Confidence, Evidence, and Disagreement

Erkenntnis 79 (1):173-183 (2014)
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Abstract

Should learning we disagree about p lead you to reduce confidence in p? Some who think so want to except beliefs in which you are rationally highly confident. I argue that this is wrong; we should reject accounts that rely on this intuitive thought. I then show that quite the opposite holds: factors that justify low confidence in p also make disagreement about p less significant. I examine two such factors: your antecedent expectations about your peers’ opinions and the difficulty of evaluating your evidence. I close by proposing a different way of thinking about disagreement.

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Katia Vavova
Mount Holyoke College

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