Franz Dietrich
‘Economics & Philosophy’
Jury Theorems and Social Epistemology
Social epistemology often relies on jury theorems to defend the 'wisdom of crowds'. But the classic jury theorem, going back to Condorcet (1785), is limited in scope and misleading in its premises and conclusions. Often in collaboration with Christian List or Kai Spiekermann, I aim to extend and revise the picture by introducing improved jury theorems and studying their epistemological significance. Genuinely plausible jury theorems cannot reach the optimistic conclusion that 'huge' groups are virtually infallible in their majority judgments. By aiming for more plausible conclusions based on more plausible premises, we hope to rehabilitate the jury-theorem approach to social truth-tracking and to deliver convincing epistemic arguments for democratic decision-making.
Related Work
- Deliberation and the Wisdom of Crowds (with K. Spiekermann), Economic Theory, 2024 [supplementary material]
- Generative Democracy: New Foundations for Democratic Theory (with K. Spiekermann), book in progress for Oxford University Press
- Jury Theorems (with K. Spiekermann), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2021
- Social Epistemology [a review] (with K. Spiekermann). In: M. Knauff & W. Spohn (eds.) The Handbook of Rationality, MIT Press, 2021, pp. 579-590
- Jury Theorems (with K. Spiekermann). In: M. Fricker et al. (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Social Epistemology. New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2020, pp. 386–396 [preprint]
- A theory of Bayesian groups, Noûs 53: 708-736, 2019 [preprint]
- Introduction to the special issue 'Beliefs in Groups' of Theory and Decision (with W. Rabinowicz), Theory and Decision 85: 1-4, 2018 [preprint]
- Belief revision generalized: a joint characterization of Bayes's and Jeffrey's rules (with C. List and R. Bradley), Journal of Economic Theory 162: 352-371, 2016
[preprint]
- For additional results about Adams's rule and the dual-Jeffrey rule see the earlier version titled A unified characterization of belief revision rules
- Judgment aggregation in search for the truth (with I. Bozbay and H. Peters), Games and Economic Behavior 87: 571-590, 2014 [preprint]
- Independent opinions? On the causal foundations of belief formation and jury theorems (with K. Spiekermann), Mind 122(487): 655-685, 2013 [preprint]
- Epistemic democracy with defensible premises (with K. Spiekermann), Economics and Philosophy 29(1): 87-120, 2013 [preprint]
- Bayesian group belief, Social Choice and Welfare 35(4): 595-626, 2010 [preprint]
- The premises of Condorcet's jury theorem are not simultaneously justified, Episteme - a Journal of Social Epistemology 5(1): 56-73, 2008 [preprint]
- General representation of epistemically optimal procedures, Social Choice and Welfare 26(2): 263-283, 2006 [preprint]
- A model of jury decisions where all jurors have the same evidence (with C. List), Synthese 142: 175-202, 2004 [preprint]