Individuals and Institutions: Essays on Social and Political Epistemic Systems

This thesis is a collection of three papers in social epistemology. Three epistemic systems of great importance for modern society are studied respectively: the expert system, the democratic system, and the financial system. Throughout the three papers, I try to pay additional attention to the interactions between individuals and institutions, which explains the title of this dissertation. In the first paper, I discuss ways in which institutional remedies are crucial for individual epistemic performance. In the second paper, I argue that the individual moral requirements of citizens (i.e., participants of democracy) should not be overlooked in presence of the epistemic aggregation effect of democracy at the institutional level. In the third paper, I analyze how individual motives in financial markets and the epistemic functions of financial markets influence and interact with each other. The proper functioning of each of the three institutions, I believe, is necessary for achieving a good society in our time. In a good society, neither the individual aspects nor the institutional aspects should be overlooked.