Collective Epistemology

WikiSilo is a tool for theorizing across interdisciplinary fields such as Cognitive Science, and provides a vocabulary for talking about the problems of doing so. It can be used to demonstrate that a particular cognitive theory is complete and coherent at multiple levels of discourse, and commensurable with and relevant to a wider domain of cognition. WikiSilo is also a minimalist theory and methodology for effectively doing science. WikiSilo is simultaneously similar to and distinct, as well as integrated and separated (...) from Wikipedia™. This paper will introduce the advantages of WikiSilo for use in the Cognitive Sciences. (shrink)

Life is a group project. It takes a village. The same is true of our intellectual lives. Since we are finite cognitive creatures with limited time and resources, any healthy intellectual life requires that we rely quite heavily on others. For nearly any question you want to investigate, there is someone who is in a better epistemic position than you are to determine the answer. For most people, their expertise does not extend far beyond their own personal lives, and even (...) here we can sometimes find others who are more reliable. Without relying on them we would know very little about the world. Since others are typically better positioned to determine the answers to the questions we have, it should make us wonder why we should bother to try and figure out much of anything at all for ourselves. After all, when trying to find an answer to a question, we should take the best route to the answer, and the most reliable route to the answer to most questions is to rely on the minds of others. At the same time, there is something defective about an intellectual life that outsources nearly all of its intellectual projects. That is, it seems that individuals ought to think for themselves, at least about some issues and at least some of the time. The puzzle is in determining why it is epistemically valuable to think for yourself, since doing so will almost always not be the best available route to the answer of your question. In this paper, I will first clarify our central question and sharpen this puzzle regarding epistemic autonomy. Having done so, I will argue that autonomous deliberation can be epistemically valuable to inquirers both when it is successful, as well as when it is unsuccessful. I conclude by gesturing at how these considerations point us toward an account of epistemic autonomy as an intellectual virtue. (shrink)

Why are mistaken beliefs about Covid-19 so prevalent? Political identity, education and other demographic variables explain only a part of individual differences in the susceptibility to Covid-19 misinformation. This paper focuses on another explanation: epistemic vice. Epistemic vices are character traits that interfere with acquiring, maintaining, and transmitting knowledge. If the basic assumption of vice epistemology is right, then people with epistemic vices such as indifference to the truth or rigidity in their belief structures will tend to be more susceptible (...) to believing Covid-19 misinformation. We carried out an observational study (US sample, n = 998) in which we measured the level of epistemic vice of participants using a novel Epistemic Vice Scale. We also asked participants questions eliciting the extent to which they subscribe to myths and misinformation about Covid-19. We find overwhelming evidence to the effect that epistemic vice is associated with susceptibility to Covid-19 misinformation. In fact, the association turns out to be stronger than with political identity, educational attainment, scores on the Cognitive Reflection Test, personality, dogmatism, and need for closure. We conclude that this offers evidence in favor of the empirical presuppositions of vice epistemology. (shrink)

Despre analogia existentă între aspectele epistemologice şi metodologice ale activităţii serviciilor de informaţii şi unele discipline ştiinţifice, pledând pentru o abordare mai ştiinţifică a procesului de culegere şi analiză de informaţii din cadrul ciclului de informaţii. Afirm că în prezent aspectele teoretice, ontologice şi epistemologice, în activitatea multor servicii de informaţii, sunt subestimate, determinând înţelegere incompletă a fenomenelor actuale şi creând confuzie în colaborarea inter-instituţională. După o scurtă Introducere, care include o istorie a evoluţiei conceptului de serviciu de informaţii după (...) al doilea război mondial, în Activitatea de informaţii definesc obiectivele şi organizarea serviciilor de informaţii, modelul de bază al acestor organizaţii (ciclul informaţional), şi aspectele relevante ale culegerii de informaţii şi analizei de informaţii. În secţiunea Ontologia evidenţiez aspectele ontologice şi entităţile care ameninţă şi sunt ameninţate. Secţiunea Epistemologie include aspecte specifice activităţii de informaţii, cu analiza principalului model (Singer) folosit în mod tradiţional, şi expun o posibilă abordare epistemologică prin prisma conceptului de cunoaştere tacită dezvoltat de omul de ştiinţă Michael Polanyi. În secţiunea Metodologii prezint diverse teorii metodologice cu accent pe tehnicile analitice structurale, şi câteva analogii, cu ştiinţa, arheologia, afacerile şi medicina. Lucrarea se încheie cu Concluziile privind posibilitatea unei abordări mai ştiinţifice a metodelor de culegere şi analiză a informaţiilor din cadrul serviciilor de informaţii. -/- Cuvinte cheie: servicii de informaţii, agenţii de informaţii, informaţii, intelligence -/- CUPRINS -/- Abstract 1. Introducere 1.1. Istorie 2. Activitatea de informaţii 2.1. Organizaţii 2.2. Ciclul informaţional 2.3. Colectarea informaţiilor 2.4. Analiza informaţiilor 2.5. Contrainformatii 2.6. Comunităţi epistemice 3. Ontologia 4. Epistemologia 4.1. Cunoaşterea tacită (Polanyi) 5. Metodologii 6. Analogii cu alte discipline 6.1. Stiinta 6.2. Arheologia 6.3. Afaceri 6.4. Medicina 7. Concluzii Bibliografie -/- DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.19751.39849 . (shrink)

