What Is Justified Group Belief?

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.

Group Belief

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.

Group Assertion

This chapter begins by distinguishing between two kinds of group assertion—coordinated and authority-based—and it is argued that authority-based group assertion is the core notion. It is then shown that a deflationary view of group assertion, according to which a group’s asserting is understood in terms of individual assertions, is misguided. This is the case because a group can clearly assert a proposition even when no individual does. A positive inflationary view of group assertion is then developed, according to which it is the group itself that is the asserter, even though this standardly occurs through a spokesperson(s) or other proxy agent(s) having the authority to speak on behalf of the group. A central virtue of my account is that it provides the framework for distinguishing when responsibility for an assertion lies at the collective level and when it should be shouldered by an individual simply speaking for herself.

Group Lies

In this chapter, an account of group lies is provided. First, whether group lies can be understood in terms of the lies of the group’s members is considered and, second, whether group lies can be characterized in terms of joint agreement by the group’s members to lie. After showing both views to be misguided, a new account of group lying is offered according to which it crucially involves the group offering a statement. In particular, because what a group says can come apart from what its individual members say, it is argued that a group might lie when no individual member lies, and a group might fail to lie even though every individual member does. A central virtue of this account is that it captures the often subtle and complex relationship that can exist between most groups and their spokespersons.

Introduction

In this Introduction, a central debate in the literature on the epistemology of groups is discussed. On the one hand, deflationary theorists hold that group phenomena, such as group beliefs, can be understood entirely in terms of individual members and their states. On the other hand, inflationary theorists, maintain that group phenomena are importantly over and above, or otherwise distinct from, individual members and their states. It is argued that settling some of the issues in this debate lies at the heart of making sense of collective responsibility. It is also emphasized that a central aim of this book is to make progress in understanding crucial notions in collective epistemology—group belief, justified group belief, group knowledge, group assertion, and group lies—so as to shed light on whether it is groups, their individual members, or both who ought to be held responsible for collective actions. Finally, overviews of each chapter are provided.

Group Knowledge

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.