Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Groups are often said to believe things. For instance, we talk about PETA believing that factory farms should be abolished, the Catholic Church believing that the Pope is infallible, and the U.S. government believing that people have the right to free speech. Some of these beliefs amount to knowledge while others do not, with epistemic justification being one of the central features distinguishing these two categories. But how should we understand a group’s justifiedly believing that p?

 

This question has received surprisingly little attention in the literature, with those who have addressed it falling into one of two camps. On the one hand, there are those who favor an inflationary approach, where groups are treated as entities with epistemic “minds of their own.” For these theorists, the justificatory status of group belief involves only actions that take place at the group level, such as the joint acceptance of reasons. On the other hand, there are those who favor a deflationary approach, where group justified belief is understood as nothing more than the aggregation of the justified beliefs of the group’s members.

 

In this paper, I raise new, and what I regard as decisive, objections to both of these approaches. If I am 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 I go on to defend, which I call the group epistemic agent account of group justified belief: groups are epistemic agents in their own right, with justified beliefs that respond to evidence and normative requirements that arise only at the group level, but which are nonetheless importantly constrained by the epistemic status of the beliefs of their individual members.