Judgment-aggregation theory has always focused on the attainment of rational collective judgments. But so far, rationality has been understood in static terms: as “coherence” of judgments at a given time, understood as consistency, completeness, and/or deductive closure. By contrast, this paper discusses whether collective judgments can be dynamically rational, so that they change rationally in response to new information. Formally, a judgment aggregation rule is dynamically rational with respect to a given revision operator if, whenever all individuals revise their judgments (...) in light of some information (a learnt proposition), then the new aggregate judgments are the old ones revised in light of this information, i.e., aggregation and revision commute. We prove a general impossibility theorem: if the propositions on the agenda are sufficiently interconnected, no judgment aggregation rule with standard properties is dynamically rational with respect to any revision operator satisfying some mild conditions (familiar from belief revision theory). Our theorem is the dynamic-rationality analogue of some well-known impossibility theorems for static rationality. We also explore how dynamic rationality might be achieved by relaxing some of the conditions on the aggregation rule and/or the revision operator. (shrink)

There have been many discussions recently from philosophers, cognitive scientists, and psychologists about group polarization, particularly with regards to political issues and scientific issues that have become markers of social identity, such as anthropogenic climate change and vaccine hesitancy. Online and social media environments in particular have received a lot of attention in these discussions, both because of people’s increasing reliance on such environments for receiving and exchanging information, and because such environments often allow individuals to selectively interact with those (...) who are like-minded. My goal here is to argue that the group epistemologist can facilitate understanding the kinds of factors that drive group polarization in a way that has been overlooked by the existing research. Specifically, I argue that polarization can occur in part because of the ways that members of a group treat the group itself (as opposed to an individual member within that group) as a source of information, and in doing so makes their own position, as well as that of the group, more extreme. I refer to this as a structural factor in driving polarization, as it is a factor that is produced by the general nature of the relationship between a group and its members. (shrink)

While social epistemologists have recently begun addressing questions about whether groups can possess beliefs or knowledge, little has yet been said about whether groups can properly be said to possess understanding. Here I want to make some progress on this question by considering two possible accounts of group understanding, modeled on accounts of group belief and knowledge: a deflationary account, according to which a group understands just in case most or all of its members understand, and an inflationary account, according (...) to which a group’s understanding does not depend solely on whether its members understand. I argue that both accounts face problems. The deflationary account has two such problems: aggregation problems that are familiar from discussions of group belief, and the problem of different bases, wherein members possess understanding for different but consistent reasons. The inflationary account faces what I call the problem of distributed grasping: while it is widely accepted that understanding requires a kind of “grasping”, it is hard to make sense of how this requirement could be met at the group level while not necessarily being met by any individual member. Despite its problems, I make a case for the inflationary account. This will require addressing the problem of distributed grasping: to do this, I propose a different way of thinking about the grasping relation at the group level, such that it is constituted by a dependency relationship between members. (shrink)

Could groups ever be an understanding subject (an epistemic agent ascribed with understanding) or should we keep our focus exclusively on the individuals that make up the group? The way this paper will shape an answer to this question is by starting from a case we are most willing to accept as group understanding, then mark out the crucial differences with an unconvincing case, and, ultimately, explain why these differences matter. In order to concoct the cases, however, we need to (...) elucidate what it means to be attributed with understanding and what makes up an epistemic agent. I shall argue that it is abilities, above all, that guide our attributions of understanding. While it is true that understanding must go beyond single acts, this is not going beyond as in going behind them (to private occurrences which are impossible to discern and don’t themselves contribute anything of value), but beyond as in considering what people could and would do: their discernable and valuable abilities. To conceptualize whom the abilities belong to, I will specify what it means to be an epistemic agent. I shall argue that it is being a successful target of the epistemic stance. The epistemic stance (heavily inspired by Dennett’s intentional stance) forms an instrumental abstraction by attributing epistemic properties (i.e., beliefs, epistemic aims, problem-solving tactics) to an entity to explain or predict its behavior. Macro-systematicity (a higher-level pattern which a theory can exploit) is what makes the epistemic stance’s abstraction an explanatory powerful one (regardless of how that macro-systematicity is realized) and emergence (the lack of a straightforward mapping-relation between the micro and the macro) is what makes its power unique to a particular level of explanation. To end, I suggest two kinds of mapping-relations and walk through the shift from reducibility to emergence. (shrink)

