Within collective epistemology, there is a class of theories that understand the epistemic status of collective attitude ascriptions, such as “the college union knows that the industrial action is going to plan” as saying that a sufficient subset of group member attitudes has the relevant epistemic status. I will demonstrate that these summativist approaches to collective epistemology are incompatible with epistemic permissivism, the doctrine that a single body of evidence may rationalize multiple doxastic attitudes. In particular, we can use epistemic permissivism to generate so-called divergence cases, which demonstrate situations in which rationality requires group-level and member-level attitudes to diverge.

在集体认识论中，有一类理论理解集体态度归因的认知状态，例如“大学工会知道将计划罢工”，即群体成员态度的足够子集具有相关的认知状态。地位。我将证明这些集体认识论的总结主义方法与认识宽容主义不相容，后者认为单一证据可以合理化多种信仰态度。特别是，我们可以使用认知宽容主义来产生所谓的分歧案例，这些案例展示了理性要求群体层面和成员层面的态度出现分歧的情况。