ABSTRACT
The epistemology and rationality of groups, and their implications for our understanding of group agency, are an important focus of research on collective intentionality. Questions about the epistemology and rationality of groups come in both at the level of individual agents participating in joint action, and at the level of groups. At the level of individuals, for example, common knowledge among participating agents of their intentions and corresponding beliefs in success of joint action is often (though not always) cited as a precondition for shared intention, and so for joint intentional action. At the group level, we say that, for example, “The tobacco companies knew and for most part accepted the evidence that cigarette smoking was a cause of cancer by the late 1950s.” Scientific knowledge raises questions about both levels. It is the result of a massive coordinated effort by many people, often as members of large research teams or organizations, in an institutional environment designed for sharing information, duplicating experiments, and critically evaluating hypothesis and proposals. Arguably the knowledge that results cannot be analyzed exhaustively in terms of the aggregate knowledge of individual scientists.
