What and How to Learn from Epistemic Network Simulations
What and How to Learn from Epistemic Network Simulations
This talk was delivered as part of the "Building Better Epistemic Networks" workshop, hosted by the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne (September 2019).
Philosophers and social scientists have invoked highly idealised agent-based simulations to explore the relationship between communication network structure among the agents, and their collective ability to learn about the “world”. These simulation results have been thought-provoking, but it is unclear how they can support claims about their real-world modelling targets. In this talk I discussed the nature and limitations of knowledge derived from such epistemic network simulations, and the conditions under which they might be (cautiously) used to inform policy decisions.