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Modelling collective belief

Synthese 73 (1):185-204 (1987)

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  1. On the Nature and Relationship of Individual and Collective Justification.Simon Graf - 2024 - Dissertation, University of Leeds
    This thesis is an investigation into the nature of epistemic justification. It brings together themes from traditional, individual-centred epistemology, and collective, group-centred epistemology. The first half of the thesis is concerned with the question of whether rationality is epistemically permissive; that is, whether one body of evidence can rationalise more than one doxastic attitude. In chapter 1, I argue that permissive cases are best understood as epistemic standard conflicts. Doing so provides us with a novel understanding of the arbitrariness objection (...)
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  • Ideological Hope.Titus Stahl - 2024 - Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 27 (6).
    The hope for a better future can, and frequently does, motivate political action. Political hope is therefore often considered a positive force. However, not all forms of political hope are beneficial. Some scholars and activists claim that some kinds of hope also function as an ideology. I argue that we can give a precise meaning to the notion of ‘ideological hope,’ and I argue that to say of a given instance of hope that it is ‘ideological’ means more than that (...)
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  • Permissive Divergence.Simon Graf - 2023 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 53 (3):240-255.
    Within collective epistemology, there is a class of theories that understand the epistemic status of collective attitude ascriptions, such as ‘the college union knows that the industrial action is going to plan’, or ‘the jury justifiedly believes that the suspect is guilty’, as saying that a sufficient subset of group member attitudes have the relevant epistemic status. In this paper, I will demonstrate that these summativist approaches to collective epistemology are incompatible with epistemic permissivism, the doctrine that a single body (...)
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  • How can we assess whether to trust collectives of scientists?Elinor Clark - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    A great many important decisions we make in life depend on scientific information that we are not in a position to assess. So it seems we must defer to experts. By now there are a variety of criteria on offer by which non-experts can judge the trustworthiness of a scientist responsible for producing or promulgating this information. But science is, for the most part, a collective not an individual enterprise. This paper explores which of the criteria for judging the trustworthiness (...)
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  • African Epistemology.Paul Irikefe - forthcoming - The Blackwell Companion to Epistemology, Third Edition, Kurt Sylvan, Matthias Steup, Ernest Sosa and Jonathan Dancy (Eds.).
    This chapter examines the three projects that constitute contemporary African epistemology and suggests various ways in which they can be put on a firmer footing, and by so doing advance the epistemic goal of the discipline. These three projects include ethno-epistemology, analytic African epistemology and what one might call ameliorative African epistemology. Ethno-epistemology is the study of the phenomenon of knowledge from the perspective of particular African communities as revealed in their cultural heritage, proverbs, folklores, traditions, and practices. Analytic African (...)
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  • The Belief Norm of Academic Publishing.Wesley Buckwalter - 2022 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 9.
    The belief norm of academic publishing states that researchers should believe certain claims they publish. The purpose of this paper is to defend the belief norm of academic publishing. In its defense, the advantages and disadvantages of the belief norm are evaluated for academic research and for the publication system. It is concluded that while the norm does not come without costs, academic research systemically benefits from the belief norm and that it should be counted among those that sustain the (...)
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  • Collective arrogance: a norms-based account.Henry Roe - 2023 - Synthese 202 (32):1-18.
    How should we understand the arrogance of groups that do not seem to exhibit group agency? Specifically, how should we understand the putative epistemic arrogance ascribed to men and privileged or powerful groups in cases raised in the extant philosophical literature? Groups like these differ from others that are usually the subject of work on collective vice and virtue insofar as they seem to lack essential features of group agency; they are sub-agential groups. In this article, I ask whether extant (...)
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  • Weakness of Political Will.Camila Hernandez Flowerman - 2024 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 27 (1).
