Group beliefs and the distinction between belief and acceptance Action editors: Luca Tummolini and Cristiano Castelfranchi Raul Hakli Department of Social and Moral Philosophy, P.O. Box 9 (Siltavuorenpenger 20 A), University of Helsinki, FIN-00014, Helsinki, Finland Received 1 April 2005; accepted 7 November 2005 Available online 7 March 2006 Abstract Group beliefs, or collective doxastic states, are states analogous to beliefs but attributed to groups instead of individuals. In this paper, existing views on the nature of certain types of group beliefs, non-summative group beliefs, are critically examined. Some authors state that they are beliefs, others say that they are not beliefs but acceptances. It is here argued that the distinction between belief and acceptance is not as clear-cut as usually assumed. A common view is that the main difference between the two notions is that beliefs are based solely on evidence, whereas acceptances are affected by pragmatic goals. It is argued that this will not distinguish beliefs from acceptances, because both attitudes can be affected by both evidence on the one hand and goals on the other. It is suggested that the possibility to voluntarily acquire, abandon, or otherwise directly affect the attitude should be taken as the property that distinguishes acceptances from other doxastic states. The question of the nature of group beliefs can then be partially answered by considering whether these states can be taken to be voluntary or not. It has sometimes been claimed that group beliefs are not voluntary for the group but only for the individual group members. It is here argued that non-summative group beliefs should be understood as being voluntary for the group and should thus be classified as acceptances. Whether they should also be regarded as proper beliefs depends on whether the distinction is taken to be dichotomous or not. Ó 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Group belief; Collective doxastic state; Collective mental state; Belief; Acceptance; Collective intentionality 1. Introduction Attributions of belief and knowledge to groups or col- lections of people instead of individuals are common in ordinary use of language, as in the following examples: ‘‘the government believes that the number of unemployed will be halved in the near future’’ or ‘‘the scientists know that the Earth is not flat’’. What these kinds of attributions literally mean has been under analysis by several philoso- phers. There are two types of analyses available in the lit- erature concerning collective intentionality: summative and non-summative. For a typical summative view, consider Quinton’s (1976) proposal: Groups are said to have beliefs, emotions and attitudes and to take decisions and make promises. But these ways of speaking are plainly metaphorical. To ascribe mental predicates to a group is always an indirect way of ascribing such predicates to its members. With such mental states as beliefs and attitudes the ascriptions are of what I have called a summative kind. To say that the industrial working class is determined to resist anti- trade-union laws is to say that all or most industrial workers are so minded. Restricting to the case of belief, to say that a group believes that p means, according to a summative view, just that the members of the group believe that p. Different summative analyses can be constructed depending on whether all group members have to believe that p, or whether it suffices that most of the members believe that p, or whether it is required that most of the members believe that p and that they also believe that most believe that p, or something similar. 1389-0417/$ - see front matter Ó 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.cogsys.2005.11.013 E-mail address: raul.hakli@helsinki.fi. www.elsevier.com/locate/cogsys Cognitive Systems Research 7 (2006) 286–297