Epistemic Free Riding

In epistemology and philosophy of science there has been a growing interest in group inquiry and ways that it might differ fundamentally from individual inquiry. The interest in this topic is understandable. Science is predominately collaborative work. If we want to understand the epistemic success of science, we need to understand group inquiry and it is an important part of this to learn whether it differs from individual inquiry. Philip Kitcher (1990) initiated the focus on scenarios where the norms or best epistemic practices for individuals working alone might come apart from the norms or best epistemic practices for individuals working in groups. Kitcher shows how it is possible for individual scientists who care only about things such as fame and money to nevertheless structure their inquiry in a way that is conducive to finding the truth. Others have carried this work further looking at various ways that group inquiry can differ in important ways from individual inquiry.1 Uniting much of this work under one heading, Mayo-Wilson et al. (2011) have recently investigated different versions of what they call the Independence Thesis, roughly, the claim that rational individuals can form irrational groups and that rational groups might be composed of irrational individuals. In this paper, my goal is to show that some surprising empirical evidence about group problem-solving reveals that groups will often face cases where it is epistemically best for each individual to do one thing, even though this is ultimately epistemically worse for the group. Thus, I will be presenting an epistemic analogue of a free riding scenario. Free riding is familiar in the practical domain, but has seldom been discussed in the epistemic domain, so it is of some interest to investigate whether there are such scenarios. More than that, however, I’ll show how the particular epistemic free riding