Jonathan Matheson

The epistemic significance of disagreement

1. Introduction 2. Idealized Disagreement 3. Steadfast Views of Disagreement 4. Conciliatory Views of Disagreement and the Equal Weight View 5. Objections to the Equal Weight View 6. Everyday Disagreements 7. Objections 8. Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

Conciliatory Views of Disagreement and Higher-Order Evidence

Conciliatory views of disagreement maintain that discovering a particular type of disagreement requires that one make doxastic conciliation. In this paper I give a more formal characterization of such a view. After explaining and motivating this view as the correct view regarding the epistemic significance of disagreement, I proceed to defend it from several objections concerning higher-order evidence (evidence about the character of ones evidence) made by Thomas Kelly (2005).

Are Conciliatory Views of Disagreement Self-Defeating?

Conciliatory views of disagreement are an intuitive class of views on the epistemic significance of disagreement. Such views claim that making conciliation is often required upon discovering that another disagrees with you. One of the chief objections to these views of the epistemic significance of disagreement is that they are self-defeating. Since, there are disagreements about the epistemic significance of disagreement, such views can be turned on themselves, and this has been thought to be problematic. In this paper, I examine several different incarnations of this objection and defend conciliatory views of disagreement from each of them, while making a modification regarding how such views should be understood.

Moral Experts, Deference & Disagreement

We sometimes seek expert guidance when we don’t know what to think or do about a problem. In challenging cases concerning medical ethics, we may seek a clinical ethics consultation for guidance. The assumption is that the bioethicist, as an expert on ethical issues, has knowledge and skills that can help us better think about the problem and improve our understanding of what to do regarding the issue.

Objections to the Equal Weight View

Thus far we have seen that in an idealized disagreement, each opinion is to be given equal weight. In such a scenario, the higher-order evidence about each party is equally good — the evidence about each party is equally good, and the evidence supports that each party is equally good. So, the proper thing to do is to give each party’s opinion equal evidential weight. We have also seen that when you give the opinion of the other party to an idealized disagreement its proper weight, you get a reason to split the difference with that party. You thereby have a reason to adopt the doxastic attitude midway between the two original conflicting doxastic attitudes. While this reason to split the difference can itself be defeated, it is not defeated in as many ways as has been thought.

Steadfast Views of Disagreement

In this chapter we will examine the case for Steadfast Views of disagreement — views that claim that it is rational to stick to your guns about p even after you have gained evidence that you are party to an idealized disagreement about p. Steadfast Views claim that evidence that you are a party to an idealized disagreement is of no real epistemic significance — this evidence does not affect what doxastic attitude you are justified in adopting toward the disputed proposition. As we saw at the end of the last chapter, Steadfast Views come in two varieties. First, they can claim that evidence that you are party to an idealized disagreement about p does not give you a defeater for your doxastic attitude about p. They can claim that this evidence might be relevant for the justification of some proposition or other, but it is irrelevant to the justification of the disputed proposition itself. Second, they can claim that while evidence that you are a party to an idealized disagreement is a defeater for your doxastic attitude toward the disputed proposition, this defeater is always itself fully defeated, resulting in no change with respect to what attitude you are justified in adopting toward the disputed proposition (or to what degree you are justified in adopting it). What is central to Steadfast Views of disagreement is that gaining evidence that you are party to an idealized disagreement about p does not affect your justification with respect to p.

Conciliatory Views of Disagreement and the Equal Weight View

Having examined the case for Steadfast Views of disagreement in the previous chapter, in this chapter our inquiry turns to their chief competitor — Conciliatory Views of disagreement.1 According to Conciliatory Views of disagreement, idealized disagreement (or better, evidence thereof) is of epistemic significance. More precisely, according to Conciliatory Views of disagreement, gaining evidence that you are party to an idealized disagreement does affect your justification for the disputed proposition. In particular, such evidence (if undefeated) makes it such that you are no longer justified in adopting your original doxastic attitude toward the disputed proposition. Rather, such evidence (if undefeated) makes it such that the doxastic attitude you are justified in adopting (regarding the disputed proposition) is closer to that of the other disagreeing party. According to Conciliatory Views of disagreement, while the evidence regarding the disagreement can itself be defeated, this evidence is not trivially defeated (it does not itself always come along with a defeater that undermines its own epistemic impact).2 So, Conciliatory Views of disagreement claim that in getting (undefeated) evidence that you are party to an idealized disagreement about p, you should typically move, at least a little, toward the other party’s view on the matter.3