{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.03318494536624848, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0169971671388102, 'mean_word_length': 5.3061224489795915, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Extending the Hegselmann-Krause Model I

Hegselmann and Krause have developed a simple yet powerful computational model for studying the opinion dynamics in societies of epistemically interacting truth-seeking agents. We present various extensions of this model and show their relevance to the investigation of socio-epistemic questions, with an emphasis on normative questions. Agent-based computer simulations have been successfully employed in the study of broadly social processes for over thirty years now. Researchers have investigated by these means such diverse phenomena as the spread of wealth in a population, the emergence and evolution of friendship networks, integration and segregation of different racial groups, the transmission of cultural values, and the propagation of infectious diseases. It is only in the past decade that agent-based simulations have come to be used for studying distinctively socio-epistemic (or socio-doxastic) questions, such as, most notably, questions concerning the roles various types of social interaction play in the acquisition and transmission of beliefs and knowledge. Pioneering work in this area has been carried out by Rainer Hegselmann and Ulrich Krause, who have developed, and systematically investigated, a simple yet already quite powerful model for simulating the opinion dynamics in societies of epistemically interacting truthseeking agents. By thus initiating what they have termed “Computer Aided Social Epistemology,” they have, in our eyes, made an important contribution to social epistemology. After all, social epistemology can be considered to be as much a branch of philosophy as of social science, and one may thus expect that it is able to profit from the deployment of simulation tools no less than the more traditional social sciences have been (and still are). Nevertheless, it has been generally recognized that, in addition to considerable virtues, the Hegselmann–Krause (HK) model also has some important inherent limitations, these being largely due to the fact that the model is starkly idealized in several respects. The present paper proposes various extensions of the model that do away 1See Epstein and Axtell [1996] and the references given there. 2See, e.g., Hegselmann and Krause [2002], [2005], and [2006]; see also Dittmer [2001], Fortunato [2004], and Lorenz [2007]. Similar work is to be found in Deffuant et al. [2000], Weisbuch et al. [2002], and Ramirez-Cano and Pitt [2006].