ABSTRACT
The nature of the individual believer and their existence are not especially pertinent questions for those trying to understand the nature of individual belief. By contrast, the nature of the group or of the collectivity and whether it really exists are important background questions for those trying to understand group belief and knowledge. An individual believer has a certain kind of commitment to a proposition: they will be disposed to assert that proposition and to deny its negation. The commitment model of group belief mirrors this feature of individual belief; the group’s members are jointly committed to letting the proposition stand as the belief of the group. There is a clear parallel between the distributed account of group belief and the account of individual belief given by the functionalist theory of mind. Indeed one might suppose that this parallel could support the claim that both individual and social beliefs are states of one and the same more general type belief.
