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.

According to moral encroachers, the moral stakes of a belief partly determine how much evidence we need for the belief to count as knowledge. This view concerns the beliefs of individual believers. In this paper, I argue for a social group version of moral encroachment: dominant groups, such as white people or men, need to have more evidence than the marginalised in order for some of their beliefs to constitute knowledge. I argue for this claim in three steps. First, I spell out the group moral stakes involved – the harms dominant knowers cause the marginalised and the knowledge economy. Second, I show off the theoretical benefits of having the notion of social group moral encroachment at our disposal: it can be an invaluable tool for decolonial and feminist epistemologists if they want to avoid the relativistic ring to their views (a ring that tends to put off many well-wishers). Finally, I start on a positive account of social group moral encroachment by addressing a potential puzzle and responding to objections.

Psychological-epistemic accounts take scientific progress to consist in the development of some psychological-epistemic attitude. Disagreements over what the relevant attitude is – true belief, knowledge, or understanding – divide proponents of the semantic, epistemic, and noetic accounts of scientific progress, respectively. Proponents of all such accounts face a common challenge. On the face of it, only individuals have psychological attitudes. However, as I argue in what follows, increases in individual true belief, knowledge, and understanding are neither necessary nor sufficient for scientific progress. Rather than being fatal to the semantic, epistemic, and noetic accounts, this objection shows that these accounts are most plausible when they take the psychological states relevant to scientific progress to be states of communities, rather than individuals. I draw on recent work in social epistemology to develop two ways in which communities can be the bearers of irreducible psychological-epistemic states. Each way yields a strategy by which proponents of one of the psychological-epistemic accounts might attempt to account for the social dimensions of scientific progress. While I present serious reasons for concern about the first strategy, I argue that the second strategy, at least, offers a promising path forward for a psychological-epistemic account of scientific progress.