tend to mistrust evidence shared by ...
Scientists are generally subject to social pressures, including pressures to conform with others in their communities, that affect achievement of their epistemic goals. Here we analyze a network epistemology model in which agents, all else being equal, prefer to take actions that conform with those of their neighbors. This preference for conformity...