Philosophers of science and meta-scientists alike now typically model scientists’ behavior as driven by credit maximization. In this paper I argue that this modeling assumption cannot account for how scientists have a default level of trust in each other’s assertions. The normative implication of this is that science policy should not only focus on incentive reform.

The line between guilt and innocence often turns on what a defendant knew. While the law’s approach to knowledge may be relatively straightforward for individuals, its doctrines for corporate defendants are fraught with ambiguity and opportunities for gamesmanship. Corporations can spread information thinly across employees so that it is never “known.” And prosecutors can exploit legal uncertainties to bring knowledge-based charges where corporations were merely negligent in how they handled information. While knowledge as a mens rea has unique practical and (...) normative properties that vary with a corporation’s size and industry, corporate law treats knowledge just like any other mental state and uses the same doctrine for all corporations. Commentators dissatisfied with that doctrine have missed an obvious resource, social epistemology, the formal study of group knowledge states. As a result, it has overlooked a crucial distinction — between knowledge and information — at the root of ambiguities and inefficiencies in the law and proposed reforms. -/- This article is the first to draw on social epistemology and organizational science to develop a functional theory of corporate knowledge. Its goal is to validate the legislature’s frequent choice of knowledge as a mens rea while also inducing corporations to process information at socially optimal levels. Critical to the analysis are the incentives corporations have to (mis)manage information, the public cost of corporate crime, and the private cost of corporate compliance. The basic proposal eschews the black-and-white approach of current doctrine in favor of a sliding functional test keyed to two factors: 1) “effort,” i.e. the cost of information management, and 2) “obviousness,” i.e. how peer corporations would perform with respect to the same information. The resulting theory is flexible enough to fine tune incentives for corporations of all sizes and industries while also intuitively capturing what culpable knowledge means in the corporate context. (shrink)

Algorithms may soon replace employees as the leading cause of corporate harm. For centuries, the law has defined corporate misconduct — anything from civil discrimination to criminal insider trading — in terms of employee misconduct. Today, however, breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and big data allow automated systems to make many corporate decisions, e.g., who gets a loan or what stocks to buy. These technologies introduce valuable efficiencies, but they do not remove (or even always reduce) the incidence of corporate harm. (...) Unless the law adapts, corporations will become increasingly immune to civil and criminal liability as they transfer responsibility from employees to algorithms. -/- This Article is the first to tackle the full extent of the growing doctrinal gap left by algorithmic corporate misconduct. To hold corporations accountable, the law must sometimes treat them as if they “know” information stored on their servers and “intend” decisions reached by their automated systems. Cognitive science and the philosophy of mind offer a path forward. The “extended mind thesis” complicates traditional views about the physical boundaries of the mind. The thesis states that the mind encompasses any system that sufficiently assists thought, e.g. by facilitating recall or enhancing decision-making. For natural people, the thesis implies that minds can extend beyond the brain to include external cognitive aids, like rolodexes and calculators. This Article adapts the thesis to corporate law. It motivates and proposes a doctrinal framework for extending the corporate mind to the algorithms that are increasingly integral to corporate thought. The law needs such an innovation if it is to hold future corporations to account for their most serious harms. (shrink)

Are epistemic reasons merely a species of instrumental practical reasons, making epistemic rationality a specialized form of instrumental practical rationality? Or are epistemic reasons importantly different in kind? Despite the attractions of the former view, Kelly (2003) argues quite compellingly that epistemic rationality cannot be merely a matter of taking effective means to one’s epistemic ends. I argue here that Kelly’s objections can be sidestepped if we understand epistemic reasons as instrumental reasons that arise in light of the aims held (...) by social collectives of which we are members, rather than being fixed by our own individual goals. This social version of epistemic instrumentalism would not be subject to counterexamples that point to the failure of individual people to possess desires or goals that would account for all of the epistemic reasons we find it natural to attribute to them. I conclude by comparing the proposed view to the alternative version of instrumentalism defended by Kornblith (1993). I argue that the social view I sketch here has one noteworthy advantage. It better accounts for the intuitive distinctness of our practical and epistemic reasons for belief in cases where flouting epistemic norms would better help us to achieve our own individual goals. (shrink)

