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Belief beyond groups

Belief beyond groups While groups can do many things, and are subject to important sorts of assessment, persons can exhibit some normative statuses that no group can realize. I defend an anti-realist position about group belief (and group agency, generally) and suggest that it can still, in a way, sympathetically accommodate the range of cases discussed by Lackey in her groundbreaking The Epistemology of Groups. The distinctive normative character of belief—its integration, in consciousness, into a framework of rational relations—makes it impossible for a group to believe. Our critique of a club, or a commission, or a community, or a company or corporation—in just the ways in which we seem also to evaluate individuals—can be explained in ways that do not require postulating that the group in question have beliefs: the evaluation is revealed as indicating a fundamentally different sort of feature. The group has perhaps failed, in a way that is worth attending to, but that failure was different in normative kind from the sort of flaw that characterizes, for example, irrational belief. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Asian Journal of Philosophy Springer Journals

Belief beyond groups

Sosa, David
Asian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 2 (1) – May 11, 2023
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Publisher
Springer Journals
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2023. Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
eISSN
2731-4642
DOI
10.1007/s44204-023-00077-z
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Abstract

While groups can do many things, and are subject to important sorts of assessment, persons can exhibit some normative statuses that no group can realize. I defend an anti-realist position about group belief (and group agency, generally) and suggest that it can still, in a way, sympathetically accommodate the range of cases discussed by Lackey in her groundbreaking The Epistemology of Groups. The distinctive normative character of belief—its integration, in consciousness, into a framework of rational relations—makes it impossible for a group to believe. Our critique of a club, or a commission, or a community, or a company or corporation—in just the ways in which we seem also to evaluate individuals—can be explained in ways that do not require postulating that the group in question have beliefs: the evaluation is revealed as indicating a fundamentally different sort of feature. The group has perhaps failed, in a way that is worth attending to, but that failure was different in normative kind from the sort of flaw that characterizes, for example, irrational belief.

Journal

Asian Journal of Philosophy – Springer Journals

Published: May 11, 2023

Keywords: Group belief; Group assertion; Normativity of groups

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