Knowledge Tree
group belief
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Sources
Social Epistemology - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy plato.stanford.edu Feb 26, 2001 15 facts
referenceRaimo Tuomela's 1992 paper 'Group Beliefs' provides a philosophical framework for understanding how groups can hold beliefs distinct from the individual beliefs of their members.
claimMargaret Gilbert proposes a Non-Summativist account of group belief based on joint commitment, where a group G believes that p if and only if the members of G are jointly committed to believe that p as a body.
claimA majoritarian process, where individual member beliefs are aggregated into a group belief, is an example of a process that may produce a justified group belief if the individual member beliefs serving as inputs are themselves justified.
claimUnder Margaret Gilbert's joint commitment account of group belief, joint commitments create normative requirements for group members to act as a single believer, and members can be held normatively responsible by their peers for failing to act accordingly.
claimLackey (2021) argues that joint commitment accounts of group belief fail to recognize that there can be various reasons for joint commitment that do not reflect actual group belief.
claimJennifer Lackey argues against Alvin Goldman's 2014 account of group justification and proposes an alternative account where a group G justifiedly believes that p if and only if (1) G believes that p, and (2) full disclosure of evidence relevant to p, accompanied by rational deliberation among members of G in accordance with epistemic normative requirements, would not result in further evidence that, when added to the bases of G's members' beliefs that p, yields a total belief set that fails to make sufficiently probable that p.
referenceSummativism posits that group belief is a function of the beliefs of the group's members, with simple versions asserting that a group believes something if all or almost all of its members hold that belief.
claimAlexander Bird introduces the 'distributed model' of group belief to account for systems performing information-intensive tasks that cannot be processed by a single individual, where individuals gather different pieces of information and others coordinate it to complete the task.
claimAlvin Goldman proposes modeling group justification by treating a group's belief as caused by a belief-forming process that aggregates member beliefs into a group belief, similar to how individual cognitive processes take inputs to produce outputs.
claimAlexander Bird contends that the distributed model of group belief is a standard type of group model that occurs in science.
quoteJennifer Lackey adopts a 'Group Agent' account of group belief, which she defines as: A group, G, believes that p if and only if: (1) there is a significant percentage of G’s operative members who believe that p, and (2) are such that adding together the basis of their beliefs that p yields a belief set that is not substantively incoherent.
claimSummativism and Non-Summativism (also known as Collectivism) are the two dominant theories regarding the nature of group belief.
claimJennifer Lackey's 'Group Agent' account of group belief is considered Summativist without being reductive because it includes a normative requirement (condition 2) that governs the collective to avoid ascribing belief when members' reasons cannot be coherently combined.
claimAlexander Bird (2014, 2022) contends that the joint acceptance model of group belief is only one of many legitimate models for understanding group belief.
claimSchmitt (1994) held that a group belief is justified only if every member of the group has a justified belief to the same effect.
Pluralism About Group Knowledge: A Reply to Jesper Kallestrup ... social-epistemology.com Jan 20, 2023 2 facts
perspectiveAvram Hiller and R. Wolfe Randall advocate for a pluralistic approach to group belief, arguing that different groups possess and use information for reasoning, planning, and action in very different ways.
claimNew research regarding the fragmented (individual) mind provides interesting models for group belief.
Social Epistemology – Introduction to Philosophy - Rebus Press press.rebus.community 1 fact
perspectiveAlvin Goldman and Cailin O'Connor include the analysis of group belief under the heading of social epistemology, though the author of the Rebus Press chapter classifies the analysis of group belief as a topic in metaphysics.
Social Epistemology - Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science oecs.mit.edu Jul 24, 2024 1 fact
claimThe philosophical dispute between summativists and anti-summativists regarding group belief can be informed by analyzing cases from team science and team mathematics.
Social Epistemology - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy plato.stanford.edu Aug 28, 2019 1 fact
referenceRichard Pettigrew authored the 2019 chapter 'On the Accuracy of Group Credences' in 'Oxford Studies in Epistemology Volume 6', which discusses the accuracy of collective belief states.