Townsend, Leo (2022) Fanaticism, dogmatism, and collective belief. In, Townsend, Leo, Rebecca Tietjen, Ruth, Schmidt, Hans Bernhard and Staudigl, Michael (eds.) The Philosophy of Fanaticism. Routledge. (doi:10.4324/9781003119371-5).
Abstract
This chapter explores the connection between collective belief and dogmatism, arguing that collective belief, properly construed, need not tend towards dogmatism, and, in fact, can be perfectly respectable and responsible from an epistemic perspective. In order to make this argument, I first draw a distinction between two forms of “firmness” in belief: doxastic dogmatism, which is an epistemic vice characterized by stubbornness and rigidity, and doxastic doggedness, which is an epistemic virtue characterized by cognitive self-trust and steadiness. I then examine in some detail Margaret Gilbert’s account of collective belief, according to which collective belief is a matter of several people being jointly committed to doing something together, namely to emulating a single believer of a given proposition. There are two very different ways of fleshing out the object of this joint commitment, and so two different ways of construing just what is involved in collective belief. On the attitude-centred approach—the a
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