It is often suggested that when opinions differ among individuals in a group, the opinions should be aggregated to form a compromise. This paper compares two approaches to aggregating opinions, linear pooling and what I call opinion agglomeration. In evaluating both strategies, I propose a pragmatic criterion, No Regrets, entailing that an aggregation strategy should prevent groups from buying and selling bets on events at prices regretted by their members. I show that only opinion agglomeration is able to satisfy the (...) demand. I then proceed to give normative and empirical arguments in support of the pragmatic criterion for opinion aggregation, and that ultimately favor opinion agglomeration. (shrink)

Previous simulation models have found positive effects of cognitive diversity on group performance, but have not explored effects of diversity in demographics (e.g., gender, ethnicity). In this paper, we present an agent-based model that captures two empirically supported hypotheses about how demographic diversity can improve group performance. The results of our simulations suggest that, even when social identities are not associated with distinctive task-related cognitive resources, demographic diversity can, in certain circumstances, benefit collective performance by counteracting two types of conformity (...) that can arise in homogeneous groups: those relating to group-based trust and those connected to normative expectations towards in-groups. (shrink)

Group agents can act, they can have knowledge. How should we understand the species of collective action which aims at knowledge? In this paper, I present an account of group inquiry. This account faces two challenges: making sense of how large-scale distributed activities might be a kind of group action, and understanding the division of labour involved in group inquiry. In the first part of the paper, I argue that existing accounts of group action face problems dealing with large-scale group (...) actions, and propose a minimal alternative account. In the second part of the paper, I draw on an analogy between inquiry and conversation, arguing that work by Robert Stalnaker and Craige Roberts helps us to think about the division of epistemic labour. In the final part of the paper I put the accounts of group action and inquiry together, and consider how to think about group knowledge, deep ignorance, and the different kinds of division of labour. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to (i) examine the concept of epistemic paternalism and (ii) explore the consequences of normative questions one might ask about it. I begin by critically examining several definitions of epistemic paternalism that have been proposed, and suggesting ways they might be improved. I then contrast epistemic and general paternalism and argue that it’s difficult to see what makes epistemic paternalism an epistemic phenomenon at all. Next, I turn to the various normative questions one might (...) ask about epistemic paternalism and discuss the literature’s assumptions of epistemic consequentialism and veritism. I close by comparing and contrasting epistemic paternalism with other topics in social epistemology, such as disagreement or testimony. (shrink)

Since subjection to harm is an intrinsic feature of our social and epistemic lives, there is a perpetual need for individual and collective agents with the virtue of epistemic courage. In this chapter, I survey some of the main issues germane to this virtue, such as the nature of courage and of harm, the range of epistemic activities that can manifest courage, and the status of epistemic courage as a collective and as a professional virtue.

Institutions play an indispensable role in our political and epistemic lives. This Chapter explores sympathetically the claim that political institutions can be bearers of epistemic vices. I start by describing one form of collectivism - the claim that the vices of institutions do not reduce to the vices of their members. I then describe the phenomenon of epistemic corruption and the various processes that can corrupt the epistemic ethoi of political institutions. The discussion focuses on some recent work by Miranda (...) Fricker and select exampls from recent British political experience. The Chapter ends with suggestions for further work on the corruption and repair of the epistemic ethoi of political institutions. (shrink)

Hayek’s and Simon’s social externalism runs on a shared presupposition: mind is constrained in its computational capacity to detect, harvest, and assimilate “data” generated by the infinitely fine-grained and perpetually dynamic characteristic of experience in complex social environments. For Hayek, mind and sociality are co-evolved spontaneous orders, allowing little or no prospect of comprehensive explanation, trapped in a hermeneutically sealed, i.e. inescapably context bound, eco-system. For Simon, it is the simplicity of mind that is the bottleneck, overwhelmed by the ambient (...) complexity of the environmental. Since on Simon’s account complexity is unidirectional, Simon is far more ebullient about the prospects of explanation. Hayek’s social externalism functions as a kind of distributed “extra-neural” memory store manifest as dynamic spontaneous orders. Simon’s organizational rule-governed externalism negotiates the “inner” world (the mind) with the “outer” world through a homeostatic interface that offloads the cognitive burden into the environment. Their respective externalisms may differ in detail but not in spirit in that it ameliorates their shared presupposition of cognitive constraint. Even though any “optimization talk” for Hayek and Simon is objectionable, knowledge acquisition can be represented by a contextualized stigmergic swarm optimization algorithm that gives due emphasis to both the individual and the environment. The key insight is that “perfect” knowledge is unnecessary, impracticable and indeed irrelevant if one understands the mechanism at work in complex sociality, a stigmergic sociality that in effect augments or scaffolds cognition. (shrink)

Encyclopedia entry: http://www.sagepub.com/books/Book234813#tabview=title.

