ABSTRACT
this chapter describes and critically evaluates the reductive virtue/vice model. According to the reductive virtue/vice model, when individuals in a group setting who lean, on average, in a particular direction strengthen their views in the direction they lean, following deliberation, they, in doing so, manifest their own (individual) epistemic virtues and vices (depending on whether the polarization at issue is epistemically good or bad). In this way, for the reductive virtue/vice model, all it takes for a group to polarize in an epistemically proper or improper way is that all or most members of the group systematically manifest their individual epistemic virtues (in the good cases) and vices (in the bad cases). Thus, on this view, saying that group polarization is an epistemically virtuous or vicious belief-forming method of a group is just to say that a majority of group members are individually epistemically virtuous or vicious in forming their post-deliberation beliefs, the average of which is the resulting epistemically virtuous or vicious polarized group belief—this the model’s key (weakly) reductionist assumption. We show that this view faces three main problems: the pessimism problem, the problem of individual blamelessness, and the problem of Mandevillian intelligence.
