In this paper, I present an account of group competence that is explicitly framed for cases of epistemic performances. According to it, we must consider group epistemic competence as the group agents’ capacity to produce knowledge, and not the result of the summation of its individual members’ competences to produce knowledge. Additionally, I contend that group competence must be understood in terms of group normative status. To introduce my view, I present Jesper Kallestrup’s denial that group competence involves anything over (...) and beyond the aggregation of individual competences. I have divided my response into two parts. First, I compare two conceptions of competence from Ernest Sosa’s reliabilist virtue epistemology, Thinking about oneself: The place and value of reflection in philosophy and psychology, Springer, 2019) and David Löwenstein’s account of know-how. Second, I take the results from this comparison and apply them to the issue of group know-how, by the hand of Orestis Palermos and Deborah Tollefsen’s twofold approach to the topic Socially extended epistemology, Oxford University Press, 2018). Finally, I return to Kallestrup’s denial to make my point in favour of the conception of genuine group competence as the group normative status to achieve success. (shrink)

What does it take for a group of people to know how to do something? An account of collective practical knowledge ought to be compatible with the linguistic evidence about the semantics for collective knowledge-how ascriptions, be able to explain the practicality of collective knowledge, be able to explain both the connection between individual and collective know-how and the possibility of a group knowing how to do something none of its members know, and be applicable to a suitably wide range (...) of groups. In this paper I develop a view which can meet all of these desiderata, which combines a Fragmented account of collective knowledge (Habgood-Coote, 2019a), with the view that practical knowledge is an Interrogative Capacity (Habgood-Coote, 2019b). (shrink)

I connect two increasingly popular ideas in social epistemology—group knowledge and epistemic extension—both departures from mainstream epistemological tradition. In doing so, I generate a framework for conceptualizing and organizing contemporary epistemology along several core axes. This, in turn, allows me to delineate a largely unexplored frontier in group epistemology. The bulk of extant work in group epistemology can be dubbed intra-group epistemology: the study of epistemically salient happenings within groups. I delineate and attempt to motivate what I dub inter-group epistemology: (...) the study of epistemically salient happenings between groups and other subjects and entities. (shrink)