What Is Justified Group Belief

Philosophical Review 125 (3):341-396 (2016)
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Abstract

This essay raises new objections to the two dominant approaches to understanding the justification of group beliefs—_inflationary_ views, where groups are treated as entities that can float freely from the epistemic status of their members’ beliefs, and _deflationary_ views, where justified group belief is understood as nothing more than the aggregation of the justified beliefs of the group's members. If this essay is right, we need to look in an altogether different place for an adequate account of justified group belief. From these objections emerges the skeleton of the positive view that this essay goes on to develop and defend, called the _group epistemic agent account_: groups are epistemic agents in their own right, with justified beliefs that respond to both evidence and normative requirements that arise only at the group level but that are nonetheless importantly constrained by the epistemic status of the beliefs of their individual members.

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Jennifer Lackey
Northwestern University

Citations of this work

Reliabilist Epistemology.Alvin Goldman & Bob Beddor - 2021 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Groundwork for a Fallibilist Account of Mathematics.Silvia De Toffoli - 2021 - Philosophical Quarterly 7 (4):823-844.
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References found in this work

Knowledge and lotteries.John Hawthorne - 2004 - New York: Oxford University Press.
The structure of empirical knowledge.Laurence BonJour - 1985 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Epistemology and cognition.Alvin I. Goldman - 1986 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Knowledge and practical interests.Jason Stanley - 2005 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Knowledge in an uncertain world.Jeremy Fantl & Matthew McGrath - 2009 - New York: Oxford University Press. Edited by Matthew McGrath.

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