Flocking Together: Free Energy, Bayesian Inference, and the Social Nature of Science

Date

2025-01-01

Author

Davoody Benı, Majıd

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This paper advances a naturalistic defence of Alexander Bird’s account of science as a form of social knowing, as well as his theory of scientific inference articulated through superobjective Bayesianism, by grounding them in recent developments in cognitive science and theoretical neuroscience. Drawing on the Free Energy Principle (FEP) and the methodology of Bayesian adversarial collaboration, the paper argues that scientific practice is irreducibly social and that scientific inference cannot be reduced to individual credences. Rather, inference arises from distributed, formalised practices that instantiate computationally tractable mechanisms for theory evaluation—mechanisms that balance empirical adequacy with explanatory virtues. Central to this framework is the use of generative models that encode theoretical virtues as priors and constrain model comparison. This approach links the biological plausibility of inference as free energy minimisation with the naturalistic plausibility of Bird’s notion of superobjective Bayesianism.

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https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?partnerID=HzOxMe3b&scp=105016204766&origin=inward
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/115916

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Department of Philosophy, Article