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)

Religious disagreements are widespread. Some philosophers have argued that religious disagreements call for religious skepticism, or a revision of one’s religious beliefs. In order to figure out the epistemic significance of religious disagreements, two questions need to be answered. First, what kind of disagreements are religious disagreements? Second, how should one respond to such disagreements? In this paper, I argue that many religious disagreements are cases of unconfirmed superiority disagreements, where parties have good reason to think they are not epistemic (...) peers, yet they lack good reason to determine who is superior. Such disagreements have been left relatively unexplored. I then argue that in cases of unconfirmed superiority disagreements, disputants can remain relatively steadfast in holding to their beliefs. Hence, we can remain relatively steadfast in our beliefs in such cases of religious disagreements. (shrink)

Religious disagreement is an emerging topic of interest in social epistemology. Little is known about how philosophers react to religious disagreements in a professional context, or how they think one should respond to disagreement. This paper presents results of an empirical study on religious disagreement among philosophers. Results indicate that personal religious beliefs, philosophical training, and recent changes in religious outlook have a significant impact on philosophers' assessments of religious disagreement. They regard peer disagreement about religion as common, and most (...) surveyed participants assume one should accord weight to the other's opinion. Theists and agnostics are less likely to assume they are in a better epistemic position than their interlocutors about religious questions compared with atheists, but this pattern only holds for participants who are not philosophers of religion. Continental philosophers think religious beliefs are more like preferences than analytic philosophers, who regard religious beliefs as fact-like. (shrink)

In a recent article, Bernáth and Tőzsér (2021) defend what they call the Bias Argument, a new skeptical argument from expert peer disagreement. They argue that the best contrastive causal explanation for disagreement among leading experts in philosophy is that they adopt their positions in a biased way. But if the leading experts are biased, non-experts either are also biased or only avoid bias through epistemic inferiority. Recognizing this is expected to prompt one to decrease one‘s confidence in one‘s philosophical (...) beliefs. This paper argues that some beliefs are immune to a key premise of the Bias Argument. To show this, the paper develops the concepts of self-favoring theories, decisive support, and standing-incommensurable disagreements. A plausible example of a self-favoring theory, dubbed Mere Reformed Protestantism, is sketched. Many disagreements over self-favoring theories and over beliefs decisively supported by self-favoring theories are shown to be standing-incommensurable. It is then argued that when non-experts are in standing-incommensurable disagreements with experts, the standards of assessing expertise are themselves controverted. This result undercuts the move in the Bias Argument from expert bias to non-expert bias. Finally, a couple reservations about the role of self-favoring theories in philosophy are addressed. (shrink)

Recently, a number of epistemologists (notably Feldman [2007], [2009] and White [2005], [2013]) have argued for the rational uniqueness thesis, the principle that any set of evidence permits only one rationally acceptable attitude toward a given proposition. In contrast, this paper argues for extreme rational permissivism, the view that two agents with the same evidence may sometimes arrive at contradictory beliefs rationally. This paper identifies different versions of uniqueness and permissivism that vary in strength and range, argues that evidential peers (...) with different interests need not rationally endorse all the same hypotheses, argues that evidential peers who weigh the theoretic virtues differently can sometimes rationally endorse contradictory conclusions, and finally defends the permissivist appeal to standards against objections in the works of Feldman and White. (shrink)

Epistemologists focus primarily on cases of knowledge, belief, or credence where the evidence which one possesses, or on which one is relying, plays a fundamental role in the epistemic or normative status of one's doxastic state. Recent work in epistemology goes beyond the evidence one possesses to consider the relevance for such statuses of evidence which one does not possess, particularly when there is a sense in which one should have had some evidence. I focus here on Sanford Goldberg's approach (...) ("Should Have Known," Synthese, forthcoming; and "On the Epistemic Significance of Evidence You Should Have Had," Episteme 2016, this issue); but the discussion will interest anyone working on epistemic defeat. (shrink)

Many accounts of faith hold that faith is deference to an authority about what to believe or what to do. I show that this kind of faith fits into a more general account of faith, the risky‐commitment account. I further argue that it can be rational to defer to an authority even when the authority's pronouncement goes against one's own reasoning. Indeed, such deference is rational in typical cases in which individuals treat others as authorities.

Epistemologists have shown increased interest in the epistemic significance of disagreement, and in particular, in whether there is a rational requirement concerning belief revision in the face of peer disagreement. This article examines some of the general issues discussed by epistemologists, and then considers how they may or may not apply to the case of religious disagreement, both within religious traditions and between religious (and non-religious) views.

Anecdotal pluralism (AP) is the claim that, when two individuals disagree on the truth of a religious belief, the right move to make is to engage in a communal epistemic process of evidence sharing and evaluation, motivated by the willingness to learn from each other, understand the adversary's views and how these challenge their own, and re-evaluate their own epistemic position in regards to external criticisms. What I will do in my paper is to provide a presentation of AP and (...) give a few reasons in support. I will begin with showing how pluralism can be promoted by religious experiences inhering in any (historical) tradition. To this regard, my purpose is to analyse such experiences as conducive to the assumption of the two main principles defining any pluralist view. Subsequently, I will construe AP by seven claims, and I will focus my efforts on justifying its superiority both to exclusivism/inclusivism and other varieties of pluralism. My next and final move is to list a few reasons which support my view. (shrink)