    In this paper I provide a preliminary account of weakness of political will (political akrasia). My aim is to use theories from the weakness of will literature as a guide to develop a model of the same phenomenon as it occurs in collective agents. Though the account will parallel the traditional view of weakness of will in individuals, weakness of political will is a distinctly political concept that will apply to group agents such as governments, institutional actors, and other political (...)
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  • Beyond belief: On disinformation and manipulation.Keith Raymond Harris - forthcoming - Erkenntnis:1-21.
    Existing analyses of disinformation tend to embrace the view that disinformation is intended or otherwise functions to mislead its audience, that is, to produce false beliefs. I argue that this view is doubly mistaken. First, while paradigmatic disinformation campaigns aim to produce false beliefs in an audience, disinformation may in some cases be intended only to prevent its audience from forming true beliefs. Second, purveyors of disinformation need not intend to have any effect at all on their audience’s beliefs, aiming (...)
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  • (1 other version)Knowledge as a (non-factive) mental state.Adam Michael Bricker - forthcoming - Erkenntnis:1-22.
    The thesis that knowledge is a factive mental state plays a central role in knowledge-first epistemology, but accepting this thesis requires also accepting an unusually severe version of externalism about the mind. On this strong attitude externalism, whether S is in the mental state of knowledge can and often will rapidly change in virtue of changes in external states of reality with which S has no causal contact. It is commonly thought that this externalism requirement originates in the factivity of (...)
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  • Okay, Google, Can I Trust You? An Anti-trust Argument for Antitrust.Trystan S. Goetze - 2023 - In Mark Alfano & David Collins (eds.), The Moral Psychology of Trust. Lexington Books. pp. 237-257.
    In this chapter, I argue that it is impossible to trust the Big Tech companies, in an ethically important sense of trust. The argument is not that these companies are untrustworthy. Rather, I argue that the power to hold the trustee accountable is a necessary component of this sense of trust, and, because these companies are so powerful, they are immune to our attempts, as individuals or nation-states, to hold them to account. It is, therefore, literally impossible to trust Big (...)
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  • Group Assertions and Group Lies.Neri Marsili - 2023 - Topoi 42 (2):369-384.
    Groups, like individuals, can communicate. They can issue statements, make promises, give advice. Sometimes, in doing so, they lie and deceive. The goal of this paper is to offer a precise characterisation of what it means for a group to make an assertion and to lie. I begin by showing that Lackey’s influential account of group assertion is unable to distinguish assertions from other speech acts, explicit statements from implicatures, and lying from misleading. I propose an alternative view, according to (...)
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  • Why group mental states are not exhaustively determined by member states.Brian Epstein - 2022 - Philosophical Issues 32 (1):417-433.
    With few exceptions, theorists analyze group attitudes in terms of the attitudes of members. In Epstein 2015, 2019a, 2019b, I argued that this thesis (which I call "MEMBERS ONLY")—and hence any theory that analyzes group attitudes in terms of member attitudes—is mistaken: the attitudes of many groups are ontologically determined by a broader range of factors than member attitudes. My aim in the present paper is to consider new arguments against MEMBERS ONLY. I argue that arguments based on the "hypothesis (...)
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  • Understanding phenomena: From social to collective?Federica Isabella Malfatti - 2022 - Philosophical Issues (1):253-267.
    In making sense of the world, we typically cooperate, join forces, and draw on one another’s competence and expertise. A group or community in which there is a well-functioning division of cognitive-epistemic labor can achieve levels of understanding that a single agent who relies exclusively on her own capacities would probably never achieve. However, is understanding also collective? I.e., is understanding something that can be possessed by a group or community rather than by individuals? In this paper, I develop an (...)
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  • Collective Responsibility Should be Treated as a Virtue.Mandi Astola - 2022 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 92:27-44.
    We often praise and blame groups of people like companies or governments, just like we praise and blame individual persons. This makes sense. Because some of the most important problems in our society, like climate change or mass surveillance, are not caused by individual people, but by groups. Philosophers have argued that there exists such a thing as group responsibility, which does not boil down to individual responsibility. This type of responsibility can only exist in groups that are organized with (...)
