Group Knowledge

2020 ◽  
pp. 111-137
Author(s):  
Jennifer Lackey
Keyword(s):  
Functional Role ◽  
Scientific Community ◽  
Social Knowledge ◽  
Single Individual ◽  
Collective Knowledge ◽  
Group Knowledge ◽  
Group Members ◽  
Group Belief

In this chapter, two influential kinds of purported group knowledge that pose challenges to my account of justified group belief are examined. The first is often referred to as “social knowledge,” a paradigmatic instance of which is the so-called knowledge possessed by the scientific community, where no single individual knows a proposition, but the information plays a functional role in the community. The second is “collective knowledge,” where knowledge may be imputed to a group by aggregating bits of information had by its individual members. It is shown that both social knowledge and collective knowledge sever the crucial connection between knowledge and action, and open the door to serious abuses, not only epistemically, but morally and legally as well. Bits of information that are merely accessible to group members, or individual instances of knowledge that are aggregated with no communication, do not amount to group knowledge in any robust sense.

Group Belief: Lessons from Lies and Bullshit

2020 ◽  
Vol 94 (1) ◽  
pp. 185-208 ◽  
Author(s):  
I—Jennifer Lackey
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Sexual Orientation ◽  
Individual Member ◽  
Single Individual ◽  
Adequate Account ◽  
White House ◽  
Group Members ◽  
Group Belief ◽  
Literature Group ◽  
Trump Administration

Abstract Groups and other sorts of collective entities are frequently said to believe things. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, for instance, was asked by reporters at White House press conferences whether the Trump administration ‘believes in climate change’ or ‘believes that slavery is wrong’. Similarly, it is said on the website of the Aclu of Illinois that the organization ‘firmly believes that rights should not be limited based on a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity’. A widespread philosophical view is that belief on the part of a group’s members is neither necessary nor sufficient for group belief. In other words, groups are said to be able to believe that p even when not a single individual member of the group believes that p. In this paper, I challenge this view by focusing on two phenomena that have been entirely ignored in the literature: group lies and group bullshit. I show that when group belief is understood in terms of actions over which group members have voluntarily control, as is standardly thought, paradigmatic instances of a group lying or bullshitting end up counting as a group believing. Thus we need to look elsewhere for an adequate account of group belief.

Can Groups Assert That P?

2019 ◽  
pp. 326-344
Author(s):  
Deborah Tollefsen
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Single Individual ◽  
Constitutive Rule ◽  
The Past ◽  
Group Members ◽  
The Common ◽  
Declarative Statement ◽  
John Macfarlane

When a group or institution issues a declarative statement, what sort of speech act is this? Is it the assertion of a single individual (perhaps the group’s spokesperson or leader) or the assertion of all or most of the group members? Or is there a sense in which the group itself asserts that p? If assertion is a speech act, then who is the actor in the case of group assertion? These are the questions this chapter aims to address. Whether groups themselves can make assertions or whether a group of individuals can jointly assert that p depends, in part, on what sort of speech act assertion is. The literature on assertion has burgeoned over the past few years, and there is a great deal of debate regarding the nature of assertion. John MacFarlane has helpfully identified four theories of assertion. Following Sandy Goldberg, we can call these the attitudinal account, the constitutive rule account, the common-ground account, and the commitment account. I shall consider what group assertion might look like under each of these accounts and doing so will help us to examine some of the accounts of group assertion (often presented as theories of group testimony) on offer. I shall argue that, of the four accounts, the commitment account can best be extended to make sense of group assertion in all its various forms.

Justified Group Belief, Group Knowledge and Being in a Position to Know

Episteme ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Jakob Koscholke
Keyword(s):  
Sufficient Conditions ◽  
Single Group ◽  
Group Knowledge ◽  
Group Belief ◽  
Group Member

Abstract Jennifer Lackey has recently presented a new and lucid analysis of the notion of justified group belief, i.e. a set of individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for a group to justifiedly believe some proposition. In this paper, however, I argue that the analysans she proposes is too narrow: one of the conditions she takes to be necessary for justified group belief is not necessary. To substantiate this claim, I present a potential counterexample to Lackey's analysis where a group knows and thus justifiedly believes some proposition but there is no single group member who actually believes that proposition. I close by defending the example against the objection that the group in question does not know but is at most in a position to know the target proposition.

