Symposium Lead Essay—Conflict of Interest: Opening Up New Territories

Wiersma, Miriam; Lipworth, Wendy; Komesaroff, Paul A.; Kerridge, Ian

doi:10.1007/s11673-020-09987-6

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 20 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…If COI are not regulated, they pose a risk for agents and their social group (see e.g. Almassi 2017;Brody 2011;Rodwin 2018;Wiersma et al 2020).…”

Section: A Systematic Problemmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Epistemic Dependence, Cognitive Irrationality, and Epistemic Conflicts of Interests

Müller¹

2022

Logos &Amp; Episteme

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

When an agent A depends on an agent B to promote one of A's epistemic goals, this will often involve B's forming and sharing of true beliefs. However, as is well documented in research on cognitive irrationality, agents are disposed to form and share false-but-useful beliefs in a lot of circumstances. The dependence relation is thus at risk of becoming negative: A might adopt false beliefs from B and thus be unable to promote their epistemic goal. I propose that we can employ the notion of an epistemic conflict of interest [ECOI] to capture the kinds of problems that epistemically interdependent agents face. Much like familiar cases of conflict of interests—e.g., related to government officials—in ECOI an agent is subject to a normatively primary interest—roughly to form and share true beliefs—that stands in conflict with normatively secondary interests. I focus on secondary interests documented in the aforementioned research on cognitive irrationality. The resulting framework addresses an explanatory gap in the literature on social epistemic norms by making explicit why there’s a need for these norms to regulate our epistemic lives. Lastly, I show how the ECOI-framework furthermore allows us to make sense of and amend norm regulation failures.

show abstract

“…If COI are not regulated, they pose a risk for agents and their social group (see e.g. Almassi 2017;Brody 2011;Rodwin 2018;Wiersma et al 2020).…”

Section: A Systematic Problemmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Although there is a lively literature in applied ethics on general conflicts of interest (e.g., Almassi 2017;Brody 2011;Rodwin 2018;Wiersma et al 2020) outside of select professional contexts their epistemic dimension has only been given little attention.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%