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  • The subject of knowledge in collaborative science.Duygu Uygun Tunç - 2023 - Synthese 201 (3):1-26.
    The epistemic subject of collective scientific knowledge has been a matter of dispute in recent philosophy of science and epistemology. Following the distributed cognition framework, both collective-subject accounts (most notably by Knorr-Cetina, in _Epistemic Cultures_, Harvard University Press, 1999) as well as no-subject accounts of collective scientific knowledge (most notably by Giere, Social Epistemology 21:313–320, 2007; in Carruthers, Stich, Siegal (eds), _The Cognitive Basis of Science_, Cambridge University Press, 2002a) have been offered. Both strategies of accounting for collective knowledge are (...)
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  • Collective Epistemic Luck.Moisés Barba & Fernando Broncano-Berrocal - 2021 - Acta Analytica 37 (1):99-119.
    A platitude in epistemology is that an individual’s belief does not qualify as knowledge if it is true by luck. Individuals, however, are not the only bearers of knowledge. Many epistemologists agree that groups can also possess knowledge in a way that is genuinely collective. If groups can know, it is natural to think that, just as true individual beliefs fall short of knowledge due to individual epistemic luck, true collective beliefs may fall short of knowledge because of collective epistemic (...)
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  • (2 other versions)The paradox of social interaction: Shared intentionality, we-reasoning, and virtual bargaining.Nick Chater, Hossam Zeitoun & Tigran Melkonyan - 2022 - Psychological Review 129 (3):415-437.
    Social interaction is both ubiquitous and central to understanding human behavior. Such interactions depend, we argue, on shared intentionality: the parties must form a common understanding of an ambiguous interaction. Yet how can shared intentionality arise? Many well-known accounts of social cognition, including those involving “mind-reading,” typically fall into circularity and/or regress. For example, A’s beliefs and behavior may depend on her prediction of B’s beliefs and behavior, but B’s beliefs and behavior depend in turn on her prediction of A’s (...)
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  • Would we lie to you?: Jennifer Lackey: The epistemology of groups. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021, 224 pp, $70 HB. [REVIEW]Kenneth Boyd - 2021 - Metascience 30 (3):397-400.
    A review of Jennifer Lackey's "The Epistemology of Groups".
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  • What's Social about Social Epistemology?Helen E. Longino - 2022 - Journal of Philosophy 119 (4):169-195.
    Much work performed under the banner of social epistemology still centers the problems of the individual cognitive agent. AU distinguishes multiple senses of "social," some of which are more social than others, and argues that different senses are at work in various contributions to social epistemology. Drawing on work in history and philosophy of science and addressing the literature on testimony and disagreement in particular, this paper argues for a more thoroughgoing approach in social epistemology.
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  • Group Knowledge and Mathematical Collaboration: A Philosophical Examination of the Classification of Finite Simple Groups.Joshua Habgood-Coote & Fenner Stanley Tanswell - 2023 - Episteme 20 (2):281-307.
    In this paper we apply social epistemology to mathematical proofs and their role in mathematical knowledge. The most famous modern collaborative mathematical proof effort is the Classification of Finite Simple Groups. The history and sociology of this proof have been well-documented by Alma Steingart (2012), who highlights a number of surprising and unusual features of this collaborative endeavour that set it apart from smaller-scale pieces of mathematics. These features raise a number of interesting philosophical issues, but have received very little (...)
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  • Group Action Without Group Minds.Kenneth Silver - 2022 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 104 (2):321-342.
    Groups behave in a variety of ways. To show that this behavior amounts to action, it would be best to fit it into a general account of action. However, nearly every account from the philosophy of action requires the agent to have mental states such as beliefs, desires, and intentions. Unfortunately, theorists are divided over whether groups can instantiate these states—typically depending on whether or not they are willing to accept functionalism about the mind. But we can avoid this debate. (...)