Bioethical Considerations on Cloning and Twinning

1997 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 135-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Milani-Comparetti
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Scientific Community ◽  
The Body ◽  
Single Individual ◽  
Biological Processes ◽  
Deep Impact ◽  
Potential Applications ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Immortality Of The Soul

The subject of cloning has had a deep impact on both public opinion and the scientific community, asking themselves about its meaning, its possible extension to humans, its potential applications and implications.Cloning was often presented by the media as a technique that would allow perpetuating oneself.The resulting impact of cloning on public opinion might be interpreted, in part at least, as making real the dream of reincarnation.In the Christian faith cloning, as a hypothesis of reincarnation, has no place, since the soul is already immortal, while the body dies (excepting its reunion with its soul on the resurrection of the last day).Thus a person's immortality is a dogma of faith for the believer, but only as immortality of the soul, that will rejoin its body only at the end of earthly time, while in our “earthly time” the body is-mortal.The body's mortality is part of natural biological processes. Only in primitive organisms, such as bacteria, and in organisms reproducing through scions or similar processes (as farmers and florists well know) it is harder to set a definite moment for the birth or death of a single individual. But in sexually reproducing higher organisms, such as we are, the cycle of individual life is clearly encompassed and expressed by the well-known sequence whereby each individual “is born, grows, reproduces and dies”.If we consider the individual in all its manifestations – what we geneticists call the “phenotype”, resulting from the interactions between genotype and environment – each subject is undoubtedly endowed with his individuality.The repetition of the very same genotype does not mean repetition of the same individual, as clearly evidenced by the observation of identical twins (monozygotic, i.e., both derived from the same fertilized egg, the zygote) who, much as so closely resembling each other, are each endowed with his or her unique individuality.

What Is Justified Group Belief?

2020 ◽  
pp. 55-110
Author(s):  
Jennifer Lackey
Keyword(s):  
Group Level ◽  
Epistemic Agent ◽  
Justified Belief ◽  
Group Members ◽  
Group Belief ◽  
Normative Constraints ◽  
Epistemic Obligations

This chapter, develops and defends a view of justified group belief—the Group Epistemic Agent Account: groups are understood as epistemic agents in their own right, ones that have evidential and normative constraints that arise only at the group level, such as a sensitivity to the relations among the evidence possessed by group members and the epistemic obligations that arise via membership in the group. These constraints bear significantly on whether groups have justified belief. At the same time, however, group justifiedness is still largely a matter of member justifiedness, where the latter is understood as involving both beliefs and their bases. The result is a view that neither inflates nor deflates group epistemology, but instead recognizes that a group’s justified beliefs are constrained by, but are not ultimately reducible to, members’ justified beliefs.

scholarly journals Who do you trust? Wild birds use social knowledge to avoid being deceived

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (22) ◽  
pp. eaba2862
Author(s):  
Filipe C. R. Cunha ◽  
Michael Griesser
Keyword(s):  
High Risk ◽  
Field Experiments ◽  
Group Living ◽  
Wild Birds ◽  
Social Knowledge ◽  
Human Language ◽  
Group Members ◽  
Cooperation Partners ◽  
Territorial Group

Many species give deceptive warning calls, enabled by the high risk of ignoring them. In Siberian jays, a territorial, group-living bird, individuals give warning calls toward perched predators and mob them. However, intruding neighbors can emit these warning calls in the absence of predators to access food, but breeders often ignore these calls. Playback field experiments show that breeders flee sooner and return later after warning calls of former group members than those of neighbors or unknown individuals. Thus, breeders respond appropriately only to warning calls of previous cooperation partners. This mechanism facilitates the evolution and maintenance of communication vulnerable to deceptive signaling. This conclusion also applies to human language because of its cooperative nature and thus, its vulnerability to deception.

