The Epistemology of Groups

Abstract

The epistemology of groups is a subfield of social epistemology that explores the possibility of epistemic properties and processes at the group level. Traditional epistemology has been criticized for exhibiting two forms of individualism. First, it takes the individual in isolation from its social setting. Second, traditional epistemology presumes the individual to be the locus of epistemic properties such as belief, knowledge, cognition, rationality, epistemic virtue, and objectivity. Virtue epistemology can be divided roughly into two groups: virtue reliabilism and virtue responsibilism. The epistemology of groups is a rapidly growing subfield of social epistemology. Alvin Goldman has broadened his conception of a reliable process to include social processes. Goldman remains agnostic regarding the nature of group belief but adopts C. List and P. Pettit’s account in order to develop a theory of the justification of group belief. Goldman calls the function that takes individual attitudes as inputs and yields collective beliefs as output a belief aggregation function.