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  • The Epistemology of Collective Testimony.Leo Townsend - 2021 - Journal of Social Ontology.
    In this paper, I explore what gives collective testimony its epistemic credentials, through a critical discussion of three competing accounts of the epistemology of collective testimony. According to the first view, collective testimony inherits its epistemic credentials from the beliefs the testimony expresses— where this can be seen either as the beliefs of all or some of the group’s members, or as the beliefs of group itself. The second view denies any necessary connection to belief, claiming instead that the epistemic (...)
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  • Belief Attribution as Indirect Communication.Christopher Gauker - 2021 - In Ladislav Koreň, Hans Bernhard Schmid, Preston Stovall & Leo Townsend (eds.), Groups, Norms and Practices: Essays on Inferentialism and Collective Intentionality. Cham: Springer. pp. 173-187.
    This paper disputes the widespread assumption that beliefs and desires may be attributed as theoretical entities in the service of the explanation and predic- tion of human behavior. The literature contains no clear account of how beliefs and desires might generate actions, and there is good reason to deny that principles of rationality generate a choice on the basis of an agent’s beliefs and desires. An alter- native conception of beliefs and desires is here introduced, according to which an attribution (...)
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  • (1 other version)Problemas Filosóficos: Uma Introdução à Filosofia / Philosophical Problems: An Introduction to Philosophy.Rodrigo Reis Lastra Cid & Luiz Helvécio Marques Segundo (eds.) - 2020 - Pelotas: Editora da UFPel / UFPel Publisher.
    De um modo geral, queríamos mostrar que a filosofia tem suas próprias áreas, mas tem também subáreas em interdisciplinaridade com as ciências. As ciências e as disciplinas acadêmicas em geral têm problemas, cuja a solução pode ser encontrada empiricamente, por meio de experimentos, entrevistas, documentos, ou formalmente, por meio de cálculos etc, porém os problemas das filosofias dessas disciplinas são justamente os problemas mais fundamentais dessas disciplinas, que fundam o quadro conceitual e de pesquisa das mesmas, e que só poderiam (...)
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  • (1 other version)Filosofia da Linguagem.Sagid Salles - 2020 - In Rodrigo Reis Lastra Cid & Luiz helvécio Marques Segundo (eds.), Problemas Filosóficos. Editora UFPel. pp. 453-489.
    Este artigo é uma breve introdução à filosofia da linguagem. Ele se concentra nos problemas que surgem a partir de dois conceitos centrais: referência e significado. Em particular, o foco central é no problema fundacional da referência e no problema descritivo do significado, assim como a relação entre eles. Embora esta de modo algum seja uma introdução exaustiva ao tema, muitos conceitos centrais são clarificados, como por exemplo teoria da referência, termo singular, termo geral, teoria do significado, composicionalidade, conteúdo, significado (...)
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  • Group minds as extended minds.Keith Raymond Harris - 2020 - Philosophical Explorations 23 (3):1-17.
    Despite clear overlap between the study of extended minds and the study of group minds, these research programs have largely been carried out independently. Moreover, whereas proponents of the extended mind thesis straightforwardly advocate the view that there are, literally, extended mental states, proponents of the group mind thesis tend to be more circumspect. Even those who advocate for some version of the thesis that groups are the subjects of mental states often concede that this thesis is true only in (...)
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  • Collective (Telic) Virtue Epistemology.J. Adam Carter - 2022 - In Mark Alfano, Jeroen De Ridder & Colin Klein (eds.), Social Virtue Epistemology. Routledge.
    A new way to transpose the virtue epistemologist’s ‘knowledge = apt belief’ template to the collective level, as a thesis about group knowledge, is developed. In particular, it is shown how specifically judgmental belief can be realised at the collective level in a way that is structurally analogous, on a telic theory of epistemic normativity (e.g., Sosa 2020), to how it is realised at the individual level—viz., through a (collective) intentional attempt to get it right aptly (whether p) by alethically (...)