Group Knowledge Analyzed

Episteme ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raimo Tuomela
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Community ◽  
Third World ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Abstract Entity ◽  
National Elections ◽  
Traditional Epistemology ◽  
Group Knowledge ◽  
The World ◽  
Belief States

One can speak of knowledge in an impersonal sense: It is accepted as knowledge that copper expands when heated, that the capital of Finland is Helsinki, and that no one under 18 years of age is entitled to vote in national elections. Such knowledge is not an abstract entity floating around in some kind of Platonic “third world”. Rather it is knowledge that some actual agent or agents actually have or have had as contents of their appropriate mental states (belief states) and that others on this basis can have as their knowledge. People find out things either by themselves or together, and often what they come to believe about the world is true and more or less well-grounded, thus knowledge much in the sense of traditional epistemology. We may say then that there isknowledge in groupsor communities, e.g. in the scientific community, that such and such is the case, and that in some casesgroups as groups know; and in all these cases there must be or have been actual knowers.

scholarly journals Functional and druggability analysis of the SARS-CoV-2 proteome

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudio N. Cavasotto ◽  
Maximiliano Sánchez Lamas ◽  
Julián Maggini
Keyword(s):  
Functional Role ◽  
Scientific Community ◽  
Structural Data ◽  
Cysteine Proteases ◽  
Accessory Proteins ◽  
Protein Protein Interaction ◽  
Novel Drugs ◽  
Molecular Determinants ◽  
Homology Models

AbstractThe infectious coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, appeared in December 2019 in Wuhan, China, and has spread worldwide. As of today, more than 22 million people have been infected, with almost 800,000 fatalities. With the purpose of contributing to the development of effective therapeutics, this work provides an overview of the viral machinery and functional role of each SARS-CoV-2 protein, and a thorough analysis of the structure and druggability assessment of the viral proteome. All structural, non-structural, and accessory proteins of SARS-CoV-2 have been studied, and whenever experimental structural data of SARS-CoV-2 proteins were not available, homology models were built based on solved SARS-CoV structures. Several potential allosteric or protein-protein interaction druggable sites on different viral targets were identified, knowledge that could be used to expand current drug discovery endeavors beyond the cysteine proteases and the polymerase complex. It is our hope that this study will support the efforts of the scientific community both in understanding the molecular determinants of this disease and in widening the repertoire of viral targets in the quest for repurposed or novel drugs against COVID-19.

scholarly journals “KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT” PADA KELOMPOK TANI KARYA BERSAMA, DI DESA TOMBASIAN ATAS KECAMATAN KAWANGKOAN BARAT, KABUPATEN MINAHASA

2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (3A) ◽  
pp. 271
Author(s):  
Raldy H. Assa ◽  
Leonardus Ricky Rengkung ◽  
Caroline B. D. Pakasi
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Management ◽  
Knowledge Creation ◽  
Secondary Data ◽  
Knowledge Presentation ◽  
Tv Media ◽  
Group Knowledge ◽  
Group Members ◽  
Farmer Groups ◽  
Knowledge Identification ◽  
Media Experience

The purpose of this paper is to know the Knowledge Management of “Karya Bersama” farmers group at Tombasian Atas Village, Kawangkoan West, Minahasa District. This research was conducted from April to July 2016. The data used in this research are primary and secondary data. The variables measured were knowledge identification, knowledge creation, knowledge presentation and knowledge distribution. The analysis used is descriptive qualitative analysis by using content analysis. The results showed that the identification of group knowledge through cultivation, mass media, experience, TV media, newspapers and books, the presence of extension workers and among group members. Knowledge creation occurs through regular meetings among farmer groups. Knowledge presentation is carried out by exploiting technology utilization, demonstrating farming tools and distributing the knowledge gained.*lrr*

scholarly journals SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE: THE AMBIVALENCE OF DEVELOPMENT MODELS

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (31(58)) ◽  
pp. 6-9
Author(s):  
Agamali Kulamovich Mamedov
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Scientific Community ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Social Knowledge ◽  
Development Models

The article declares the position of dissensus and consensus as basic models for the development of social sciences. The demarcation of natural sciences and social sciences is carried out. Attempts are being made to identify the features of "acceptance" by the scientific community. The article analyzes L. Laudan's concept of consensus in modern social knowledge.

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