Grounds for trust: Essential Epistemic Opacity and Computational Reliabilism
Abstract
Several philosophical issues in connection with computer simulations rely on the assumption that results of simulations are trustworthy. Examples of these include the debate on the experimental role of computer simulations Parker2009, Morrison2009, the nature of computer data Barberousse2013, Humphreys2013, and the explanatory power of computer simulations Krohs2008, Duran2017. The aim of this article is to show that these authors are right in assuming that the results of computer simulations are to be trusted when computer simulations are reliable processes. After a short reconstruction of the problem of epistemic opacity, the article elaborates extensively on computational reliabilism, a specified form of process reliabilism with computer simulations located at the center. The article ends with a discussion of four sources for computational reliabilism, namely, verification and validation, robustness analysis for computer simulations, a history of (un)successful implementations, and the role of expert knowledge in simulations.
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