Conciliationism is the view that an agent must revise her belief in a proposition when she becomes aware that there is an epistemic peer who disagrees with her about that proposition. If epistemic peers are anything less than strict cognitive and evidential equals, then even slight differences could explain away why the two parties disagree in the first place. But this strict notion of peerhood never obtains in many, if not most, of real-life cases disagreements between inquirers. One recent account (...) of peerhood which might obtain more frequently in cases of real-life disagreements comes from Elgin Voicing dissent: the ethics and epistemology of making disagreement public, Routledge, New York, pp 10–21, 2018). She argues that two scientists who are epistemic peers can disagree because while they might have the same reasoning abilities, they can have different reasoning styles. While there are merits to Elgin’s account, I argue that two people with different reasoning styles are unlikely to be epistemic peers since such differences could serve to explain away why they disagree. I argue that there is a conception of peerhood which can retain the sceptical force of conciliationism without trivializing or dismissing the problem of disagreement. I then conclude that a particularly attractive argument against conciliationism is gestured at by Elgin in one of her earlier pieces on disagreement. This argument is based on the idea that there are epistemic benefits to be gained from remaining steadfast in the face of disagreement Disagreement, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 53–68, 2010). The success of this argument, however, might force an inquirer faced with disagreement to choose between synchronic reasons and diachronic reasons. If Hughes’ recent defense of epistemic dilemmism is correct this may be a feature of the argument, rather than a bug. (shrink)

The paper presents a new argument for epistemic permissivism. The version of permissivism that we defend is a moderate version that applies only to explicit doxastic attitudes. Drawing on Yalcin’s framework for modeling such attitudes, we argue that two fully rational subjects who share all their evidence, prior beliefs, and epistemic standards may still differ in the explicit doxastic attitudes that they adopt. This can happen because two such subjects may be sensitive to different questions. Thus, differing intellectual interests can (...) yield failures of uniqueness. This is not a merely pragmatic phenomenon. (shrink)

Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Volume 92, Issue 2, Page 365-377, June 2014.

Conciliationists about peer disagreement hold that when one disagrees with an epistemic peer about some proposition p, one should significantly change one's view about p. Many arguments for conciliationism appeal to a principle Christensen [2011] dubs Independence. Independence says that evaluations of the beliefs of those with whom one disagrees should not be made on the basis of one's initial reasoning about p. In this paper, I show that this principle is false. I also show that two weaker principles that (...) vindicate conciliationism are either false, unmotivated, or both. (shrink)

Michael Bergmann seeks to motivate his externalist, proper function theory of epistemic justification by providing three objections to the mentalism and mentalist evidentialism characteristic of nonexternalists such as Richard Feldman and Earl Conee. Bergmann argues that (i) mentalism is committed to the false thesis that justification depends on mental states; (ii) mentalism is committed to the false thesis that the epistemic fittingness of an epistemic input to a belief-forming process must be due to an essential feature of that input, and, (...) relatedly, that mentalist evidentialism is committed to the false thesis that the epistemic fittingness of doxastic response B to evidence E is an essential property of B–E; and (iii) mentalist evidentialism is “unmotivated”. I object to each argument. The argument for (i) begs the question. The argument for (ii) suffers from the fact that mentalist evidentialists are not committed to the consequences claimed for them; nevertheless, I show that there is, in the neighborhood, a substantive dispute concerning the nature of doxastic epistemic fittingness. That dispute involves what I call “Necessary Fittingness”, the view that, necessarily, exactly one (at most) doxastic attitude ( belief , or disbelief , or suspension of judgment ) toward a proposition is epistemically fitting with respect to a person’s total evidence at any time. Reflection on my super-blooper epistemic design counterexamples to Bergmann’s proper function theory reveals both the plausibility of Necessary Fittingness and a good reason to deny (iii). Mentalist evidentialism is thus vindicated against the objections. (shrink)

