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  1. How Low Can You Go? A Defense of Believing Philosophical Theories.Elizabeth Jackson - forthcoming - In Mark Walker & Sanford Goldberg (eds.), Philosophy with Attitude. OUP.
    What attitude should philosophers take toward their favorite philosophical theories? I argue that the answer is belief and middling to low credence. I begin by discussing why disagreement has motivated the view that we cannot rationally believe our philosophical theories. Then, I show why considerations from disagreement actually better support my view. I provide two additional arguments for my view: the first concerns roles for belief and credence and the second explains why believing one’s philosophical theories is superior to accepting (...)
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  • Disagreement and the value of self-trust.Robert Pasnau - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (9):2315-2339.
    Controversy over the epistemology of disagreement endures because there is an unnoticed factor at work: the intrinsic value we give to self-trust. Even if there are many instances of disagreement where, from a strictly epistemic or rational point of view, we ought to suspend belief, there are other values at work that influence our all-things considered judgments about what we ought to believe. Hence those who would give equal-weight to both sides in many cases of disagreement may be right, from (...)
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  • Peer-Disagreement about Restaurant Bills and Abortion.Martin Sticker - 2017 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 94 (4):577-604.
    The author defends Conciliationism as a response to peer-disagreement in ethics against a prominent objection: if in cases of peer-disagreement we have to move our credences towards those of our dissenting peers, then we have to adopt scepticism in fields where disagreement between peers abounds. For this objection, the case of ethics is particularly worrisome. The author argues that the objection from scepticism is based on a highly idealised notion of an epistemic peer. In cases of disagreement about ethical issues, (...)
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  • Disagreement.Richard Feldman & Ted A. Warfield (eds.) - 2010 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
    Disagreement is common: even informed, intelligent, and generally reasonable people often come to different conclusions when confronted with what seems to be the same evidence. Can the competing conclusions be reasonable? If not, what can we reasonably think about the situation? This volume examines the epistemology of disagreement. Philosophical questions about disagreement arise in various areas, notably politics, ethics, aesthetics, and the philosophy of religion: but this will be the first book focusing on the general epistemic issues arising from informed (...)
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  • The moral evil demons.Ralph Wedgwood - 2010 - In Richard Feldman & Ted A. Warfield (eds.), Disagreement. Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
    Moral disagreement has long been thought to create serious problems for certain views in metaethics. More specifically, moral disagreement has been thought to pose problems for any metaethical view that rejects relativism—that is, for any view that implies that whenever two thinkers disagree about a moral question, at least one of those thinkers’ beliefs about the question is not correct. In this essay, I shall outline a solution to one of these problems. As I shall argue, it turns out in (...)
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  • Epistemology of disagreement: The good news.David Christensen - 2007 - Philosophical Review 116 (2):187-217.
    How should one react when one has a belief, but knows that other people—who have roughly the same evidence as one has, and seem roughly as likely to react to it correctly—disagree? This paper argues that the disagreement of other competent inquirers often requires one to be much less confident in one’s opinions than one would otherwise be.
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  • Essays in Collective Epistemology Edited by Jennifer Lackey, ed. [REVIEW]Leo Townsend - 2016 - Analysis 76 (1):105-108.
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  • Sensory Integration and the Unity of Consciousness By David J. Bennett and Christopher S. Hill, eds.J. Henry Taylor - 2016 - Analysis 76 (1):108-111.
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  • Epistemic Peerhood and the Epistemology of Disagreement.Robert Mark Simpson - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 164 (2):561-577.
    In disagreements about trivial matters, it often seems appropriate for disputing parties to adopt a ‘middle ground’ view about the disputed matter. But in disputes about more substantial controversies (e.g. in ethics, religion, or politics) this sort of doxastic conduct can seem viciously acquiescent. How should we distinguish between the two kinds of cases, and thereby account for our divergent intuitions about how we ought to respond to them? One possibility is to say that ceding ground in a trivial dispute (...)