It is widely acknowledged that individual moral obligations and responsibility entail shared moral obligations and responsibility. However, whether individual epistemic obligations and responsibility entail shared epistemic obligations and responsibility is rarely discussed. Instead, most discussions of doxastic responsibility focus on individuals considered in isolation. In contrast to this standard approach, I maintain that focusing exclusively on individuals in isolation leads to a profoundly incomplete picture of what we're epistemically obligated to do and when we deserve epistemic blame. First, I argue (...) that we have epistemic obligations to perform actions of the sort that can be performed in conjunction with other people, and that consequently, we are often jointly blameworthy when we violate shared epistemic obligations. Second, I argue that shared responsibility is especially important to doxastic responsibility thanks to the fact that we don't have the same kind of direct control over our beliefs that we have over our actions. In particular, I argue that there are many cases in which a particular individual who holds some problematic belief only deserves epistemic blame in virtue of belonging to a group all the members of which are jointly blameworthy for violating some shared epistemic obligation. (shrink)

Normatively inappropriate scientific dissent prevents warranted closure of scientific controversies, and confuses the public about the state of policy-relevant science, such as anthropogenic climate change. Against recent criticism by de Melo-Martín and Intemann of the viability of any conception of normatively inappropriate dissent, I identify three conditions for normatively inappropriate dissent : its generation process is politically illegitimate; it imposes an unjust distribution of inductive risks; it adopts evidential thresholds outside an accepted range. I supplement these conditions with an inference-to-the-best-explanation (...) account of knowledge-based consensus and dissent to allow policy makers to reliably identify unreliable scientific dissent. (shrink)

Hermeneutical injustices, according to Miranda Fricker, are injustices that occur “when a gap in collective interpretive resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences” (Fricker 2007, 1). For Fricker, the relevant injustice in these cases is the very lack of knowledge and understanding experienced by the subject. In this way, hermeneutical injustices are instances of epistemic injustices, the kind of injustice that “wrongs someone in their capacity as a subject of knowledge” (...) (Fricker 2007, 5). In this paper, however, I identify different means by which our hermeneutic activities lead to social injustices, of both a practical and epistemic kind, and I identify different ways in which those injustices manifest themselves. Since Fricker’s use of the notion of “hermeneutical injustices” to denote a well-defined kind of injustice is rightfully well-established, I here refer to the more general kinds of injustices I have in mind as “hermeneutic injustices” instead. (shrink)

According to the diversity-beats-ability theorem, groups of diverse problem solvers can outperform groups of high-ability problem solvers. We argue that the model introduced by Lu Hong and Scott Page is inadequate for exploring the trade-off between diversity and ability. This is because the model employs an impoverished implementation of the problem-solving task. We present a new version of the model which captures the role of ‘ability’ in a meaningful way, and use it to explore the trade-offs between diversity and ability (...) in scientific problem solving. (shrink)

We seem to ascribe mental states and agency to groups. We say ‘Google knows such-and-such,’ or ‘Amazon intends to do such-and-such.’ This observation of ordinary parlance also found its way into philosophical accounts of social groups and collective intentionality. However, these discussions are usually quiet about how groups self-ascribe their own beliefs and intentions. Apple might explain to its shareholders that it intends to bring a new iPhone to the market next year. But how does Apple know what it intends? (...) How do groups get to know their own mental states? This is the question of collective self-knowledge. I argue that collective self-knowledge is a distinct phenomenon that deserves our attention. In particular I suggest: that we should be interested in collective self-knowledge, because our behaviour indicates that we already engage with collective self-knowledge in practice; that groups can collectively avow, which indicates that they have privileged and peculiar access to their own intentional states; and that collective self-knowledge is not reducible to intentional states of individuals and therefore is an independent explanandum. (shrink)

Jennifer Lackey challenged group acceptance accounts of justification by arguing that these accounts make the possession of evidence arbitrary and hence lead to illegitimate manipulation of the group's evidence. She proposes that the only way out is to rely on the epistemic propriety of the individual group members, which leads to a dilemma for group acceptance views: either they are wrong about justification, or they cease to rely only on group acceptances. I argue that there is a third option based (...) on general expectations of epistemic propriety that restricts the group's maximal justification. A group cannot be more justified than any individual in the group's position could be expected to be. I motivate this solution by a discussion of normative defeat and epistemic expectations as proposed by Goldberg. (shrink)