My main claim is that, contrary to the assumptions of mainstream literature, epistemic religious diversity is not a matter of an abstract comparison among the belief systems of different religions or denominations; rather, it is a relation arising from the epistemic encounter among individuals who adhere to different doxastic groups. Particularly, while epistemic symmetry inclines to treat our doxastic opponents as peers, epistemic peerhood is not the starting point of doctrinal comparisons, but the potential outcome of the epistemic process of (...) the construal of shared evidence. A key point in my approach is that such a process is anecdotally constituted. My working plan is the following. In the first section I will introduce the challenge of religious diversity. In the next section, I will distinguish between two characterisations of the relation among seminal claims of doxastic groups, namely, beliefs which stand in a competing relation and beliefs which are merely alternative. I will provide a degree view of this distinction. The subsequent section consists in a overview of the outcomes from the epistemology of disagreement. In the fourth section, I will provide two basic motivations in support of TE. Finally, I will conclude by sketching how TE motivates the assumption of a schema for handling religious disagreements which I name anecdotal pluralism. (shrink)

Many epistemologists argue that responses to disagreement should exhibit a certain kind of epistemic impartiality. “Strong conciliationists” claim that we ought to give equal weight to the views of those who, judged from a dispute-neutral perspective, appear to be our “epistemic peers” with respect to some disputed matter. Using a Bayesian framework, Chapter 8 considers whether there is a plausible epistemic impartiality principle that would require us to give up confident religious (or irreligious) belief in favor of religious skepticism. It (...) is argued that the strong conciliationist’s epistemic impartiality is untenable, at least in contexts like the religious domain where the primary questions under dispute cannot be cleanly separated from questions about what qualifications are needed to reliably assess those primary questions. The chapter recommends instead a rationalist view on which rational insight can sustain justified confidence even when impartial grounds are lacking. It closes by defending the “religious acceptability” of this rationalist epistemology. (shrink)

التزام دینی و ربط و نسبت آن با عقلانیت از مباحث مهم فلسفۀ دین است. راجر تریگ از اندیشمندان معاصری است که این مسئله را محور توجه خود قرار داده است. در این مقاله ما دیدگاه او در خصوص سرشت التزام و ربط و نسبت آن با باور، معنا، توجیه و عقلانیت را از نظر گذرانده‌ایم. او با تعریف خاصی که از التزام ارائه می‌دهد، آن را مبتنی بر دو مؤلفه می‌داند: یکی باور گزاره‌ای و دیگری تعهد شخصی بدان. از (...) آنجا که تریگ مؤلفه اول التزام را اساسی و بنیادین می‌داند، تمرکز مقاله نیز بر همین مؤلفه است. تریگ بر اساس مؤلفۀ اول، واقع‌گرایی و نقد نسبی‌انگاری را از لوازم حقیقی التزام می‌داند و در همین راستا به نقد ناواقع‌گرایی و نسبی‌انگاری در این حوزه می‌پردازد. او از جمله علل گرایش به نسبی‌انگاری در حوزۀ دین را تلاش ویتگنشتاین متأخر در واکنش به پوزیتیویسم منطقی می‌داند که منجر به جدایی و تمایز دین از علم شد. تریگ ضمن نقد این جریان فلسفی، می‌کوشد تا پیامدهای آن را نیز نشان دهد. او با تأکید بر زبان به عنوان امری که تبلور حقیقت است و ارتباط را امکان‌پذیر می‌کند و نیز تأکید بر سرشت مشترک بشر به مقابله با نسبی‌انگاری مفهومی می‌پردازد و راه را برای عقلانیت التزام می‌گشاید. مقاله در پایان نشان می‌دهد که اگرچه تریگ در نقدهایش به موفقیت‌هایی دست یافته است، به نظر می‌رسد جنبۀ ایجابی بحث او فاقد استحکام و دقت کافی است. (shrink)

One very natural dividing line that—for better or worse—is often used to distinguish those who believe in God from those who do not is that between theism and atheism, where ‘theism’ is used to mark the believers and ‘atheism’ the non-believers. Such contrastive labels can serve many practical functions even when the terms in question are not clearly defined. Individuals are often, on the basis of their beliefs and values, attracted toward one such label more so than the other. However, (...) once a clear statement of the substantive difference between theism and atheism is requested, things become more complicated, much more so than our casual use of these terms would suggest. What exactly is the best way to capture the relationship between theism and atheism? To what extent are they opposed to one another, and relatedly, to what extent should they be regarded as exhausting the available theoretical options? §2 will canvass a range of responses to this cluster of questions. In §3, we explore the social-epistemic dimension of the atheism/theism divide, by focusing in particular on the issue of religious disagreements, including those disagreements that take very different assumptions as starting points. (shrink)

Choo and Pittard recently have presented new attractive incommensurability arguments for remaining steadfast in religious beliefs even when disagreeing with sophisticated disputants. This article responds to the latest iteration of this genre in the work of Choo, and does double duty evaluating more generally the merits of this genre, which is becoming increasingly more popular since originally championed by Alston. Both Choo and Alston argue that it is reasonable to stay steadfast in one’s religious beliefs when there are no commensurable (...) ways of evaluating the disputant’s claims. This paper first describes four views about disagreement that inform Choo’s conclusion, one of which is the incommensurability argument similarly championed by Alston. Incommensurability arguments are attractive, but, when deployed in the most challenging disagreements, ultimately complacent. (shrink)