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  • Intersubjective corroboration.Darrell Patrick Rowbottom - 2008 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 39 (1):124-132.
    How are we to understand the use of probability in corroboration functions? Popper says logically, but does not show we could have access to, or even calculate, probability values in a logical sense. This makes the logical interpretation untenable, as Ramsey and van Fraassen have argued. -/- If corroboration functions only make sense when the probabilities employed therein are subjective, however, then what counts as impressive evidence for a theory might be a matter of convention, or even whim. So isn’t (...)
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  • No testimonial route to consensus.Philip Pettit - 2006 - Episteme 3 (3):156-165.
    The standard image of how consensus can be achieved is by pooling evidence and reducing if not eliminating disagreements. But rather than just pooling substantive evidence on a certain question, why not also take into account the formal, testimonial evidence provided by the fact that a majority of the group adopt a particular answer? Shouldn't we be reinforced by the discovery that we are on that majority side, and undermined by the discovery that we are not? Shouldn't this be so, (...)
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  • Collective Reason, the Rationality Gap, and Political Leadership.Vesco Paskalev - 2020 - Ratio Juris 33 (2):169-195.
    The article discusses the implications of the well‐known discursive dilemma. The dilemma arises whenever a reasoned decision has to be taken by a collective decision‐maker and generates persistent contradiction between what is defined as collective reason and public opinion. Following Philip Pettit, I argue that collective reason is normatively preferable and that the role of existing constitutional institutions in contemporary democracies is to collectivise reason. However, this makes the frustration of popular will a systematic by‐product of any well‐functioning political process. (...)
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  • Kitcher, Mathematical Intuition, and Experience.Mark McEvoy - 2007 - Philosophia Mathematica 15 (2):227-237.
    Mathematical apriorists sometimes hold that our non-derived mathematical beliefs are warranted by mathematical intuition. Against this, Philip Kitcher has argued that if we had the experience of encountering mathematical experts who insisted that an intuition-produced belief was mistaken, this would undermine that belief. Since this would be a case of experience undermining the warrant provided by intuition, such warrant cannot be a priori.I argue that this leaves untouched a conception of intuition as merely an aspect of our ordinary ability to (...)
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  • The theory of judgment aggregation: an introductory review.Christian List - 2012 - Synthese 187 (1):179-207.
    This paper provides an introductory review of the theory of judgment aggregation. It introduces the paradoxes of majority voting that originally motivated the field, explains several key results on the impossibility of propositionwise judgment aggregation, presents a pedagogical proof of one of those results, discusses escape routes from the impossibility and relates judgment aggregation to some other salient aggregation problems, such as preference aggregation, abstract aggregation and probability aggregation. The present illustrative rather than exhaustive review is intended to give readers (...)
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  • Group Communication and the Transformation of Judgments: An Impossibility Result.Christian List - 2011 - Journal of Political Philosophy 19 (1):1-27.
    While a large social-choice-theoretic literature discusses the aggregation of individual judgments into collective ones, there is much less formal work on the transformation of judgments in group communication. I develop a model of judgment transformation and prove a baseline impossibility theorem: Any judgment transformation function satisfying some initially plausible conditions is the identity function, under which no opinion change occurs. I identify escape routes from this impossibility and argue that the kind of group communication envisaged by deliberative democats must be (...)
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  • Religious diversity and its challenges to religious belief.Nathan L. King - 2008 - Philosophy Compass 3 (4):830-853.
    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 (...)
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  • XI—Literature and Disagreement.Eileen John - 2014 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 114 (3pt3):239-260.
    To understand rational response to ethical disagreement, we need to consider how epistemic and ethical factors interact. The notion of an ethical peer is developed, and the roles that epistemic and ethical peers play in disagreement are compared. In the light of some literary examples, the view that conciliation in response to an ethical peer can be called for, even if that peer is an epistemic inferior, is defended.
