Inconsistency of knowledge and collective intelligence

Is the intelligence of a collective larger than the intelligence of its members? How does one determine the knowledge of a collective on the basis of the knowledge of its members? In this paper, we try to answer these questions. Many examples show that the knowledge of a collective is not a usual union of the knowledge of its members. If we assume that the members of a collective possess their knowledge states about some common real world, and these states reflect to some degree the proper (real) state of the knowledge about the real world, then a question arises: How does one determine the knowledge of the collective, and what is its quality? In this paper, we use Consensus Theory to solve this problem and to show that, in many cases, the collective knowledge state is more proper than the knowledge states of the collective intelligence.