The uniqueness thesis states that for any body of evidence and any proposition, there is at most one rational doxastic attitude that an epistemic agent can take toward that proposition. Permissivism is the denial of uniqueness. Perhaps the most popular form of permissivism is what I call the Epistemic Standard View, since it relies on the concept of epistemic standards. Roughly speaking, epistemic standards encode particular ways of responding to any possible body of evidence. Since different epistemic standards may rationalize (...) different doxastic states on the same body of evidence, this view gives us a form of permissivism if different agents can have different epistemic standards. Defenders of the ESV, however, have not paid sufficient attention to what it means to have a particular epistemic standard. I argue that any theory of epistemic standard possession must satisfy two criteria to adequately address the broader needs of the ESV. The first criterion is the normative criterion: a theory of standard-possession should explain why agents are rationally required to form beliefs in accordance with their own epistemic standard, rather than any other standard. The second criterion is the applicability criterion: a theory of standard-possession should rule that agents have the epistemic standards we intuitively think they have. I then argue that no extant theories of standard-possession can satisfy both these criteria. I conclude by diagnosing why these criteria are so hard to jointly satisfy. Defenders of the ESV are thus left with a serious obstacle to forming a complete and plausible version of their view. (shrink)

Rationality is intrapersonally permissive just in case there are multiple doxastic states that one agent may be rational in holding at a given time, given some body of evidence. One way for intrapersonal permissivism to be true is if there are epistemic supererogatory beliefs—beliefs that go beyond the call of epistemic duty. Despite this, there has been almost no discussion of epistemic supererogation in the permissivism literature. This paper shows that this is a mistake. It does this by arguing that (...) the most popular ways of responding to one of the major obstacles to any intrapersonally permissive all fall prey to the same problem. This problem is most naturally solved by positing a category of epistemically supererogatory belief. So intrapersonal epistemic permissivists should embrace epistemic supererogation. (shrink)

There is a controversy, within social epistemology, over how to handle disagreement among epistemic peers. Call this the problem of peer disagreement. There is a solution, i.e. the equal-weight view, which says that disagreement among epistemic peers is a reason for each peer to lower the credence they place in their respective positions. However, this solution is susceptible to a serious challenge. Call it the merely modal peers challenge. Throughout parts of modal space, which resemble the actual world almost completely, (...) there are hordes of epistemic peers, who disagree with almost any arbitrarily chosen belief had by residents of the actual world. Further, the mere modality of these peers is not itself an epistemic difference-maker. Thus, on the equal-weight view, we should significantly lower the credence we place in most of our beliefs. Surely, this is seriously mistaken. Thus, there are serious considerations that cut against the equal-weight view. (shrink)

Intractable disagreement among philosophers is ubiquitous. An implication of such disagreement is that many philosophers hold false philosophical beliefs (i.e. at most only one party to a dispute can be right). Suppose that we distribute philosophers along a spectrum arranged from philosophers with mostly true philosophical beliefs on one end (high‐reliability), to those with mostly false philosophical beliefs on the other (low‐reliability), and everyone else somewhere in‐between (call this is the reliability spectrum). It is hard to see how philosophers could (...) accurately locate themselves on the reliability spectrum; they are prima facie as well positioned as their peers with respect to philosophical matters (call this the placement problem). In this paper, I argue that the reliability spectrum and placement problem lend support to modest meta‐philosophical skepticism: we have a pro tanto (but not an all‐things‐considered) reason to withhold ascent to philosophical claims. (shrink)

Radical experimentalists argue that we should give up using intuitions as evidence in philosophy. In this paper, I first argue that the studies presented by the radical experimentalists in fact suggest that some intuitions are reliable. I next consider and reject a different way of handling the radical experimentalists' challenge, what I call the Argument from Robust Intuitions. I then propose a way of understanding why some intuitions can be unreliable and how intuitions can conflict, and I argue that on (...) this understanding, both moderate experimentalism and the standard philosophical practice of using intuitions as evidence can help resolve these conflicts. (shrink)

In a recent paper in this journal, Joshua Blanchard has identified a novel problem: the problem of unwelcome epistemic company. We find ourselves in unwelcome epistemic company when we hold a belief that is also held mainly or most prominently by those we regard as morally or epistemically bad. Blanchard argues that some, but not all, unwelcome epistemic company provides higher-order evidence against our belief. But he doesn't provide a test for when company is unwelcome or a diagnosis of why (...) it is unwelcome. I provide both. On my disjunctive test, unwelcome epistemic company provides us with a defeater when either there is a match between the content of the belief and the properties that make our company unwelcome, or there is reason to suspect that the belief arose via a shared, unreliable, causal process. (shrink)

The accusation of virtue signalling is typically understood as a serious charge. Those accused usually respond by attempting to show that they are doing no such thing. In this paper, I argue that we ought to embrace the charge, rather than angrily reject it. I argue that this response can draw support from cognitive science, on the one hand, and from social epistemology on the other. I claim that we may appropriately concede that what we are doing is virtue signalling, (...) because virtue signalling is morally appropriate. It neither expresses vices, nor is hypocritical, nor does it degrade the quality of public moral discourse. Signalling our commitment to norms is a central and justifiable function of moral discourse, and the same signals provide evidence that is appropriately taken into account in forming moral beliefs. (shrink)