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  • The philosophical scandal of the wrong kind of religious disagreement.Peter Forrest - 2009 - Sophia 48 (2):151-166.
    I argue for the following four theses: (1) The Dread Thesis: human beings should fear having false religious beliefs concerning some religious doctrines; (2) The Radical Uncertainty Thesis: we, namely most human beings in our culture at our time, are in a situation where we have to commit ourselves on the truth or falsity of some propositions of ultimate importance; (3) The Radical Choice Thesis: considerations of expected loss or gain do not always provide guidance as to how to commit (...)
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  • Scientific Controversies and the Ethics of Arguing and Belief in the Face of Rational Disagreement.Xavier de Donato Rodríguez & Jesús Zamora Bonilla - 2014 - Argumentation 28 (1):39-65.
    Our main aim is to discuss the topic of scientific controversies in the context of a recent issue that has been the centre of attention of many epistemologists though not of argumentation theorists or philosophers of science, namely the ethics of belief in face of rational disagreement. We think that the consideration of scientific examples may be of help in the epistemological debate on rational disagreement, making clear some of the deficiencies of the discussion as it has been produced until (...)
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  • Disagreement as Evidence: The Epistemology of Controversy. [REVIEW]David Christensen - 2009 - Philosophy Compass 4 (5):754-767.
    How much should your confidence in your beliefs be shaken when you learn that others – perhaps ‘epistemic peers’ who seem as well-qualified as you are – hold beliefs contrary to yours? This article describes motivations that push different philosophers towards opposite answers to this question. It identifies a key theoretical principle that divides current writers on the epistemology of disagreement. It then examines arguments bearing on that principle, and on the wider issue. It ends by describing some outstanding questions (...)
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  • Disagreement as evidence: The epistemology of controversy.David Christensen - 2009 - Philosophy Compass 4 (5):756-767.
    How much should your confidence in your beliefs be shaken when you learn that others – perhaps 'epistemic peers' who seem as well-qualified as you are – hold beliefs contrary to yours? This article describes motivations that push different philosophers towards opposite answers to this question. It identifies a key theoretical principle that divides current writers on the epistemology of disagreement. It then examines arguments bearing on that principle, and on the wider issue. It ends by describing some outstanding questions (...)
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  • Local Supermajorities.Fabrizio Cariani - 2016 - Erkenntnis 81 (2):391-406.
    This paper explores two non-standard supermajority rules in the context of judgment aggregation over multiple logically connected issues. These rules set the supermajority threshold in a local, context sensitive way—partly as a function of the input profile of opinions. To motivate the interest of these rules, I prove two results. First, I characterize each rule in terms of a condition I call ‘Block Preservation’. Block preservation says that if a majority of group members accept a judgment set, then so should (...)
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  • Judgment Aggregation.Fabrizio Cariani - 2011 - Philosophy Compass 6 (1):22-32.
    Judgment aggregation studies how collective opinions arise from the aggregation of individual ones. This article surveys a variety of aggregation rules (possible ways of aggregating individual judgments into collective ones). Aggregation by majority opinion is known to satisfy some but not all the desiderata for an aggregation rule. More general impossibility results show that not all the natural desiderata can be satisfied by a single aggregation rule. To interpret these results, we focus here on some applications of judgment aggregation models (...)
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  • Aggregating with reason.Fabrizio Cariani - 2013 - Synthese 190 (15):3123-3147.
    Judgment aggregation is naturally applied to the modeling of collective attitudes. In the individual case, we represent agents as having not just beliefs, but also as supporting them with reasons. Can the Judgment Aggregation help model a concept of collective reason? I argue that the resources of the standard judgment aggregation framework are insufficiently general. I develop a generalization of the framework that improves along this dimension. In the new framework, new aggregation rules become available, as well as a natural (...)
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  • A Faithful Response to Disagreement.Lara Buchak - 2021 - The Philosophical Review 130 (2):191-226.
    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. (...)
