Collective Epistemology

Aggregation procedures are mechanisms, a multimember group can use to combine the individual beliefs or judgments held by the group members into collective beliefs or judgments endorsed by the group as a whole’. Groups should be understood as epistemic agents in their own right, ones that have evidential constraints that arise only at the group level, but group justifiedness should still significantly depend on member justifiedness. Walking this middle ground between inflating and deflating group epistemology promises to carve out space for both groups, and the individual members that make them up, to shoulder the responsibility of group actions. But if the truth-tracking or reliability at the collective level of the two groups is equivalent, then the Condorcet-inspired view counts them as equally justified in their respective beliefs. The joint acceptance account treats groups as epistemic entities that can float freely of the evidential profiles of their individual members.