Humans are prone to producing morally suboptimal and even disastrous outcomes out of ignorance. Ignorance is generally thought to excuse agents from wrongdoing, but little attention has been paid to group-based ignorance as the reason for some of our collective failings. I distinguish between different types of first-order and higher order group-based ignorance and examine how these can variously lead to problematic inaction. I will make two suggestions regarding our epistemic obligations vis-a-vis collective (in)action problems: (1) that our epistemic obligations (...) concern not just our own knowledge and beliefs but those of others, too and (2) that our epistemic obligations can be held collectively where the epistemic tasks cannot be performed by individuals acting in isolation, for example, when we are required to produce joint epistemic goods. (shrink)

This essay explains why partisanship is justified in contemporary America and environments with similar voting systems and coalition structures. It explains how political parties operate, how helping a party succeed can be a goal of genuine ethical significance, and how trusting one party while mistrusting another can be a reliable route to true belief about important political issues.

In this paper, we explain and showcase the promising methodology of testimonial network analysis and visualization for experimental epistemology, arguing that it can be used to gain insights and answer philosophical questions in social epistemology. Our use case is the epistemic community that discusses vaccine safety primarily in English on Twitter. In two studies, we show, using both statistical analysis and exploratory data visualization, that there is almost no neutral or ambivalent discussion of vaccine safety on Twitter. Roughly half the (...) accounts engaging with this topic are pro-vaccine, while the other half are con-vaccine. We also show that these two camps rarely engage with one another, and that the con-vaccine camp has greater epistemic reach and receptivity than the pro-vaccine camp. In light of these findings, we question whether testimonial networks as they are currently constituted on popular fora such as Twitter are living up to their promise of delivering the wisdom of crowds. We conclude by pointing to directions for further research in digital social epistemology. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore what gives collective testimony its epistemic credentials, through a critical discussion of three competing accounts of the epistemology of collective testimony. According to the first view, collective testimony inherits its epistemic credentials from the beliefs the testimony expresses— where this can be seen either as the beliefs of all or some of the group’s members, or as the beliefs of group itself. The second view denies any necessary connection to belief, claiming instead that the epistemic (...) credentials of collective testimony derive from the reliability or truth-conduciveness of the statement that expresses the testimony. Finally, the third view claims that the epistemic credentials of collective testimony derive from the fact that it involves undertaking a collective commitment to trustworthiness, which makes the group susceptible to rebuke and blame if its testimony is not trustworthy. I argue that this last account holds the most promise for preserving what is distinctive about testimonial knowledge while still underwriting a robust epistemology of collective testimony. (shrink)

The authors of *Linguistic Bodies* appeal to shared know-how to explain the social and participatory interactions upon which linguistic skills and agency rest. However, some issues lurk around the notion of shared know-how and require attention and clarification. In particular, one issue concerns the agent behind the shared know-how, a second one concerns whether shared know-how can be reducible to individual know-how or not. In this paper, I sustain that there is no single answer to the first issue; depending on (...) the case, shared know-how can belong to the participants of a social activity or to the system the participants bring forth together. In relation to the second issue, I sustain, following the authors, a non-reductive account of shared know-how. I also suggest that responsiveness to others, which is a fundamental element of shared know-how, can be extended by perceptual learning. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Panels, boards, and committees throughout society evaluate all manner of things by grading them, first individually and then collectively. Thus risks are prioritized, research proposals are funded, and candidates are shortlisted for jobs. It is not usual to pick winners in political elections by grading the candidates, but there are examples in history. This article takes up a question about the quality of judgments and decisions made by grading: under which conditions are they likely to be right? An answer comes (...) in the form of a jury theorem for median grading. Here, the collective grade for a thing is the median of its individually assigned grades—the one in the middle, when all of them are listed from "top" to "bottom." A second objective of this article is to suggest a solution to problems of voter ignorance in democracies. The idea is for democratic assemblies to use voting methods that make more of people's limited knowledge than do commonly used methods, such as majority voting. It turns out that in theory anyway, and perhaps also in practice, median grading can enable unenlightened assemblies to “track the truth”—even as majority voting would run them off the rails. (shrink)

It is often argued that our obligations to address structural injustice are collective in character. But what exactly does it mean for ‘ordinary citizens’ to have collective obligations visà- vis large-scale injustice? In this paper, I propose to pay closer attention to the different kinds of collective action needed in addressing some of these structural injustices and the extent to which these are available to large, unorganised groups of people. I argue that large, dispersed and unorganised groups of people are (...) often in a position to perform distributive collective actions. As such, ordinary citizens can have massively shared obligations to address structural injustice through distributive action, but, ultimately, such obligations are ‘collective’ only in a fairly weak sense. (shrink)