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  • How a Modest Fideism may Constrain Theistic Commitments: Exploring an Alternative to Classical Theism.John Bishop - 2007 - Philosophia 35 (3-4):387-402.
    On the assumption that theistic religious commitment takes place in the face of evidential ambiguity, the question arises under what conditions it is permissible to make a doxastic venture beyond one’s evidence in favour of a religious proposition. In this paper I explore the implications for orthodox theistic commitment of adopting, in answer to that question, a modest, moral coherentist, fideism. This extended Jamesian fideism crucially requires positive ethical evaluation of both the motivation and content of religious doxastic ventures. I (...)
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  • Naturalistic Epistemology and Reliabilism.Alvin I. Goldman - 1994 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 19 (1):301-320.
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  • Self-deception.Ian Deweese-Boyd - 2023 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Virtually every aspect of the current philosophical discussion of self-deception is a matter of controversy including its definition and paradigmatic cases. We may say generally, however, that self-deception is the acquisition and maintenance of a belief (or, at least, the avowal of that belief) in the face of strong evidence to the contrary motivated by desires or emotions favoring the acquisition and retention of that belief. Beyond this, philosophers divide over whether this action is intentional or not, whether self-deceivers recognize (...)
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  • Dilemmas, Disagreement, and Dualism.Elizabeth Jackson - 2021 - In Scott Stapleford, Kevin McCain & Matthias Steup (eds.), Epistemic Dilemmas: New Arguments, New Angles. New York, USA: Routledge. pp. 217–231.
    This paper introduces and motivates a solution to a dilemma from peer disagreement. Following Buchak (2021), I argue that peer disagreement puts us in an epistemic dilemma: there is reason to think that our opinions should both change and not change when we encounter disagreement with our epistemic peers. I argue that we can solve this dilemma by changing our credences, but not our beliefs in response to disagreement. I explain how my view solves the dilemma in question, and then (...)
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  • Rational Uniqueness and Religious Disagreement.Christopher Willard-Kyle - manuscript
    This paper argues for extreme rational permissivism—the view that agents with identical evidence can rationally believe contradictory hypotheses—and a mild version of steadfastness. Agents can rationally come to different conclusions on the basis of the same evidence because their way of weighing the theoretic virtues may differ substantially. Nevertheless, in the face of disagreement, agents face considerable pressure to reduce their confidence. Indeed, I argue that agents often ought to reduce their confidence in the higher-order propositions that they know or (...)
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  • Justice, Constructivism, and The Egalitarian Ethos.A. Faik Kurtulmus - 2010 - Dissertation, University of Oxford
    This thesis defends John Rawls’s constructivist theory of justice against three distinct challenges. -/- Part one addresses G. A. Cohen’s claim that Rawls’s constructivism is committed to a mistaken thesis about the relationship between facts and principles. It argues that Rawls’s constructivist procedure embodies substantial moral commitments, and offers an intra-normative reduction rather than a metaethical account. Rawls’s claims about the role of facts in moral theorizing in A Theory of Justice should be interpreted as suggesting that some of our (...)
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  • The Equal Weight Argument Against Religious Exclusivism.Samuel Ruhmkorff - 2013 - In Jeanine Diller & Asa Kasher (eds.), Models of God and Alternative Ultimate Realities. Springer.
    In the last decade, analytic epistemologists have engaged in a lively debate about Equal Weight, the claim that you should give the credences of epistemic peers the same consideration as your own credences. In this paper, I explore the implications of the debate about Equal Weight for how we should respond to religious disagreement found in the diversity of models of God. I first claim that one common argument against religious exclusivism and for religious pluralism can be articulated as an (...)
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  • When to defer to supermajority testimony — and when not.Christian List - 2014 - In Jennifer Lackey (ed.), Essays in Collective Epistemology. Oxford University Press. pp. 240-249.
