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Justified Group Belief, Group Knowledge and Being in a Position to Know

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 December 2020

Jakob Koscholke Open the ORCID record for Jakob Koscholke [Opens in a new window]
Jakob Koscholke*
Affiliation:
University of Hamburg, Germany
*
Email: jakob.koscholke@uni-hamburg.de
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Abstract

Jennifer Lackey has recently presented a new and lucid analysis of the notion of justified group belief, i.e. a set of individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for a group to justifiedly believe some proposition. In this paper, however, I argue that the analysans she proposes is too narrow: one of the conditions she takes to be necessary for justified group belief is not necessary. To substantiate this claim, I present a potential counterexample to Lackey's analysis where a group knows and thus justifiedly believes some proposition but there is no single group member who actually believes that proposition. I close by defending the example against the objection that the group in question does not know but is at most in a position to know the target proposition.

Keywords

Justified group beliefgroup knowledgesocial epistemology
Type
Article
Information
Episteme , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , March 2023 , pp. 15 - 22
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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