Together we can often achieve things that are impossible to do on our own. We can prevent something bad from happening or we can produce something good, even if none of us could do it by herself. But when are we morally required to do something of moral importance together with others? This book develops an original theory of collective moral obligations. These are obligations that individual moral agents hold jointly, but not as unified collective agents. To think of some (...) of our obligations as joint or collective is the best way of making sense of our intuitions regarding collective moral action problems. Where we have reason to believe that our efforts are most efficient as part of a collective endeavor we may incur collective obligations together with others who are similarly placed as long as we are able to establish compossible individual contributory strategies towards that goal. The book concludes with a discussion of “massively shared obligations” to large-scale moral problems such as global poverty. (shrink)

Our aim in this chapter is to draw attention to what we see as a disturbing feature of conciliationist views of disagreement. Roughly put, the trouble is that conciliatory responses to in-group disagreement can lead to the frustration of a group's epistemic priorities: that is, the group's favoured trade-off between the "Jamesian goals" of truth-seeking and error-avoidance. We show how this problem can arise within a simple belief aggregation framework, and draw some general lessons about when the problem is most (...) pronounced. We close with a tentative proposal for how to solve the problem raised without rejecting conciliationism. (shrink)

Recently, Margaret Gilbert has argued that it appears that the wisdom of a society impinges, greatly, on its freedom. In this article, I show that Gilbert’s “negative argument” fails to be convincing. On the other hand, there are important lessons, particularly for democratic theory, that can be by looking carefully, and critically, at her argument. This article will proceed as follows. First, I present Gilbert’s argument. Next, I criticize her understanding of freedom, and then, using arguments from Christopher McMahon, criticize (...) her understanding of a wise society. Finally, I discuss how what has been said can inform how one should think about democratic theory. (shrink)

This is an introduction to the volume The Epistemology of Group Disagreement (Routledge, forthcoming), (eds.) F. Broncano-Berrocal and J.A. Carter.

Suppose an inquiring group wants to let a certain view stand as the group's view. But there’s a problem: the individuals in that group do not initially all agree with one another about what the correct view is. What should the group do, given that it wants to settle on a single answer, in the face of this kind of intragroup disagreement? Should the group members deliberate and exchange evidence and then take a vote? Or, given the well-known ways that (...) evidence exchange can go wrong, e.g., by exacerbating pre-existing biases, compromising the independence of individual judgments, etc., should the group simply take a vote without deliberating at all? While this question has multiple dimensions to it—including ethical and political dimensions—we approach the question through an epistemological lens. In particular, we investigate to what extent it is epistemically advantageous and disadvantageous that groups whose members disagree over some issue use deliberation in comparison to voting as a way to reach collective agreements. Extant approaches in the literature to this ‘deliberation versus voting’ comparison typically assume there is some univocal answer as to which group strategy is best, epistemically. We think this assumption is mistaken. We approach the deliberation versus voting question from a pluralist perspective, in that we hold that a group’s collective endeavor to solve an internal dispute can be aimed at different, albeit not necessarily incompatible, epistemic goals, namely the goals of truth, evidence, understanding, and epistemic justice. Different answers to our guiding question, we show, correspond with different epistemic goals. We conclude by exploring several ways to mitigate the potential epistemic disadvantages of solving intragroup disagreement by means of deliberation in relation to each epistemic goal. (shrink)

A new way to transpose the virtue epistemologist’s ‘knowledge = apt belief’ template to the collective level, as a thesis about group knowledge, is developed. In particular, it is shown how specifically judgmental belief can be realised at the collective level in a way that is structurally analogous, on a telic theory of epistemic normativity (e.g., Sosa 2020), to how it is realised at the individual level—viz., through a (collective) intentional attempt to get it right aptly (whether p) by alethically (...) affirming that p. An advantage of the proposal developed is that it is shown to be compatible with competing views—viz., joint acceptance accounts and social-distributive accounts—of how group members must interact in order to materially realise a group belief. I conclude by showing how the proposed judgment-focused collective (telic) virtue epistemology has important advantages over a rival version of collective virtue epistemology defended in recent work by Jesper Kallestrup (2016). (shrink)

In the attempt to understand the norms governing believers, epistemologists have tended to focus on individual belief as the primary object of epistemic evaluation. However, norm governance is often assumed to concern, at base, things we can do as a free exercise or manifestation of our agency. Yet believing is not plausibly conceived as something we freely do but rather as a state we are in, usually as the mostly automatic or involuntary result of cognitively processes shaped by nature, bias, (...) and ideology. In this paper, I sketch a response to this tension. This response is based on rejecting the traditional theoretical focus on an individual’s particular beliefs as the primary object of normative epistemic evaluation. If we shift our focus from the particular beliefs of individuals to the community and its information managing practices, we may lessen the tension between norm governance and automaticity and involuntariness in a way that construes autonomous cognitive agency as a resultant of rather than a precondition for our norm-governed epistemic sociality. (shrink)