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  • Group understanding.Kenneth Boyd - 2019 - Synthese 198 (7):6837-6858.
    While social epistemologists have recently begun addressing questions about whether groups can possess beliefs or knowledge, little has yet been said about whether groups can properly be said to possess understanding. Here I want to make some progress on this question by considering two possible accounts of group understanding, modeled on accounts of group belief and knowledge: a deflationary account, according to which a group understands just in case most or all of its members understand, and an inflationary account, according (...)
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  • What Is Epistemic Public Trust in Science?Gürol Irzık & Faik Kurtulmuş - 2019 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 70 (4):1145-1166.
    We provide an analysis of the public's having warranted epistemic trust in science, that is, the conditions under which the public may be said to have well-placed trust in the scientists as providers of information. We distinguish between basic and enhanced epistemic trust in science and provide necessary conditions for both. We then present the controversy regarding the connection between autism and measles–mumps–rubella vaccination as a case study to illustrate our analysis. The realization of warranted epistemic public trust in science (...)
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  • Informal Logic: A 'Canadian' Approach to Argument.Federico Puppo (ed.) - 2019 - Windsor, Canada: Windsor Studies in Argumentation.
    The informal logic movement began as an attempt to develop – and teach – an alternative logic which can account for the real life arguing that surrounds us in our daily lives – in newspapers and the popular media, political and social commentary, advertising, and interpersonal exchange. The movement was rooted in research and discussion in Canada and especially at the University of Windsor, and has become a branch of argumentation theory which intersects with related traditions and approaches (notably formal (...)
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  • Staying true with the help of others: doxastic self-control through interpersonal commitment.Leo Charles Townsend - 2019 - Philosophical Explorations 22 (3):243-258.
    I explore the possibility and rationality of interpersonal mechanisms of doxastic self-control, that is, ways in which individuals can make use of other people in order to get themselves to stick to their beliefs. I look, in particular, at two ways in which people can make interpersonal epistemic commitments, and thereby willingly undertake accountability to others, in order to get themselves to maintain their beliefs in the face of anticipated “epistemic temptations”. The first way is through the avowal of belief, (...)
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  • Monuments as commitments: How art speaks to groups and how groups think in art.C. Thi Nguyen - 2019 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 100 (4):971-994.
    Art can be addressed, not just to individuals, but to groups. Art can even be part of how groups think to themselves – how they keep a grip on their values over time. I focus on monuments as a case study. Monuments, I claim, can function as a commitment to a group value, for the sake of long-term action guidance. Art can function here where charters and mission statements cannot, precisely because of art’s powers to capture subtlety and emotion. In (...)
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  • What's the Point of Authors?Joshua Habgood-Coote - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    Who should be the author(s) of an academic paper? This question is becoming increasingly pressing, due to the increasing prevalence and scale of scientific collaboration, and the corresponding diversity of authorship practices in different disciplines and subdisciplines. This paper addresses the conceptual issues underlying authorship, with an eye to ameliorating authorship practices. The first part of the paper distinguishes five roles played by authorship attributions: allocating credit, constructing a speaker, enabling credibility judgements, supporting accountability, and creating an intellectual marketplace. The (...)
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  • Well-ordered science and public trust in science.Gürol Irzik & Faik Kurtulmus - 2021 - Synthese 198 (Suppl 19):4731-4748.
    Building, restoring and maintaining well-placed trust between scientists and the public is a difficult yet crucial social task requiring the successful cooperation of various social actors and institutions. Kitcher’s takes up this challenge in the context of liberal democratic societies by extending his ideal model of “well-ordered science” that he had originally formulated in his. However, Kitcher nowhere offers an explicit account of what it means for the public to invest epistemic trust in science. Yet in order to understand how (...)
