Seminar on History and Philosophy of Science

Abstract: This paper contributes to the lively literature on formal social epistemology. It presents a puzzle from the statistics literature, known as Stein's paradox, and explains this paradox by reference to a discussion on the aggregation of probabilistic expert judgments. The novelty of the paper resides in applying the lessons from Stein's paradox in the context of social epistemology. This delivers insights into the role of diversity in the aggregation of judgments.