Experimental Epistemology

is the use of the experimental methods of the cognitive sciences to shed light on debates within epistemology, the philosophical study of knowledge and rationally justified belief. pdf

Some skeptics contend that ‘experimental epistemology’ (or ‘Experimental Philosophy’ more generally) is an oxymoron. If you are doing Experiments, they say, you are not doing philosophy. You are doing psychology or some other scientific activity.

⇒ Experiment vs Exploration ⇒ Education can thus be reconstructed as the experimental and learning as the exploratory form in which individuals open up the world.

It is true that the part of experimental philosophy that is devoted to carrying out experiments and performing statistical analyses on the data obtained is primarily a scientific rather than a philosophical activity. However, because the experiments are designed to shed light on debates within philosophy, the experiments themselves grow out of mainstream philosophical debate and their results are injected back into the debate, with an eye to moving the debate forward. This part of experimental philosophy is indeed philosophy—not philosophy as usual perhaps, but philosophy nonetheless.

Monica Anderson is an Experimental AI Epistemologist. We are a pretty small crowd. Since January 1, 2001 I have used Deep Neural Networks of my own design to test my theories about Learning, Understanding, Reasoning, Abstraction and other Epistemological concepts. site

Science was created to stop people from overrating correlations and jumping to erroneous conclusions on scant evidence and then sharing those conclusions with others, leading to compounded mistakes and much wasted effort.

Consequently, promoting a Holistic Stance has long been a career-ending move in academia, and especially in Computer Science.

Ignorance of these stances leads people to develop significant personal cognitive dissonances which is why discussions about these issues are very unpopular among people with solid STEM educations. But the dichotomy is real; we need to deal with it.

Epistemology is, just like Philosophy in general, an armchair thinking exercise and the results are judged on internal coherence and consistency with other accepted theory rather than by proofs or experiments.

However, the availability of Understanding Machines such as DNNs now suddenly provides the opportunity for actual experiments in Epistemology. post