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Groupthink
Russell, Jeffrey Sanford Hawthorne, John Buchak, Lara
Russell, Jeffrey Sanford
Hawthorne, John
Buchak, Lara
Abstract
How should a group with different opinions (but the same values) make decisions? In a Bayesian setting, the natural question is how to aggregate credences: how to use a single credence function to naturally represent a collection of different credence functions. An extension of the standard Dutch-book arguments that apply to individual decision-makers recommends that group credences should be updated by conditionalization. This imposes a constraint on what aggregation rules can be like. Taking conditionalization as a basic constraint, we gather lessons from the established work on credence aggregation, and extend this work with two new impossibility results. We then explore contrasting features of two kinds of rules that satisfy the constraints we articulate: one kind uses fixed prior credences, and the other uses geometric averaging, as opposed to arithmetic averaging. We also prove a new characterisation result for geometric averaging. Finally we consider applications to neighboring philosophical issues, including the epistemology of disagreement.
Keywords
credence aggregation, formal epistemology, social epistemology, conditionalization, disagreement
Date
2015
Type
Journal article
Journal
Philosophical Studies
Book
Volume
172
Issue
5
Page Range
1287-1309
Article Number
ACU Department
Dianoia Institute of Philosophy
Faculty of Theology and Philosophy
Faculty of Theology and Philosophy
Collections
Relation URI
Source URL
Event URL
Open Access Status
License
File Access
Controlled