In the peer disagreement debate, three intuitively attractive claims seem to conflict: there is disagreement among peers on many important matters; peer disagreement is a serious challenge to one’s own opinion; and yet one should be able to maintain one’s opinion on important matters. I show that contrary to initial appearances, we can accept all three of these claims. Disagreement significantly shifts the balance of the evidence; but with respect to certain kinds of claims, one should nonetheless retain one’s beliefs. (...) And one should retain them even though these beliefs would not be supported by the new total evidence if one didn’t already hold them. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper concerns a problem that has received insufficient analysis in the philosophical literature so far: the conditions under which an information-bearing state – say a perception or recollection – yields belief. The paper distinguishes between belief and a psychological property easily conflated with belief, illustrates the tendency of philosophers to overlook this distinction, and offers a positive conception of the mind's information-responsiveness that requires far less belief-formation – and far less formation of other propositional attitudes – than has been (...) commonly supposed to be produced by perception and other experiences. This conception is clarified by a partial sketch of the natural economy of mind. The paper then considers two important questions the conception raises. Does it force us to abandon the venerable belief-desire conception of intentional action, and does it require expanding the domain of intellectual responsibility and thereby our conception of epistemic virtue? (shrink)

Scientific researchers welcome disagreement as a way of furthering epistemic aims. Religious communities, by contrast, tend to regard it as a potential threat to their beliefs. But I argue that religious disagreement can help achieve religious epistemic aims. I do not argue this by comparing science and religion, however. For scientific hypotheses are ideally held with a scholarly neutrality, and my aim is to persuade those who are committed to religious beliefs that religious disagreement can be epistemically beneficial for them (...) too. (shrink)

In a fallen world fraught with evidence against religious beliefs, it is tempting to think that, on the assumption that those beliefs are true, the best way to protect them is to hold them dogmatically. Dogmatic belief, which is highly confident and resistant to counterevidence, may fail to exhibit epistemic virtues such as humility and may instead manifest epistemic vices such as arrogance or servility, but if this is the price of secure belief in religious truths, so be it. I (...) argue, however, that even in a world full of misleading evidence against true religious beliefs, cultivating epistemic humility is the better way to achieve believers’ epistemic aims. The reason is that dogmatic belief courts certain epistemic dangers, including to the true religious beliefs themselves, whereas epistemic humility empowers believers to counter them. (shrink)