Abstract
A prominent question in social epistemology concerns the epistemic profile of groups. While inflationists and deflationists agree that groups are fit to constitute knowers, they disagree about whether group knowledge is reducible to knowledge of their individual members. This paper develops and defends a weak inflationist view according to which some, but not all, group knowledge is over and above any knowledge of their members. This view sits between the deflationist view that all group knowledge is reducible to individual knowledge, and the strong inflationist view that some such knowledge even fails to supervene on features of individuals. Thus, some group knowledge is irreducible, but all such knowledge is anchored in, and so doesn't float freely from, individual features.
Original language | English |
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Number of pages | 24 |
Journal | Episteme |
Early online date | 6 Jul 2022 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | E-pub ahead of print - 6 Jul 2022 |
Keywords
- Socially structured groups
- group knowledge
- inflationism
- epistemic standards
- distributed cognition