Group communication and the transformation of judgments: an impossibility result

List, Christian ORCID: 0000-0003-1627-800X (2011) Group communication and the transformation of judgments: an impossibility result. Journal of Political Philosophy, 19 (1). pp. 1-27. ISSN 0963-8016

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Abstract

While a large social-choice-theoretic literature discusses the aggregation of individual judgments into collective ones, there is much less formal work on the transformation of judgments in group communication. I develop a model of judgment transformation and prove a baseline impossibility theorem: Any judgment transformation function satisfying some initially plausible conditions is the identity function, under which no opinion change occurs. I identify escape routes from this impossibility and argue that the kind of group communication envisaged by deliberative democrats must be 'holistic': It must focus on webs of connected propositions, not on one proposition at a time, which echoes the Duhem-Quine 'holism thesis' on scientific theory testing. My approach provides a map of the logical space in which different possible group communication processes are located.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	http://www.wiley.com/bw/journal.asp?ref=0963-8016
Additional Information:	© 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Divisions:	Government Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method CPNSS
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > B Philosophy (General) B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology
Date Deposited:	05 Feb 2009 11:42
Last Modified:	01 Nov 2025 19:18
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/22531

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