Group Knowledge, Questions, and the Division of Epistemic Labour

Discussions of group knowledge typically focus on whether a group’s knowledge that p reduces to group members’ knowledge that p. Drawing on the cumulative reading of collective knowledge ascriptions and considerations about the importance of the division of labour, I argue for a more complex relation between individual and collective knowledge in the form of what I call the Fragmented Knowledge account of group knowledge. This account claims that a group can know an answer to a question in virtue of members of the group knowing parts of that answer, when the whole answer is available to group-level action.