In making sense of the world, we typically cooperate, join forces, and draw on one another’s competence and expertise. A group or community in which there is a well-functioning division of cognitive-epistemic labor can achieve levels of understanding that a single agent who relies exclusively on her own capacities would probably never achieve. However, is understanding also collective ? I.e., is understanding something that can be possessed by a group or community rather than by individuals? In this paper, I develop an account of understanding phenomena according to which understanding a phenomenon requires reasonably endorsing an adequate and intelligible epistemic mediator that accounts for this phenomenon. I then show that understanding, conceived along these lines, can be attributed to collective entities. An important result of my arguments will be that a collective entity’s understanding cannot (always) be reduced to the sum of the understandings of the individuals belonging to it. This is because a collective entity can sometimes be rightfully claimed to understand a phenomenon while none of its individual members understands it.
{"title":"Understanding phenomena: From social to collective?","authors":"F. Malfatti","doi":"10.1111/phis.12216","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/phis.12216","url":null,"abstract":"In making sense of the world, we typically cooperate, join forces, and draw on one another’s competence and expertise. A group or community in which there is a well-functioning division of cognitive-epistemic labor can achieve levels of understanding that a single agent who relies exclusively on her own capacities would probably never achieve. However, is understanding also collective ? I.e., is understanding something that can be possessed by a group or community rather than by individuals? In this paper, I develop an account of understanding phenomena according to which understanding a phenomenon requires reasonably endorsing an adequate and intelligible epistemic mediator that accounts for this phenomenon. I then show that understanding, conceived along these lines, can be attributed to collective entities. An important result of my arguments will be that a collective entity’s understanding cannot (always) be reduced to the sum of the understandings of the individuals belonging to it. This is because a collective entity can sometimes be rightfully claimed to understand a phenomenon while none of its individual members understands it.","PeriodicalId":46360,"journal":{"name":"Philosophical Issues","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43359843","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Why group mental states are not exhaustively determined by member states","authors":"B. Epstein","doi":"10.1111/phis.12215","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/phis.12215","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46360,"journal":{"name":"Philosophical Issues","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44987454","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Challenging the ability intuition: From personal to extended to distributed belief‐forming processes","authors":"Joseph Shieber","doi":"10.1111/phis.12222","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/phis.12222","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46360,"journal":{"name":"Philosophical Issues","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43346408","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Many jurisdictions prohibit or severely restrict the use of evidence about a defendant’s character to prove legal culpability. Situationists, who argue that conduct is largely determined by situational features rather than character, can easily defend this prohibition. According to situationism, character evidence is misleading or paltry evidence. But proscriptions on character evidence seem harder to justify on virtue ethical accounts. It appears that excluding character evidence either denies the centrality of character for explaining conduct—the situationist position—or omits probative evidence. Situationism, after all, is antithetical to virtue ethics. This essay provides a virtue ethical defense of character evidence exclusion rules. We show that existing virtue ethical rebuttals to situationism themselves support prohibitions on character evidence; even if behavior arises from stable character traits, character evidence should be prohibited. In building our case, we provide a taxonomy of kinds of character judgment and reconcile the ubiquity and reasonableness of character judgements in ordinary life with the epistemic legitimacy of character evidence prohibitions in law.
{"title":"Opacity of Character: Virtue Ethics and the Legal Admissibility of Character Evidence","authors":"Jacob A. Smith, Georgi Gardiner","doi":"10.1111/phis.12192","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/phis.12192","url":null,"abstract":"Many jurisdictions prohibit or severely restrict the use of evidence about a defendant’s character to prove legal culpability. Situationists, who argue that conduct is largely determined by situational features rather than character, can easily defend this prohibition. According to situationism, character evidence is misleading or paltry evidence. But proscriptions on character evidence seem harder to justify on virtue ethical accounts. It appears that excluding character evidence either denies the centrality of character for explaining conduct—the situationist position—or omits probative evidence. Situationism, after all, is antithetical to virtue ethics. This essay provides a virtue ethical defense of character evidence exclusion rules. We show that existing virtue ethical rebuttals to situationism themselves support prohibitions on character evidence; even if behavior arises from stable character traits, character evidence should be prohibited. In building our case, we provide a taxonomy of kinds of character judgment and reconcile the ubiquity and reasonableness of character judgements in ordinary life with the epistemic legitimacy of character evidence prohibitions in law.","PeriodicalId":46360,"journal":{"name":"Philosophical Issues","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-10-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47100317","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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