Conciliationism—the thesis that when epistemic peers discover that they disagree about a proposition, both should reduce their confidence—faces a major objection: it seems to require us to significantly reduce our confidence in our central moral and political commitments. In this paper, I develop a typology of disagreement cases and a diagnosis of the source and force of the pressure to conciliate. Building on Vavova’s work, I argue that ordinary and extreme disagreements are surprising, and for this reason, they carry information (...) about the likelihood of error. But deep disagreement is not surprising at all, and token deep disagreements do not put pressure on us to conciliate. However, a pattern of deep disagreements points to a different concern: not the problem of disagreement but the problem of irrelevant influences. Deep disagreement constitutes some pressure to examine the foundations from which we reason, rather than to conciliate on our central moral and political claims. (shrink)

Moral judgments entail or consist in claims that certain ways of behaving are called for. These actions have expectable consequences. I will argue that these consequences are suspiciously benign: on controversial issues, each side assesses these consequences, measured in dispute-independent goods, as significantly better than the consequences of behaving in the ways their opponents recommend. This remains the case even when we have not formed our moral judgment by assessing consequences. I will suggest that the evidence indicates that our perception (...) of the consequences of acting as recommended by our moral judgments is motivated, such that the warrant of such assessments is lower than we might have thought. The suspicion correlation between our moral judgments and our assessments of the implicated facts provides higher-order evidence that should lead us to reduce our confidence in these assessments. (shrink)

This paper replies to the contributors to a symposium on the book Bad Beliefs. It groups the criticisms and concerns of the contributors under the headings “Gaps and Holes”, “Rationality”, “Epistemic Virtue”, “Agency and Control” and “Nudges”. It defends the view that bad belief formation and maintenance is very importantly rational, though it also acknowledges gaps, limitations and unanswered questions.

Permissivism about rationality is the view that there is sometimes more than one rational response to a given body of evidence. In this paper I discuss the relationship between permissivism, deference to rationality, and peer disagreement. I begin by arguing that—contrary to popular opinion—permissivism supports at least a moderate version of conciliationism. I then formulate a worry for permissivism. I show that, given a plausible principle of rational deference, permissive rationality seems to become unstable and to collapse into unique rationality. (...) I conclude with a formulation of a way out of this problem on behalf of the permissivist. (shrink)

No-platforming—the refusal to allow those who espouse views seen as inflammatory the opportunity to speak in certain forums—is very controversial. Proponents typically cite the possibility of harms to disadvantaged groups and, sometimes, epistemically paternalistic considerations. Opponents invoke the value of free speech and respect for intellectual autonomy in favor of more open speech, arguing that the harms that might arise from bad speech are best addressed by rebuttal, not silencing. In this article, I argue that there is a powerful consideration (...) in favor of no-platforming some speakers: allowing them a platform generates genuine higher-order evidence in favor of their claims. When that higher-order evidence would be misleading, we may reasonably believe it should not be generated. (shrink)

This paper is about epistemic dilemmas, i.e., cases in which one is doomed to have a doxastic attitude that is rationally impermissible no matter what. My aim is to develop and defend a position according to which there can be genuine rational indeterminacy; that is, it can be indeterminate which principles of rationality one should satisfy and thus indeterminate which doxastic attitudes one is permitted or required to have. I am going to argue that this view can resolve epistemic dilemmas (...) in a systematic way while also enjoying some important advantages over its rivals. (shrink)

Recent authors have drawn attention to a new kind of defeating evidence commonly referred to as higher-order evidence. Such evidence works by inducing doubts that one’s doxastic state is the result of a flawed process – for instance, a process brought about by a reason-distorting drug. I argue that accommodating defeat by higher-order evidence requires a two-tiered theory of justification, and that the phenomenon gives rise to a puzzle. The puzzle is that at least in some situations involving higher-order defeaters (...) the correct epistemic rules issue conflicting recommendations. For instance, a subject ought to believe p, but she ought also to suspend judgment in p. I discuss three responses. The first resists the puzzle by arguing that there is only one correct epistemic rule, an Über-rule. The second accepts that there are genuine epistemic dilemmas. The third appeals to a hierarchy or ordering of correct epistemic rules. I spell out problems for all of these responses. I conclude that the right lesson to draw from the puzzle is that a state can be epistemically rational or justified even if one has what looks to be strong evidence to think that it is not. As such, the considerations put forth constitute a non question-begging argument for a kind of externalism. (shrink)

