Abstract
There are many reasons we might want to take the opinions of various individuals and pool them to give the opinions of the group they constitute. If all the individuals in the group have probabilistic opinions about the same propositions, there is a host of pooling functions we might deploy, such as linear or geometric pooling. However, there are also cases where different members of the group assign probabilities to different sets of propositions, which might overlap a lot, a little, or not at all. There are far fewer proposals for how to proceed in these cases, and those there are have undesirable features. I begin by considering four proposals and arguing that they don’t work. Then I’ll describe my own proposal, which is intended to cover the situation in which we want to pool the individual opinions in order to ascribe an opinion to the group considered as an agent in its own right.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 372 |
| Number of pages | 25 |
| Journal | Synthese |
| Volume | 200 |
| Issue number | 5 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Sept 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:I’d like to extend my heartfelt thanks to Sylvia Wenmackers and two referees for this journal, all of whom generously gave extremely constructive comments on earlier versions of this material. This current version is dramatically improved as a result.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022, The Author(s).