Joint epistemic action: Some applications

The notion of a joint action is a familiar one in the philosophical literature. Moreover, the notion of epistemic action has recently been discussed in the literature. Elsewhere I have suggested that these two notions can be brought together to yield the notion of joint epistemic action and provided a relational individualist analysis of joint epistemic actions. In this article I extend this analysis and show how this extended analysis applies to different kinds of important epistemic institutional phenomena: (1) voting in a democracy; (2) financial benchmarks, e.g. LIBOR (the London interbank offered (interest) rate) and; (3) profiling using computer databases. Each of these institutional mechanisms is important in its own right. Moreover, each is a species of a more widespread generic social form that I refer to as joint institutional mechanisms which, I suggest, are ubiquitous yet somewhat diverse in character. Accordingly, there is a need to distinguish them from the more basic phenomenon of joint action but also to taxonomise them. The latter is a large task to which this article is a first step.