What sort of doxastic response is rational to learning that one disagrees with an epistemic peer who has evaluated the same evidence? I argue that even weak general recommendations run the risk of being incompatible with a pair of real epistemic phenomena, what I call evidential attenuation and evidential amplification. I focus on a popular and intuitive view of disagreement, the equal weight view. I take it to state that in cases of peer disagreement, a subject ought to end up (...) equally confident that her own opinion is correct as that the opinion of her peer is. I say why we should regard the equal weight view as a synchronic constraint on (prior) credence functions. I then spell out a trilemma for the view: it violates what are intuitively correct updates (also leading to violations of conditionalisation), it poses implausible restrictions on prior credence functions, or it is non-substantive. The sorts of reasons why the equal weight view fails apply to other views as well: there is no blanket answer to the question of how a subject should adjust her opinions in cases of peer disagreement. (shrink)

In a situation of peer disagreement, peers are usually assumed to share the same evidence. However they might not share the same evidence for the epistemic system used to process the evidence. This synchronic complication of the peer disagreement debate suggested by Goldman (In Feldman R, Warfield T (eds) (2010) Disagreement. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 187–215) is elaborated diachronically by use of a simulation. The Hegselmann–Krause model is extended to multiple epistemic systems and used to investigate the role of (...) consensus and difference splitting in peer disagreement. I find that the very possibility of multiple epistemic systems downgrades the epistemic value of consensus and makes difference splitting a suboptimal strategy. (shrink)

This paper considers two questions. First, what is the scope of the Equal Weight View? Is it the case that meeting halfway is the uniquely rational method of belief-revision in all cases of known peer disagreement? The answer is no. It is sometimes rational to maintain your own opinion in the face of peer disagreement. But this leaves open the possibility that the Equal Weight View is indeed sometimes the uniquely rational method of belief revision. Precisely what is the skeptical (...) import of this fact; is it the case that some form of skepticism triumphs in such cases? The answer to this question is also no. As it turns out, the situations in which it is most plausible that the Equal Weight view is a rational requirement are the ones in which meeting halfway with a disagreeing peer brings you closer to, and not farther from, knowledge. I argue for these theses in a novel way; by looking at the comparative reliability of belief- invariance and meeting halfway using measures of reliability for degrees of belief, and by drawing normative conclusions from such results. The conclusions here can have the effect of reframing the entire debate in the epistemology of disagreement. (shrink)

It is a common intuition that at least in some cases disagreement has skeptical consequences: the participants are not justified in persisting in their beliefs. I will argue that the currently popular non-dialectical and individualistic accounts of justification, such as evidentialism and reliabilism, cannot explain this intuition and defend the dialectical conception of justification that can explain it. I will also argue that this sort of justification is a necessary condition of knowledge by relying on Craig's genealogy of the concept (...) of knowledge. I will then respond to the accusation that the dialectical conception leads to radical skepticism. My response is partly concessive. It does lead to skepticism in areas where controversy prevails, such as philosophy, politics and religion, but this sort of skepticism is quite intuitive. Finally, I deal with the objection that my defense of skepticism about philosophy is self-refuting. (shrink)

This paper assesses the comparative reliability of two belief-revision rules relevant to the epistemology of disagreement, the Equal Weight and Stay the Course rules. I use two measures of reliability for probabilistic belief-revision rules, calibration and Brier Scoring, to give a precise account of epistemic peerhood and epistemic reliability. On the calibration measure of reliability, epistemic peerhood is easy to come by, and employing the Equal Weight rule generally renders you less reliable than Staying the Course. On the Brier-Score measure (...) of reliability, epistemic peerhood is much more difficult to come by, but employing the Equal Weight rule always renders you more reliable than Staying the Course. I conclude with some normative lessons we can draw from these formal results. (shrink)