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  • Social Ontology.Brian Epstein - 2018 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Social ontology is the study of the nature and properties of the social world. It is concerned with analyzing the various entities in the world that arise from social interaction. -/- A prominent topic in social ontology is the analysis of social groups. Do social groups exist at all? If so, what sorts of entities are they, and how are they created? Is a social group distinct from the collection of people who are its members, and if so, how is (...)
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  • Joint Commitment and Collective Belief.Leo Townsend - 2015 - Phenomenology and Mind 9 (9):46-53.
    According to Margaret Gilbert, two or more people collectively believe that p if and only if they are jointly committed to believe that p as a body. But the way she construes joint commitment in her account – as a commitment of and by the several parties to “doing something as a body” – encourages the thought that the phenomenon accounted for is not that of genuine belief. I explain why this concern arises and explore a different way of construing (...)
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  • Opressões epistêmicas.Breno Ricardo Guimarães Santos - 2018 - In José Leonardo Annunziato Ruivo (ed.), Proceedings of the Brazilian Research Group in Epistemology. pp. 201-226.
    In this paper, I discuss some of the recent developments in the political turn of Social Epistemology, focusing on the notions of epistemic injustice and epistemic oppression. In the first part of the work, I introduce Kristie Dotson’s characterization of the epistemic injustices presented by Miranda Fricker, through the understanding of systematic ways of violating epistemic agency in terms of oppressions. In the second part, I discuss Dotson’s critique of Fricker on the grounds that there is an important kind of (...)
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  • Group disagreement: a belief aggregation perspective.Mattias Skipper & Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen - 2019 - Synthese 196 (10):4033-4058.
    The debate on the epistemology of disagreement has so far focused almost exclusively on cases of disagreement between individual persons. Yet, many social epistemologists agree that at least certain kinds of groups are equally capable of having beliefs that are open to epistemic evaluation. If so, we should expect a comprehensive epistemology of disagreement to accommodate cases of disagreement between group agents, such as juries, governments, companies, and the like. However, this raises a number of fundamental questions concerning what it (...)
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  • Justified group belief is evidentially responsible group belief.Paul Silva - 2019 - Episteme 16 (3):262-281.
    ABSTRACTWhat conditions must be satisfied if a group is to count as having a justified belief? Jennifer Lackey has recently argued that any adequate account of group justification must be sensitive to both the evidence actually possessed by enough of a group's operative members as well as the evidence those members should have possessed. I first draw attention to a range of objections to Lackey's specific view of group justification and a range of concrete case intuitions any plausible view of (...)
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  • Do corporations have minds of their own?Kirk Ludwig - 2017 - Philosophical Psychology 30 (3):265-297.
    Corporations have often been taken to be the paradigm of an organization whose agency is autonomous from that of the successive waves of people who occupy the pattern of roles that define its structure, which licenses saying that the corporation has attitudes, interests, goals, and beliefs which are not those of the role occupants. In this essay, I sketch a deflationary account of agency-discourse about corporations. I identify institutional roles with a special type of status function, a status role, in (...)
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  • (1 other version)Outsiders enabling scientific change: learning from the sociohistory of a mathematical proof.Line Edslev Andersen - 2017 - Social Epistemology 31 (2):184-191.
    It has been a common belief among scientists, including mathematicians, that young scientists are especially good at bringing about scientific change. A number of studies suggest, however, that older scientists are not more resistant to change than young scientists are. It is nonetheless worth examining why a scientist’s or mathematician’s outsider status – due to age, educational background, or something else – can sometimes be effective in enabling scientific change. This paper focuses on the case of the solving of the (...)
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  • Group Knowledge and Epistemic Defeat.J. Adam Carter - 2015 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 2.
