Collective (Telic) Virtue Epistemology

Abstract

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 judgemental belief can be realised at the collective level in a way that is structurally analogous, on a telic theory of epistemic normativity, to how it is realised at the individual level—viz., through a (collective) intentional attempt to get it right aptly (whether p) by alethically affirming that p. An advantage of the proposal developed is that it is shown to be compatible with competing views—viz., joint acceptance accounts and social-distributive accounts—of how group members must interact in order to materially realise a group belief. I conclude by showing how the proposed judgement-focussed collective (telic) virtue epistemology has important advantages over a rival version of collective virtue epistemology defended in recent work by Jesper Kallestrup.