    Pettit (2006) argues that deferring to majority testimony is not generally rational: it may lead to inconsistent beliefs. He suggests that “another ... approach will do better”: deferring to supermajority testimony. But this approach may also lead to inconsistencies. In this paper, I describe conditions under which deference to supermajority testimony ensures consistency, and conditions under which it does not. I also introduce the concept of “consistency of degree k”, which is weaker than full consistency by ruling out only “blatant” (...)
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  • Judgment aggregation: A short introduction.Christian List - 2012 - In Uskali Mäki (ed.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Economics. Elsevier.
    The aim of this article is to introduce the theory of judgment aggregation, a growing interdisciplinary research area. The theory addresses the following question: How can a group of individuals make consistent collective judgments on a given set of propositions on the basis of the group members' individual judgments on them? I begin by explaining the observation that initially sparked the interest in judgment aggregation, the so-called "doctinal" and "discursive paradoxes". I then introduce the basic formal model of judgment aggregation, (...)
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  • The aggregation of propositional attitudes: Towards a general theory.Franz Dietrich & Christian List - 2010 - Oxford Studies in Epistemology 3.
    How can the propositional attitudes of several individuals be aggregated into overall collective propositional attitudes? Although there are large bodies of work on the aggregation of various special kinds of propositional attitudes, such as preferences, judgments, probabilities and utilities, the aggregation of propositional attitudes is seldom studied in full generality. In this paper, we seek to contribute to filling this gap in the literature. We sketch the ingredients of a general theory of propositional attitude aggregation and prove two new theorems. (...)
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  • Deliberation, single-peakedness, and the possibility of meaningful democracy: evidence from deliberative polls.Christian List, Robert C. Luskin, James S. Fishkin & Iain McLean - 2013 - Journal of Politics 75 (1):80–95.
    Majority cycling and related social choice paradoxes are often thought to threaten the meaningfulness of democracy. But deliberation can prevent majority cycles – not by inducing unanimity, which is unrealistic, but by bringing preferences closer to single-peakedness. We present the first empirical test of this hypothesis, using data from Deliberative Polls. Comparing preferences before and after deliberation, we find increases in proximity to single-peakedness. The increases are greater for lower versus higher salience issues and for individuals who seem to have (...)
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  • The Theory of Judgment Aggregation: An Introductory Review.Christian List - 2010 - LSE Choice Group Working Paper Series 6 (1).
    This paper provides an introductory review of the theory of judgment aggregation. It introduces the paradoxes of majority voting that originally motivated the field, explains several key results on the impossibility of propositionwise judgment aggregation, presents a pedagogical proof of one of those results, discusses escape routes from the impossibility and relates judgment aggregation to some other salient aggregation problems, such as preference aggregation, abstract aggregation and probability aggregation. The present illustrative rather than exhaustive review is intended to give readers (...)
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  • The Theory of Judgment Aggregation: An Introductory Review.Christian List - 2010 - LSE Choice Group Working Paper Series 6 (1).
    This paper provides an introductory review of the theory of judgment aggregation. It introduces the paradoxes of majority voting that originally motivated the field, explains several key results on the impossibility of propositionwise judgment aggregation, presents a pedagogical proof of one of those results, discusses escape routes from the impossibility and relates judgment aggregation to some other salient aggregation problems, such as preference aggregation, abstract aggregation and probability aggregation. The present illustrative rather than exhaustive review is intended to give readers (...)
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  • Double Heuristics and Collective Knowledge: the Case of Expertise.Stephen Turner - 2012 - Studies in Emergent Order 5:64-85.
    There is a large literature on social epistemology, some of which is concerned with expert knowledge. Formal representations of the aggregation of decisions, estimates, and the like play a larger role in these discussions. Yet these discussions are neither sufficiently social nor epistemic. The assumptions minimize the role of knowledge, and often assume independence between observers. This paper presents a more naturalistic approach, which appeals to a model of epistemic gain from others, as mutual consilience—a genuinely social notion of epistemology. (...)
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