Essays in Collective Epistemology
by Jennifer Lackey (Editor)
We often talk about groups believing, knowing, and
testifying. For instance, we ask whether the Bush Administration had good
reasons for believing that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, or
whether BP knew that its equipment was faulty before the oil spill in the Gulf
of Mexico. Epistemic claims of this sort often have enormously significant
consequences, given the ways they bear on the moral and legal responsibilities
of collective entities. Despite the importance of these epistemic claims, there
has been surprisingly little philosophical work shedding light on these
phenomena, their consequences, and the broader implications that follow for
epistemology in general. Essays in Collective Epistemology aims to fill this
gap in the literature by bringing together new papers in this area by some of
the leading figures in social epistemology.
The volume is divided into four parts and contains ten
articles written on a range of topics in collective epistemology. All of the
papers focus on fundamental issues framing the epistemological literature on
groups, and offer new insights or developments to the current debates: some do
so by providing novel examinations of the epistemological relationship that
groups bear to their members, while others point to new, cutting edge
approaches to theorizing about concepts and issues related to collective entities.
Anyone working in epistemology, or concerned with issues involving the social
dimensions of knowledge, should find the papers in this book both interesting
and valuable.
