Religious Disagreement and Pluralism

This volume explores many issues at the intersection of the epistemology of disagreement and religious epistemology. Epistemological questions about the significance of disagreement have advanced in concert with broader developments in social epistemology concerning testimony, the nature of expertise and epistemic authority, the role of institutions, group belief, and epistemic injustice, among others. During this period, related issues in the epistemology of religion have re-emerged as worthy of new consideration, and available to be situated with new conceptual tools. Does disagreement between, and within, religions, challenge the rationality of religious commitment? How should religious adherents think about exclusivist, inclusivist, and pluralist frameworks as applied to religious truth, or to matters of salvation or redemption? This volume engages in careful reflection on religious diversity and disagreement, offering ways to balance epistemic humility with personal conviction. Recognizing the place of religious differences in our social lives, it provides renewed efforts at how best to think about truths concerning religion.

Negative Economic Shocks and the Compliance to Social Norms

This paper is about why suffering a Negative Economic Shock, i.e. a large loss, may trigger a change in behavior. We conjecture that people trade off a concern for money with a conditional preference to follow social norms, and that suffering a shock makes the first motivation more salient, leading to more norm violation. We study this question experimentally: After administering losses on the earnings from a Real Effort Task, we elicit decisions in set of pro-social and anti-social settings. To derive our predictions, we elicit social norms separately from behavior. We find that a shock increases deviations from norms in antisocial settings — more subjects cheat, steal, and avoid retaliation, with changes that are economically large. This is in line with our prediction. The effect on trust and cooperation is instead more ambiguous. Finally, we conducted an additional experiment to study the difference between an intentional shock and a random shock in a trust game. We found that the two induce partially different effects and that victims of intentional losses are more sensible to the in-group belief. This may explain why part of the literature studying shocks in natural settings found an increase in pro-social behavior, contrary to our prediction.

Collective Epistemic Luck

A platitude in epistemology is that an individual’s belief does not qualify as knowledge if it is true by luck. Individuals, however, are not the only bearers of knowledge. Many epistemologists agree that groups can also possess knowledge in a way that is genuinely collective. If groups can know, it is natural to think that, just as true individual beliefs fall short of knowledge due to individual epistemic luck, true collective beliefs may fall short of knowledge because of collective epistemic luck. This paper argues, first, that the dominant view of epistemic luck in the literature, the modal view, does not yield a satisfactory account of lucky collective beliefs. Second, it argues that collective epistemic luck is better explained in terms of groups lacking (suitably defined) forms of control over collective belief formation that are specific to the different procedures for forming collective beliefs. One of the main implications of this, we will argue, is that groups whose beliefs are formed via internal deliberation are more vulnerable to knowledge-undermining collective luck than groups that form their beliefs via non-deliberative methods, such as non-deliberative anonymous voting. The bottom line is that the greater exposure to knowledge-undermining luck that deliberation gives rise to provides a reason (not a conclusive one) for thinking that non-deliberative methods of group belief formation have greater epistemic value.

We Believe: Group Belief and the Liturgical use of Creeds

The recitation of creeds in corporate worship is widespread in the Christian tradition. Intuitively, the use of creeds captures the belief not only of the individuals reciting it, but of the Church as a whole. This paper seeks to provide a philosophical analysis of the meaning of the words, ‘We believe…’, in the context of the liturgical recitation of the Creed. Drawing from recent work in group ontology, I explore three recent accounts of group belief (summative accounts, joint commitment accounts, and functionalist accounts) and consider the potential of applying these to the group belief contained in the Creed.

When White Americans see “non-Whites” as a group: Belief in minority collusion and support for White identity politics

White Americans may find diversity threatening in part because they construe non-White Americans as a coherent social and political force. We argue that this perception manifests in a belief that minority groups collude against White people and that White people should act as a political bloc to defend ingroup interests. In a 3-year longitudinal study, the belief in minority collusion and support for White identity politics increased significantly among a nationally representative sample of 2,635 White Americans. Compared to White Democrats, White Republicans more strongly endorsed minority collusion beliefs and White identity politics, and increased more in these beliefs over time. Essentialist perceptions of the White ingroup were associated with longitudinal increases in minority collusion beliefs, but not in support for White identity politics. Endorsement of minority collusion and support for White identity politics both predicted lower support for Black Lives Matter and greater support for the Alt-Right movement. Implications for race relations, stigma-based solidarity, and the psychology of partisanship and ideology are discussed.

Group Belief

Beliefs are commonly attributed to groups or collective entities. But what is the nature of group belief? Summativism and nonsummativism are two main rival views regarding the nature of group belief. On the one hand, summativism holds that, necessarily, a group g has a belief B only if at least one individual i is both a member of g and has B. On the other hand, non-summativism holds that it is possible for a group g to have a belief B even if no member of g has B. My aim in this paper is to consider whether divergence arguments for non-summativism and against summativism about group belief are sound. Such divergence arguments aim to show that there can be a divergence between belief at the group level and the corresponding belief at the individual level. I will argue that these divergence arguments do not decisively defeat a minimal version of summativism. In order to accomplish this goal, I have the following plan: In section 2, I will analyze the structure of two important counterexamples against the summativist view, which are based on divergence arguments. Such counterexamples are based on the idea that a group decides to adopt a particular group belief, even if none of its members holds the belief in question. However, in section 3, I will show that these counterexamples fail, because they can be explained without the need to posit group beliefs. More specifically, I argue that in these apparent counterexamples, we have only a ‘group acceptance’ phenomenon and not a ‘group belief’ phenomenon. For this conclusion, I advance two arguments: in subsection 3.1, I formulate an argument from doxastic involuntarism, and in subsection 3.2, I develop an argument from truth connection. Thus, summativism is not defeated by divergence arguments. Lastly, in section 4, I will conclude with some advantages of summativism.

Group belief

While logical formalizations of group notions of knowledge such as common and distributed knowledge have received considerable attention in the literature, most approaches being based on modal logic, group notions of belief have received much less attention. In this paper we systematically study standard notions of group belief under different assumptions about the properties of belief. In particular, we map out (lack of) preservation of belief properties against different standard definitions of group belief. It turns out that what is called group belief most often is not actually belief, i.e. does not have the properties of belief. In fact, even what is called group knowledge is sometimes not actually knowledge either. For example, under the common assumption that belief has the KD45 properties, neither common belief (does not satisfy the negative introspection axiom 5) nor distributed belief (does not satisfy the consistency axiom D) are not actually belief. There has been some confusion in the literature regarding soundness of proposed axiomatizations of logics with distributed knowledge, related to the mentioned lack of preservation. In this paper we also present detailed completeness proofs of sound and complete axiomatizations of KD45 with distributed belief, both with and without common belief.

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

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.