Essays on Aggregation in Deliberation and Inquiry

In Essays on Aggregation in Deliberation and Inquiry, I study models of aggregation for probabilities, full beliefs, and preferences. Aggregation matters for finding consensus, neutral positions, or agreement, which serves crucial functions in rational deliberation and inquiry for both individual agents and groups. While it may be obvious that neutrality or consensus matters in settings of groups of decision makers or inquirers, such notions are also crucial for single agents. A rational agent can have multiple goals or values that come into conflict or she may suspend judgment between various ways of evaluating events with respect to subjective probability, for example. Such cases require an account of neutrality. So an account of neutrality is important for decision theory and epistemology even when the focus is on individual agents. Essays on Aggregation in Deliberation and Inquiry is a sustained exploration of taking indeterminacy—in value, in probability—seriously in the context of aggregation. My dissertation comprises six papers, naturally grouped into three sections: probability, full belief, and preference.