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This chapter examines the relationship between individual and collective epistemology, with a particular focus on the debate between those who grant that groups have beliefs and those who claim that they have only acceptances. It is argued that there is an important methodological constraint that most have failed to appreciate; namely, that it should not be assumed that theories and distinctions accepted in individual epistemology will apply straightforwardly to the corresponding phenomena in collective epistemology.

This introduction presents a central debate in collective epistemology between summativists—who argue that epistemic phenomena at the collective level, such as group knowledge, can be understood entirely in terms of individual phenomena—and non-summativists—who deny this. Summaries of the chapters are included, along with a discussion of how they bear on this, and other, key debates in this area of epistemology.

In this Introduction, a central debate in the literature on the epistemology of groups is discussed. On the one hand, deflationary theorists hold that group phenomena, such as group beliefs, can be understood entirely in terms of individual members and their states. On the other hand, inflationary theorists, maintain that group phenomena are importantly over and above, or otherwise distinct from, individual members and their states. It is argued that settling some of the issues in this debate lies at the heart of making sense of collective responsibility. It is also emphasized that a central aim of this book is to make progress in understanding crucial notions in collective epistemology—group belief, justified group belief, group knowledge, group assertion, and group lies—so as to shed light on whether it is groups, their individual members, or both who ought to be held responsible for collective actions. Finally, overviews of each chapter are provided.

The received view in collective epistemology is that group belief must be understood in inflationary terms, with the most popular version being the joint acceptance account. Very roughly, group belief is the result of members jointly agreeing to accept a proposition as the group’s, even if no member believes it herself. In this chapter, this orthodoxy is challenged by showing that joint acceptance accounts lack the resources to explain how groups can lie and bullshit, and, more generally, it is argued that group belief cannot be determined by processes that are under the direct voluntary control of the members. A new view, the Group Agent Account, is then defended, according to which group belief is determined in part by relations among the bases of the beliefs of members, where these relations arise only at the collective level, but is also partly constituted by the individual beliefs of members.