Filippo Riscica

In this article, I present a potential counterexample to Lackey’s Group Agent Account (GAA) of group beliefs. I argue that cases of pluralistic ignorance pose a problem for Lackey’s GAA because, in such cases, it systematically yields the wrong ascriptions of belief. I then discuss two ways to improve GAA, which I call GAA* and GAA**, that make it immune to the pluralistic ignorance problem. However, I argue that GAA* and GAA** face their own problems that cannot be straightforwardly solved without overfitting the account. I conclude by arguing that pluralistic ignorance is not a minor problem but one that generally affects summative approaches, such as GAA, and provides evidence in support of nonsummative accounts of group beliefs.