Sometimes ordinary disagreements become deep as a result of epistemic injustice. The paper explores a hitherto unnoticed connection between two phenomena that have received ample attention in recent social epistemology: deep disagreement and epistemic injustice. When epistemic injustice comes into play in a regular disagreement, this can lead to higher-order disagreement about what counts as evidence concerning the original disagreement, which deepens the disagreement. After considering a common definition of deep disagreement, it is proposed that the depth of disagreements is (...) best understood as a matter of degree. Then, a case study of real-life disagreement is introduced: the disagreement about whether racism is a significant issue in the Netherlands, illustrated by the tradition of ‘Black Pete’. It is argued that there is disagreement about what counts as evidence in the case study because of two forms of epistemic injustice: testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. Specifically, there is disagreement about epistemic principles concerning whether private first-personal experience of racism is a weighty source of evidence in this domain, whether victims of racism count as important testifiers in this domain, and how to assess testimony that is not intelligible to you because it employs concepts and terminology you are unfamiliar with. By dismissing the relevant testimony and epistemic resources, the disagreement boils down to disagreement on the level of epistemic principles concerning,, and. Introducinginjustice-based deep disagreementhighlights moral and political aspects of disagreements that might seem factual. (shrink)

Within the framework of the epistemological debate on disagreement, this paper aims to examine the sceptical thesis that holds that, if it is impossible to rationally choose among two excluding positions, the only sensible or rational thing to do is to suspend judgement. The idea that ordinary life does not constitute the source of scepticism is presented, which rules out real disagreement between epistemic pairs as its foundation. Sceptical scenes differ ontologically from everyday scenes, without such ontological difference entailing an (...) epistemic difference, since epistemic practices do not vary from one sceptical scene to other types of scenes. (shrink)

Philosophical Issues, Volume 31, Issue 1, Page 188-209, October 2021.

This paper seeks to widen the dialogue between the “epistemology of peer disagreement” and the epistemology informed by Wittgenstein’s last notebooks, later edited as On Certainty. The paper defends the following theses: not all certainties are groundless; many of them are beliefs; and they do not have a common essence. An epistemic peer need not share all of my certainties. Which response to a disagreement over a certainty is called for, depends on the type of certainty in question. Sometimes a (...) form of relativism is the right response. Reasonable, mutually recognized peer disagreement over a certainty is possible.—The paper thus addresses both interpretative and systematic issues. It uses Wittgenstein as a resource for thinking about peer disagreement over certainties. (shrink)

Formal epistemologists criticise the Conciliatory View of peer disagreement for being non-commutative with conditionalisation, path dependent and does not preserve the independence between propositions. Failing to commute with conditionalisation, one may switch the order between conciliating and conditionalising and obtain different outcomes. Failing to be path independent, the outcome of conciliation varies with the order of the acquisition of new testimonies. Failing to preserve the independence between propositions, one may suffer from a sure-loss and hence be deemed irrational. The three (...) formal deficiencies urge people to abandon the Conciliatory View. This paper aims to show that one may save the Conciliatory View by conciliating with nonlinear functions. Research in the study of opinion pooling shows that the three deficiencies are not problems of the Conciliatory View, but problems of linear averaging. Hence, one can get rid of these formal deficiencies by making conciliation with nonlinear averaging functions. After showing how the three deficiencies can be avoided, I will explore the features of nonlinear averaging functions and argue that they have properties that correctly capture people’s intuition concerning disagreement. The conclusion, therefore, is to suggest epistemologists develop a more fine-grained taxonomy for cases of disagreement. With a deliberate categorisation of different kinds of disagreement, epistemologists can pick the proper averaging rule to apply in each specific case, and get rid of possible formal deficiencies. (shrink)

A common worry about moral conciliationism is that it entails at best uncertainty about many of our moral beliefs and at worst epistemological moral scepticism. Against this worry, I argue that moral conciliationism saves us from epistemological moral scepticism and enables us to be confident in many of our moral beliefs. First, I show that only taking disagreements seriously as a threat to our beliefs allows us to utilise agreements in support of our beliefs (call this symmetry). Next, I argue (...) that utilising moral agreements as an epistemic resource allows moral conciliationism to resist the potentially worrisome reduction in confidence of our moral beliefs. Taking the relevance of moral agreement into account, I argue that it is anti-conciliationism that must meet the challenge of epistemological moral scepticism. For this, I suggest that moral inquiry is best understood as a collective endeavour. If so, then agreement on our moral judgments is required to justify the confidence we have in many of our moral beliefs. However, by symmetry, this appeal is possible only if one accepts the conciliatory attitude towards disagreements. Hence, accepting, rather than rejecting moral conciliationism, is the way out of moral scepticism. (shrink)