Recent work by Kahan et al. (2017) on the psychology of motivated numeracy in the context of intracultural disagreement suggests that people are less likely to employ their capabilities when the evidence runs contrary to their political ideology. This research has so far been carried out primarily in the USA regarding the liberal–conservative divide over gun control regulation. In this paper, we present the results of a modified replication that included an active reasoning intervention with Western European participants regarding both (...) the hierarchy–egalitarianism and individualism–collectivism divides over immigration policy (n = 746; considerably less than the preregistration sample size). We reproduce the motivated numeracy effect, though we do not find evidence of increased polarization of high-numeracy participants. (shrink)

We give a review and critique of jury theorems from a social-epistemology perspective, covering Condorcet’s (1785) classic theorem and several later refinements and departures. We assess the plausibility of the conclusions and premises featuring in jury theorems and evaluate the potential of such theorems to serve as formal arguments for the ‘wisdom of crowds’. In particular, we argue (i) that there is a fundamental tension between voters’ independence and voters’ competence, hence between the two premises of most jury theorems; (ii) (...) that the (asymptotic) conclusion that ‘huge groups are infallible’, reached by many jury theorems, is an artifact of unjustified premises; and (iii) that the (nonasymptotic) conclusion that ‘larger groups are more reliable’, also reached by many jury theorems, is not an artifact and should be regarded as the more adequate formal rendition of the ‘wisdom of crowds’. (shrink)

In this chapter I offer a critique of the received way of thinking about responsibility for collective inaction and propose an alternative approach that takes as its point of departure the epistemic agency exhibited by people navigating impossible situations together. One such situation is becoming increasingly common in the context of climate change: so-called “natural” disasters wreaking havoc on communities—flooding homes, collapsing infrastructures, and straining the capacities of existing organizations to safeguard lives and livelihoods. What happens when philosophical reflection begins (...) here—in places where the institutions and practices that have emerged over the last century seem incapable of addressing the problems communities face now, and where people find themselves turning to one another for the sake of their own survival? (shrink)

Our aim in this paper is to defend the reductionist (or deflationist) view on group testimony from the attacks of divergence arguments. We will begin by presenting how divergence arguments can challenge the reductionist view. However, we will argue that these arguments are not decisive to rule out the reductionist view; for, these arguments have false premises, assuming dubious epistemic principles that testimony cannot generate knowledge and understanding. The final part of this paper will be devoted to presenting the advantages (...) of the reductionist approach to explaining the phenomenon of group testimony. (shrink)

In this article we discuss what we call the deliberative division of epistemic labor. We present evidence that the human tendency to engage in motivated reasoning in defense of our beliefs can facilitate the occurrence of divisions of epistemic labor in deliberations among people who disagree. We further present evidence that these divisions of epistemic labor tend to promote beliefs that are better supported by the evidence. We show that promotion of these epistemic benefits stands in tension with what extant (...) theories in epistemology take rationality to require in cases of disagreement. We argue that the epistemic benefits that result from the deliberative division of epistemic labor can provide epistemic reason to maintain confidence in cases of disagreement. We then show that the deliberative division of epistemic labor constitutes a distinct kind of epistemic dependence. (shrink)

We attribute knowledge to institutions on a daily basis, saying things like "the government knew about the threat" or "the university did not act upon the knowledge it had about the harassment". Institutions can also attribute knowledge to themselves, like when Maybank Global Banking claims that it offers its customers "deep expertise and vast knowledge" of the Southeast Asia region, or when the United States Geological Survey states that it understands complex natural science phenomena like the probability of earthquakes occurring (...) along a given fault line. This article aims to discover when we can correctly attribute knowledge to an institution. I find this an interesting question, especially because when something does go wrong, all too often the official line of response from institutions is that they were unaware of the situation: in other words, they did not have enough information at their disposal. I will argue that institutions have fewer excuses for being ignorant than individuals do, and that many admissions of institutional knowledge are too modest. I begin by discussing a real-life example of the latter, before turning my attention to the usually fragmented nature of institutional knowledge. I also discuss the robustness of this knowledge, offering a distinction between two types of institutional knowledge. I then discuss knowledge parameters and why institutions have fewer excuses for not knowing about something than individuals do. I round off the chapter by examining institutional knowledge on climate change. (shrink)