The Social Epistemology of Anthropology: Insights from Judgment Aggregation

Anthropological writings have, at times, been vague in the approach used to gather evidence of cultural and social beliefs of the peoples studied, and the method of representing the data to the reading public. This paper employs the theory of judgment aggregation in critiquing anthropological theory and practice. It will be structured in three parts: first, I will present the theory of judgment aggregation as constructed by Christian List and Philip Pettit; second, I will sketch some epistemological methods used by anthropologists, and assess their attitude toward the notions of judgment aggregation and group agency; and finally, I will apply List and Pettit’s arguments about effective group organization to anthropological practice of representing its studied peoples’ beliefs and judgments by proposing three possible changes in method that will allow for more accurate and faithful interpretations and descriptions. Dagan Douglas Reed College douglasd@reed.edu https://doi.org/10.7710/2155-4838.1177 Volume 9, Issue 1 Res Cogitans 2 | eP1177 Res Cogitans Judgment Aggregation An emerging subfield of epistemology, social epistemology has sought to uncover the social element inherent in certain forms of knowledge.1 It expands from epistemology’s exclusive focus on individuals into “investigating the epistemic effects of social interactions and social systems.” The field of judgment aggregation2 investigates “the epistemic quality of group doxastic attitudes (whatever their provenance may be),” and “the epistemic consequences of adopting certain institutional arrangements or systemic relations as opposed to alternatives” as well.3 List called this the “radical form” of social epistemology, wherein “certain multi-member groups themselves are taken to be epistemic agents capable of acquiring beliefs and knowledge.”4 Judgment aggregation, where judgments are binary expressions of attitudes,5 is concerned with the establishment of group doxastic attitudes (judgments and beliefs) out of individual doxastic attitudes.6 Juries determining defendants’ guilt or innocence, expert panels of scientists recommending policy, and bank committees forecasting future opportunities are just the sort of groups List and Pettit want to explore.7 Much of their work on judgment aggregation since their famous 2002 article “Aggregating sets of judgments: An impossibility result” has been clarification of the aggregation procedure, defense of the existence of group agents, and suggestion for certain configurations of groups using certain aggregation procedures to produce certain results. I will now briefly sketch their views on each of these first two matters, 1 Alvin I. Goldman and Thomas Blanchard, “Social Epistemology,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), section 1, https://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/win2016/entries/epistemology-social. The authors place its formal beginnings in the 1970s and 1980s. 2 One of the many types of social epistemology to have developed since its inception. Alvin I. Goldman, “A Guide to Social Epistemology,” in Social Epistemology: Essential Readings, ed. by Alvin I. Goldman and Dennis Whitcomb (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 11. 3 Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Social Epistemology,” section 2 and 4.1-4.2. 4 Christian List, “Group Knowledge and Group Rationality: A Judgment Aggregation Perspective,” in Social Epistemology: Essential Readings, ed. by Alvin I. Goldman and Dennis Whitcomb (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 223. 5 Christian List and Philip Pettit, Group agency: the possibility, design, and status of corporate agents (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 37-38. 6 “A Guide to Social Epistemology,” 17. 7 “Group Knowledge,” 223. Douglas | The Social Epistemology of Anthropology commons.pacificu.edu/rescogitans eP1177 | 3 and return to the third in my conclusion. Aggregation procedures “are mechanisms a multi-member group can use to combine (‘aggregate’) the individual beliefs or judgments held by the group members into collective beliefs or judgments endorsed by the group as a whole.”8 Groups like juries and federal agencies seek to make decisive judgments on important propositions whilst adhering to the dual constraints of responsiveness to the judgments of their composing individual members, and collective rationality across their judgments and over time.9 One example of many different possible procedures that such groups may implement is systematic majority voting on each proposition in question: the proposition is considered by itself by each member of the group, who give a binary affirmation or denial of its veracity; then, the ‘majority’ judgment on that proposition becomes the group’s judgment on it. In addition to responsiveness and rationality, the procedure, or “aggregation function” (“a mapping that assigns to each profile of individual attitudes towards the propositions on the agenda the collective attitudes towards these propositions”10), must also meet three more minimal conditions that List and Pettit claim we would expect “of plausible group attitude formation”: universal domain, anonymity, and systematicity.11 Universal domain is when “any possible profile of individual attitudes towards the propositions on the agenda” may be input to the function. Anonymity is when “all individuals’ attitudes are given equal weight in determining the group attitudes,” as in a secret ballot. And systematicity is when “the group attitude on each proposition depends only on the individuals’ attitudes towards it, not on their attitudes towards other propositions, and the pattern of dependence between individual and collective attitudes is the same for all propositions.” List and Pettit show that any organization attempting to meet all of these standards at once will fail to do so, an issue they dubbed the discursive paradox.12 To avoid it, they suggest ignoring at least one of these conditions, so that groups can still function while not being perfect. I return to this idea in the conclusion. 8 “Group Knowledge and Group Rationality: A Judgment Aggregation Perspective,” 222. 9 Christian List and Philip Pettit, “Aggregating sets of judgments: An impossibility result,” Economics and Philosophy 18 (1) (2002): 91, 96. Rationality itself is bound by three of its own constraints, which are completeness, consistency, and deductive closure. See pages 97-98 for definition. 10 Group agency, 48. 11 Group agency, 49. 12 “Aggregating sets of judgments,” 95-96, 100. Volume 9, Issue 1 Res Cogitans 4 | eP1177 Res Cogitans Judgment aggregation depends heavily on the notion of group agency, which might not be readily accepted as existing. List and Pettit claim that in everyday speech, we regularly ascribe to groups’ and organizations’ motivations and actions, such as the FBI investigating such and such suspects, or Goodwill wanting to hire this or that many employees. Not only do we find it acceptable to speak in this manner despite knowing that these groups exist only as collections of their members under certain organizing principles, but also, List and Pettit claim, we could not make sense of these groups as merely collections of individuals. They argue that these groups have agency apart from though arising from the agency of the individual members. List states that thinkers [M]ay be prepared to treat certain groups as agents, provided some stringent conditions are met.... In particular, to be an agent, a group must exhibit patterns of behaviour vis-a-vis the outside world that robustly satisfy certain rationality conditions... In short, a necessary condition for epistemic agency in a group is an institutional structure (formal or informal) that allows the group to endorse certain beliefs or judgments as collective ones; and the group’s performance as an epistemic agent [i.e. how they perform at acquiring beliefs or knowledge] depends on the details of that institutional structure.13 This definition allows groups, from corporations to tribes, to be considered group agents.