Epistemic Value Theory and Judgment Aggregation

Abstract

The doctrinal paradox shows that aggregating individual judgments by taking a majority vote does not always yield a consistent set of collective judgments. Philip Pettit, Luc Bovens, and Wlodek Rabinowicz have recently argued for the epistemic superiority of an aggregation procedure that always yields a consistent set of judgments. This paper identifies several additional epistemic advantages of their consistency maintaining procedure. However, this paper also shows that there are some circumstances where the majority vote procedure is epistemically superior. The epistemic value of maintaining consistency does not always outweigh the epistemic value of making true judgments.

Keywords: epistemic value theory, epistemology, judgment aggregation, doctrinal paradox, probability, consistency