Modelling collective belief

@article{Gilbert2004ModellingCB,
  title={Modelling collective belief},
  author={Margaret Gilbert},
  journal={Synthese},
  year={2004},
  volume={73},
  pages={185-204}
}
What is it for a group to believe something? A summative account assumes that for a group to believe that p most members of the group must believe that p. Accounts of this type are commonly proposed in interpretation of everyday ascriptions of beliefs to groups. I argue that a nonsummative account corresponds better to our unexamined understanding of such ascriptions. In particular I propose what I refer to as the ‘joint acceptance’ model of group belief. I argue that group beliefs according to… 
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184 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
11
Background Citations
74
Methods Citations
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184 Citations

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ABSTRACT What conditions must be satisfied if a group is to count as having a justified belief? Jennifer Lackey (2016) has recently argued that any adequate account of group justification must be…
JOINT COMMITMENT AND COLLECTIVE BELIEF: A REVISIONARY PROPOSAL*
According to Margaret Gilbert, two or more people collectively believe that p if and only if they are jointly committed to believe that p as a body. But the way she construes joint commitment in her…
Justified Group Belief, Group Knowledge and Being in a Position to Know
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…
Can groups be genuine believers? The argument from interpretationism
In ordinary discourse we often attribute beliefs not just to individuals but also to groups. But can groups really have genuine beliefs? This paper considers but ultimately rejects one of the main…
Collective Belief And Acceptance
TLDR
It is argued that the attitudes that groups adopt that Gilbert refers to as ``collectivebeliefs'' are not a species of belief in animportant and central sense, but rathera species of acceptance.
Believing is said of groups in many ways (and so it should be said of them in none)
In the first half of this paper, I argue that group belief ascriptions are highly ambiguous. What’s more, in many cases, neither the available contextual factors nor known pragmatic considerations are…
Belief, Acceptance, and What Happens in Groups Some Methodological Considerations
The vast majority of the discussions in epistemology have focused on the epistemic states of human individuals.1 Those discussions consider, for example, what it is for individual human beings to…
Reliable group belief
TLDR
A modified reliability-based account of justified group belief is proposed, and it is noted how some formal and experimental work is relevant to those who are attracted to the kind of reliability- based account of justification group belief that is developed here.
Collective beliefs and horizontal interactions between groups: the case of political parties
Groups matter in our ordinary folk psychology because a part of our social interactions is done with collective entities. In our everyday life, we indeed sometimes ascribe mental states to social…
On the Possibility of Group Knowledge without Belief
Endorsing the idea of group knowledge seems to entail the possibility of group belief as well, because it is usually held that knowledge entails belief. It is here studied whether it would be…
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