    If individual knowledge and justification can be vanquished by epistemic defeaters, then the same should go for group knowledge. Lackey (2014) has recently argued that one especially strong conception of group knowledge defended by Bird (2010) is incapable of preserving how it is that (group) knowledge is ever subject to ordinary mechanisms of epistemic defeat. Lackey takes it that her objections do not also apply to a more moderate articulation of group knowledge--one that is embraced widely in collective epistemology--and which (...)
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  • Moral Responsibility, Shared Values, and Corporate Culture.James Dempsey - 2015 - Business Ethics Quarterly 25 (3):319-340.
    ABSTRACT:Although it is unremarkable to hear a corporate culture described as ethical or unethical, it remains quite unclear what such a claim means or how it may be justified. I begin by addressing these two questions by offering an account of corporate culture as the intrinsic values that are shared by organisation members and that underpin organisational goals. I then employ this analysis to offer a new account of how moral responsibility is generated and distributed in business organisations. Since certain (...)
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  • Why Change the Subject? On Collective Epistemic Agency.András Szigeti - 2015 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 6 (4):843-864.
    This paper argues that group attitudes can be assessed in terms of standards of rationality and that group-level rationality need not be due to individual-level rationality. But it also argues that groups cannot be collective epistemic agents and are not collectively responsible for collective irrationality. I show that we do not need the concept of collective epistemic agency to explain how group-level irrationality can arise. Group-level irrationality arises because even rational individuals can fail to reason about how their attitudes will (...)
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  • Why knowledge is the property of a community and possibly none of its members.Boaz Miller - 2015 - Philosophical Quarterly 65 (260):417-441.
    Mainstream analytic epistemology regards knowledge as the property of individuals, rather ‎than groups. Drawing on insights from the reality of knowledge production and dissemination ‎in the sciences, I argue, from within the analytic framework, that this view is wrong. I defend ‎the thesis of ‘knowledge-level justification communalism’, which states that at least some ‎knowledge, typically knowledge obtained from expert testimony, is the property of a ‎community and possibly none of its individual members, in that only the community or some ‎members (...)
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  • Belief, Acceptance, and What Happens in Groups: Some Methodological Considerations.Margaret Gilbert & Daniel Pilchman - 2014 - In Jennifer Lackey (ed.), Essays in Collective Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    This paper argues for a methodological point that bears on a relatively long-standing debate concerning collective beliefs in the sense elaborated by Margaret Gilbert: are they cases of belief or rather of acceptance? It is argued that epistemological accounts and distinctions developed in individual epistemology on the basis of considering the individual case are not necessarily applicable to the collective case or, more generally, uncritically to be adopted in collective epistemology.
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  • Who's Afraid of Dissent? Addressing Concerns about Undermining Scientific Consensus in Public Policy Developments.Inmaculada de Melo-Martín & Kristen Intemann - 2014 - Perspectives on Science 22 (4):593-615.
    Many have argued that allowing and encouraging public avenues for dissent and critical evaluation of scientific research is a necessary condition for promoting the objectivity of scientific communities and advancing scientific knowledge . The history of science reveals many cases where an existing scientific consensus was later shown to be wrong . Dissent plays a crucial role in uncovering potential problems and limitations of consensus views. Thus, many have argued that scientific communities ought to increase opportunities for dissenting views to (...)
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  • Explicatures are NOT Cancellable.Alessandro Capone - 2013 - In Perspectives on Linguistic Pragmatics. Cham: Springer. pp. 131-151.
    Explicatures are not cancellable. Theoretical considerations.
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  • Group selection: The theory replaces the bogey man.David Sloan Wilson & Elliott Sober - 1994 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 17 (4):639-654.
    In both biology and the human sciences, social groups are sometimes treated as adaptive units whose organization cannot be reduced to individual interactions. This group-level view is opposed by a more individualistic one that treats social organization as a byproduct of self-interest. According to biologists, group-level adaptations can evolve only by a process of natural selection at the group level. Most biologists rejected group selection as an important evolutionary force during the 1960s and 1970s but a positive literature began to (...)
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