The received view in collective epistemology is that group belief must be understood in inflationary terms, with the most popular version being the joint acceptance account. Very roughly, group belief is the result of members jointly agreeing to accept a proposition as the group’s, even if no member believes it herself. In this chapter, this orthodoxy is challenged by showing that joint acceptance accounts lack the resources to explain how groups can lie and bullshit, and, more generally, it is argued that group belief cannot be determined by processes that are under the direct voluntary control of the members. A new view, the Group Agent Account, is then defended, according to which group belief is determined in part by relations among the bases of the beliefs of members, where these relations arise only at the collective level, but is also partly constituted by the individual beliefs of members.
What it Might Be like to Be a Group Agent