In recent years, epistemologists have devoted enormous attention to this question: what should happen when two epistemic peers disagree about the truth-value of some proposition? Some have argued that that in all such cases, both parties are rationally required to revise their position in some way. Others have maintained that, in at least some cases, neither party is rationally required to revise her position. In this paper, I examine a provocative and under-appreciated argument for the latter view due to Elgin (...) Disagreement, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 53–68, 2010; The Philosopher’s Magazine, fourth quarter, pp 77–82, 2012; True enough, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2017; in: Johnson Voicing dissent: the ethics and epistemology of making disagreement public, Routledge, New York, pp 10–21, 2018). I defend it against a series of objections, and I then identify some fruitful ways in which her view could be developed further. (shrink)

Nico Silins has proposed and defended a form of Liberalism about perception that, he thinks, is a good compromise between the Dogmatism of Jim Pryor and others, and the Conservatism of Roger White, Crispin Wright, and others. In particular, Silins argues that his theory can explain why having justification to believe the negation of skeptical hypotheses is a necessary condition for having justification to believe ordinary propositions, even though (contra the Conservative) the latter is not had in virtue of the (...) former. I argue that Silins's explanation is unsuccessful, and hence that we should prefer either White/Wright-style Conservatism (which can explain this necessary condition) or Pryor-style Dogmatism (which denies that this is a necessary condition). (shrink)

Despite the recent growth of studies in virtue epistemology, the intellectual virtue of epistemic collaborativeness has been overlooked by scholars working in virtue theory. This is a significant gap in the literature given the import of well-motivated and skillful epistemic collaboration for the flourishing of human societies. This paper engages in an in-depth examination of the intellectual virtue of epistemic collaborativeness. It argues that the agent who possesses this acquired character trait is (i) highly motivated to engage in epistemic collaboration (...) (out of her rational desire for intellectual ends), (ii) competent at the characteristic activity of epistemic collaborativeness and (iii) has good judgement as to when and with whom it is epistemically appropriate to engage in epistemic collaboration. Furthermore, this paper discusses the place of epistemic collaborativeness among the virtues and argues that it is an overarching virtue—i.e. it presupposes certain other intellectual virtues although it remains distinguishable from them. Theoretical and practical merits of this virtue are also presented and considered. The virtue of collaborativeness highlights the social dimension of intellectual virtues and could be of significant value for contemporary virtue-based approaches to education. (shrink)

The Uniqueness Thesis holds, roughly speaking, that there is a unique rational response to any particular body of evidence. We first sketch some varieties of Uniqueness that appear in the literature. We then discuss some popular views that conflict with Uniqueness and others that require Uniqueness to be true. We then examine some arguments that have been presented in its favor and discuss why permissivists find them unconvincing. Last, we present some purported counterexamples that have been raised against Uniqueness and (...) discuss some possible reasons why proponents of Uniqueness might find these similarly unconvincing. (shrink)

Fifteen years ago, Sharon Street and Richard Joyce advanced evolutionary debunking arguments against moral realism, which purported to show that the evolutionary history of our moral beliefs makes moral realism untenable. These arguments have since given rise to a flurry of objections; the epistemic principles Street and Joyce relied upon, in particular, have come in for a number of serious challenges. My goal in this paper is to develop a new account of evolutionary debunking which avoids the pitfalls Street and (...) Joyce encountered and responds to the most pressing objections they faced. I begin by presenting a striking thought experiment to serve as an analogy for the evolution of morality; I then show why calibrationist views of higher-order evidence are crucial to the evolutionary debunking project; I outline a new rationale for why finding out that morality was selected to promote cooperation suggests that our moral judgments are unreliable; and I explain why evolutionary debunking arguments do not depend on our having a dedicated faculty for moral cognition. All things considered, I argue, evolutionary debunking arguments against moral realism are on relatively secure footing – provided, at least, that we accept a calibrationist account of higher-order evidence. (shrink)

Contributors to the recent disagreement debate have sought to provide a uniform response to cases in which epistemic peers disagree about the epistemic import of a shared body of evidence, no matter what kind of evidence they are disagreeing about. The varied cases addressed in the literature have included examples of disagreement about restaurant bills, court verdicts, weather forecasting, chess, morality, religious beliefs, and even disagreements about philosophical disagreements. The equal treatment of these varied cases has motivated the search for (...) a uniform response to peer disagreement wherever it is encountered. In this article I challenge this prevalent approach in the literature. I grant the notion of epistemic peer and accept that being a peer may amount to the same thing in different domains; nonetheless I contend that different domains appear to call for different responses to disagreement. I argue that the appropriate response to finding out about a disagreement with a peer is different in different domains. (shrink)

