A Deflationary Account of Group Testimony

How should we understand group testimony as a source of knowledge? According to a reductionist account, a group's testimony that p is epistemologically reducible to the testimony of some individual(s). In contrast, a non-reductionist account of these phenomena maintains that in some very important sense, the group itself is the bearer of the state. In this paper, I raise problems for both views and then develop my own deflationary account, according to which the epistemic status of a group's testimony is reducible to that of one or more individuals, though not necessarily ones who are members of the group in question.