When Is There a Group that Knows?

Abstract

In this chapter, three questions are posed: (i) When does a collection of individuals form an entity that is more than just the mereological sum of its constituent persons? (ii) Given that there is a group of this sort, under what conditions does it know (or believe etc.)? (iii) When we talk of, for example, ‘the growth of scientific knowledge’, can we regard this scientific knowledge as an epistemic state of some social entity? Drawing upon ideas from distribution cognition and Durkheimian sociology, responses are provided to the first and second questions and thereby a positive answer is given to the third.

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