A model of the epistemic value of open-mindedness

This repository is associated with the paper titled When should one be open-minded? on the epistemic value of open-mindedness (accepted for publication at Philosophical Studies). The paper investigates the conditions under which open-mindedness will be epistemically valuable. One of the central features of the analysis is that it represents an agent's competence and evaluative capacities using gradual scales. Another novel feature is that it starts with three realistic assumptions: 1. people are not perfectly competent in forming their own opinions, 2. people are not perfectly capable of evaluating the claims put forward by others, and 3. people can only give consideration to a limited number of arguments or opinions.

This repository contains code for computing the epistemic benefits of open-mindedness, and for creating the figures of the paper. These results are visualized as heatmaps such as:

Although the paper only focuses on a limited area of the full parameter space, one can use (or extend) the repository to consider other areas of the parameter space.

1. Setup

To run the project, you first need to install the required packages

commandline pip install -r requirements.txt

2. Usage

To create the figures, just run the main script: commandline python main.py A folder new_figures with figures will be created, which correspond to the figures in the paper.

3. Organization of the repository

Accuracy calculations

The central calculations can be found in accuracy_calculator.py, which contains the central class Agent. The key function of the class is accuracy_open_mind, which calculates the accuracy of an agent with given parameter settings.

Figures

The scripts for creating the figures are in the folder generate_figures. The script plot_functions.py contains the global plotting functions and configurations; each of the other scripts corresponds to one or multiple figures.

Find tipping point evaluation content

One of the figures requires us to compute the tipping point where open-mindedness becomes epistemically beneficial above a given content evaluative capacity. The script to compute this tipping point can be found in find_tipping_evaluation_content.py and the corresponding method.

4. Licence and citation

This repository accompanies an academic paper. Please cite the paper as follows:

• Duijf, H. (forthcoming). When should one be open-minded? Philosophical Studies. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-024-02137-3.

If appropriate, you can cite this repository as follows: - - Duijf, H. (2023). A model of the epistemic value of open-mindedness (v1.0.1). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7989054.

Released under the MIT licence.