Brian Ball

PolyGraphs is an ongoing computational humanities project in social epistemology. It uses computational methods to simulate the effects of mis- and disinformation on communities of rational agents, exploring the relative roles of social network structures, informational environments, and information processing strategies in influencing epistemic attitudes.
With financial support from the Royal Society and others under an APEX Award from 2021-2023, a scalable framework for philosophical simulations was developed in Python, and is available on GitHub (https://github.com/alexandroskoliousis/polygraphs). This enables researchers to perform experiments – effectively, batches of simulations of the (practical and theoretical) behaviour of these communities under various configurations, i.e. sets of values for the independent variables. Running these simulations generates synthetic data, which need to be analyzed and interpreted.
As a DISKAH Fellow and through engagement with DRI, my research on the PolyGraphs simulation framework focuses on the potential to be further generalized – notably to new models (of rational agents, of the communities they belong to, and of the informational environments in which they operate), and to new empirical/real-world and not merely artificially generated data sets, e.g. to model climate mis- and disinformation, or decision-making in business contexts.