On the shared-­ends account of close friendship, proper care for a friend as an agent requires seeing yourself as having important reasons to accommodate and promote the friend’s valuable ends for her own sake. However, that friends share ends doesn't inoculate them against disagreements about how to pursue those ends. This paper defends the claim that, in certain circumstances of reasonable disagreement, proper care for a friend as a practical and moral agent sometimes requires allowing her judgment to decide what (...) you are to do, even when you disagree with her judgment (and even when her judgment is in fact mistaken). In these instances, your friendship can make it the case that you may not act on your own practical and even moral judgments because, at those times, you have a duty as her close friend to defer to her judgments. As a result, treating your friend properly as a responsible agent can require that you assist her in committing what may in fact be serious moral wrongs. (shrink)

The anti-metaphysical argument against scientific realism is the following: Knowledge of unobservable entities implies metaphysical knowledge; There is no metaphysical knowledge. Therefore, there is no knowledge of unobservable entities. This argument has strangely received little attention in the profuse literature on scientific realism. This paper claims that the AMA is logically more fundamental than both the pessimistic meta-induction and the underdetermination argument. The second and main claim of this paper is that the instrumentalists’ use of AMA is incoherent. The gist (...) of my argument is that experimental knowledge requires minimally metaphysical knowledge, and that minimally metaphysical knowledge—when associated with empirical knowledge—suffices to yield a minimal knowledge of the unobservable. I then examine and reject two possible responses: minimally metaphysical instrumentalism and algebraic instrumentalism. (shrink)

Conciliatory views of disagreement say, roughly, that it’s rational for you to become less confident in your take on an issue in case you find out that an epistemic peer’s take on it is the opposite. Their intuitive appeal notwithstanding, there are well-known worries about the behavior of conciliatory views in scenarios involving higher-order disagreements, which include disagreements over these views themselves and disagreements over the peer status of alleged epistemic peers. This paper does two things. First, it explains how (...) the core idea behind conciliatory views can be expressed in a defeasible logic framework. The result is a formal model that’s particularly useful for thinking about the behavior of conciliatory views in cases involving higher-order disagreements. And second, the paper uses this model to resolve three paradoxes associated with disagreements over epistemic peerhood. (shrink)

Toleranz wird für gewöhnlich als eine Einstellung definiert, die sich aus Akzeptanz und Ablehnung gegenüber der tolerierten Praxis zusammensetzt. In einem Aufsatz in dieser Zeitschrift hat Achim Lohmar dieses klassische Verständnis von Toleranz angegriffen und einen alternativen Toleranzbegriff stark gemacht. Ich werde argumentieren, dass Lohmars Analyse von Toleranz verfehlt ist, und zeigen, wie sich der klassische Toleranzbegriff gegen Lohmars Kritik verteidigen lässt. Dennoch ist Lohmars Kritik nicht uninteressant. Denn obwohl Lohmars begriffliche Kritik unzutreffend ist, lässt sich auf Lohmars Kritik aufbauend (...) ein inhaltliches Argument gegen die derzeit prominenteste Rechtfertigung von Toleranz formulieren, das Rawls’sche Argument von vernünftiger Meinungsverschiedenheit. Abschließend argumentiere ich gegen Lohmar, dass der personale Toleranzbegriff vom politischen nicht kategorial verschieden ist. (shrink)

Belnap-Dunn logic, sometimes also known as First Degree Entailment, is a four-valued propositional logic that complements the classical truth values of True and False with two non-classical truth values Neither and Both. The latter two are to account for the possibility of the available information being incomplete or providing contradictory evidence. In this paper, we present a probabilistic extension of BD that permits agents to have probabilistic beliefs about the truth and falsity of a proposition. We provide a sound and (...) complete axiomatization for the framework defined and also identify policies for conditionalization and aggregation. Concretely, we introduce four-valued equivalents of Bayes’ and Jeffrey updating and also suggest mechanisms for aggregating information from different sources. (shrink)

