The Epistemology of Groups

Description

Groups are often said to bear responsibility for their actions, many of which have enormous moral, legal, and social significance. When children were separated from their parents or guardians at the U.S.-Mexico border as part of America's immigration policy, for example, the Trump Administration was said to be responsible for the harms these families suffered as a result. But are groups subject to normative assessment simply in virtue of their individual members being so, or are they somehow agents in their own right? Answering this question depends on understanding key concepts in the epistemology of groups, as we cannot hold the Trump Administration responsible without first determining what it believed, knew, and said. Deflationary theorists hold that group phenomena can be understood entirely in terms of individual members and their states. Inflationary theorists maintain that group phenomena are importantly over and above, or otherwise distinct from, individual members and their states. In The Epistemology of Groups Jennifer Lackey argues that neither approach is satisfactory. Groups are more than their members, but not because they have 'minds of their own,' as the inflationists hold. Instead, she shows how group phenomena--like belief, justification, and knowledge--depend on what the individual group members do or are capable of doing while being subject to group-level normative requirements. This framework allows for the correct distribution of responsibility across groups and their individual members. Cover Halftitle Title Copyright Dedication Contents Acknowledgments Introduction 0.1 On the Very Existence of Group Beliefs 0.2 The Nature of Groups 0.3 Chapter Overviews 0.4 The Bigger Picture 1. Group Belief Lessons from Lies and Bullshit 1.1 Summative and Non-Summative Views of Group Belief 1.2 Group Lies and Group Bullshit 1.3 Judgment Fragility 1.4 Base Fragility 1.5 The Group Agent Account 1.6 Conclusion 2. What Is Justified Group Belief? 2.1 Divergence Arguments 2.2 The Paradigmatic Inflationary Non-Summativist View: The Joint Acceptance Account 2.3 Problems for the Joint Acceptance Account 2.4 Revisiting Divergence Arguments 2.5 Deflationary Summativism, the Group Justification Paradox, and the Defeater Problem 2.6 The Collective Evidence Problem 2.7 The Group Normative Obligations Problem 2.8 A Condorcet-Inspired Account of Justified Group Belief 2.9 The Group Epistemic Agent Account 2.10 Central Objection to the Group Epistemic Agent Account 2.11 Conclusion 3. Group Knowledge 3.1 Social Knowledge 3.2 Social Knowledge and Action 3.3 Social Knowledge and Defeaters 3.4 Knowing, Being in a Position to Know, and Should Have Known 3.5 Collective Knowledge 3.6 Conclusion 4. Group Assertion 4.1 Two Kinds of Group Assertion 4.2 Having the Authority to Be a Spokesperson 4.3 The Autonomy of Spokespersons 4.4 Coordinated and Authority-Based Group Assertion 4.5 Two Other Accounts 4.6 Group Assertion Is Not Reducible to Individual Assertion 4.7 Conclusion 5. Group Lies 5.1 Individual Lies 5.2 Counterexamples to the Traditional View of Lying 5.3 Non-Deception Accounts of Lying 5.4 Back to Deception 5.5 Summativism and Sufficiency 5.6 Summativism and Necessity 5.7 The Joint Acceptance Account of Group Lies 5.8 Group Lies 5.9 Conclusion References Index