Essays in Collective Epistemology

Abstract

We routinely ascribe both belief and knowledge to collective entities. We say that the Bush administration knew that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, that the philosophy department believes its hiring decision complies with employment law, or that we know that greenhouse gas emissions cause climate change. Collective epistemology studies the nature of collective belief, justification, and knowledge. This volume contains ten original articles, five of which are centrally concerned with collective epistemology so understood. The other five take up a number of issues that fall into the wider area of social epistemology. Two of the contributions are primarily concerned with the metaphysics of group belief and knowledge. Gilbert and Pilchman propose a joint commitment account of the nature of group belief: a group believes that p if and only if the members of the group are jointly committed to believe that p as a body. Bird is primarily interested in the ascription of knowledge to large, diffuse groups, such as the scientific community as a whole. On Bird's view, the scientific community can know, say, how stem cell differentiation works, but not because the members of this group are jointly committed to a theory of stem cell differentiation. Instead, group knowledge of this kind is based on the distribution of information and abilities across the group members. Together, these two articles give a good sense of the wide range of phenomena under investigation in this volume, and they provide an appropriate warning against the assumption that that all of our everyday collective knowledge and belief ascriptions refer to the same underlying structure.

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