Jennifer Lackey’s excellent new book is very ambitious, as the title suggests: it covers all of collective epistemology (group justification, group knowledge, group speech acts), but also related issues in ethics (group responsibility), language (group assertion and lying), and mind (group belief).
I don’t have the space here to do justice to all the excellent philosophy in this book. I will therefore focus on the topics that I take to be central to collective epistemology—namely, group justification and knowledge.
I will also not go into much detailed discussion of Lackey’s attacks on deflationary views, as I take her arguments to flawlessly show that there are very serious problems with conceiving group epistemic states along such lines. Rather, this piece’s focus will be twofold: I will first put forth a worry for Lackey’s preferred account of group justification. Second, I will look at Lackey’s arguments against inflationism, and identify ways for...