Contemporary Western culture is experiencing a heightened awareness of religious diversity. This article surveys a range of possible responses to such diversity, and distinguishes between responses that concern the salvation or moral transformation of persons (soteriological views) and those that concern the alethic or epistemic status of religious beliefs (doctrinal views). After providing a brief taxonomy of these positions and their possible relations to one another, the article focuses primarily on competing views about the truth and rationality of religious beliefs (...) (e.g., pluralism, exclusivism, and skepticism). Here a heavy emphasis is placed on arguments for and against the rationality and moral propriety of retaining one's religious beliefs in the face of disagreement. The article surveys some of the more prominent arguments from the literature on this topic and closes with suggestions for further research. (shrink)

Sarah McGrath has recently defended a disagreement-based argument for skepticism about moral knowledge. If sound, the argument shows that our beliefs about controversial moral issues do not amount to knowledge. In this paper, I argue that McGrath fails to establish her skeptical conclusion. I defend two main claims. First, the key premise of McGrath’s argument is inadequately supported. Second, there is good reason to think that this premise is false.

There is an ancient, yet still lively, debate in moral epistemology about the epistemic significance of disagreement. One of the important questions in that debate is whether, and to what extent, the prevalence and persistence of disagreement between our moral intuitions causes problems for those who seek to rely on intuitions in order to make moral decisions, issue moral judgments, and craft moral theories. Meanwhile, in general epistemology, there is a relatively young, and very lively, debate about the epistemic significance (...) of disagreement. A central question in that debate concerns peer disagreement: When I am confronted with an epistemic peer with whom I disagree, how should my confidence in my beliefs change (if at all)? The disagreement debate in moral epistemology has not been brought into much contact with the disagreement debate in general epistemology (though McGrath [2007] is an important exception). A purpose of this paper is to increase the area of contact between these two debates. In Section 1, I try to clarify the question I want to ask in this paper – this is the question whether we have any reasons to believe what I shall call “anti-intuitivism.” In Section 2, I argue that anti-intuitivism cannot be supported solely by investigating the mechanisms that produce our intuitions. In Section 3, I discuss an anti-intuitivist argument from disagreement which relies on the so-called “Equal Weight View.” In Section 4, I pause to clarify the notion of epistemic parity and to explain how it ought to be understood in the epistemology of moral intuition. In Section 5, I return to the anti-intuitivist argument from disagreement and explain how an apparently-vulnerable premise of that argument may be quite resilient. In Section 6, I introduce a novel objection against the Equal Weight View in order to show how I think we can successfully resist the anti-intuitivist argument from disagreement. (shrink)

On many science-related policy questions, the public is unable to make informed decisions, because of its inability to make use of knowledge obtained by scientists. Philip Kitcher and James Fishkin have both suggested therefore that on certain science-related issues, public policy should not be decided on by actual democratic vote, but should instead conform to the public’s counterfactual informed democratic decision. Indeed, this suggestion underlies Kitcher’s specification of an ideal of a well-ordered science. This article argues that this suggestion misconstrues (...) the normative significance of CIDDs. At most, CIDDs might have epistemic significance, but no authority or legitimizing force. (shrink)

This paper explores the role and resolution of disagreements between physicians and their diagnostic AI-based decision support systems. With an ever-growing number of applications for these independently operating diagnostic tools, it becomes less and less clear what a physician ought to do in case their diagnosis is in faultless conflict with the results of the DSS. The consequences of such uncertainty can ultimately lead to effects detrimental to the intended purpose of such machines, e.g. by shifting the burden of proof (...) towards a physician. Thus, we require normative clarity for integrating these machines without affecting established, trusted, and relied upon workflows. In reconstructing different causes of conflicts between physicians and their AI-based tools—inspired by the approach of “meaningful human control” over autonomous systems and the challenges to resolve them—we will delineate normative conditions for “meaningful disagreements”. These incorporate the potential of DSS to take on more tasks and outline how the moral responsibility of a physician can be preserved in an increasingly automated clinical work environment. (shrink)

This paper discusses a scenario borrowed from Williamson (2000) and repurposes it to argue for the possibility of conflict between two prima facie categorical norms of epistemic rationality: the norm to respect one’s evidence and the norm to be coherent. It is argued, pace Williamson, that in the conflict defining the scenario, the evidence norm overrides the coherence norm; that a rational agent with our evidence would lack evidence about some of their own credences; and that for agents whose evidence (...) is limited in this way, incoherence fails to entail irrationality. The above possibility claim has also been defended by Worsnip (2018), albeit on a quite different premise set and in conjunction with a coherence-centered account of epistemic rationality that issues predictions incompatible with those licensed by the evidence-centered account recommended here, as illustrated towards the end of the paper. (shrink)