Abstract
I investigate the implication of the truth-relativist’s alleged ‘faultless disagreements’ for issues in the epistemology of disagreement. A conclusion I draw is that the type of disagreement the truth-relativist claims (as a key advantage over the contextualist) to preserve fails in principle to be epistemically significant in the way we should expect disagreements to be in social-epistemic practice. In particular, the fact of faultless disagreement fails to ever play the epistemically significant role of making doxastic revision (at least sometimes) rationally required for either party in a (faultless) disagreement. That the truth-relativists’ disagreements over centred content fail to play this epistemically significant role that disagreements characteristically play in social epistemology should leave us sceptical that disagreement is what the truth-relativist has actually preserved.
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Notes
See MacFarlane (2003).
See Richard (2004).
For example, Weatherson (2009).
Cf. Sundell (2011). Thanks to an anonymous referee for drawing my attention to this reference.
Or, perhaps, by whatever is within an agent’s epistemic reach. As Egan (2007, 11) suggests, It might be the case that P is true iff it’s compatible with all of the facts that are within some group’s epistemic reach that P, where what it takes to be within one’s epistemic reach can vary across contexts.
See Egan et al. (2005) for further problems for DeRose’s speaker inclusion constraint.
Since truth-relativism is prominent in both predicates of personal taste and about epistemic modals, let X represent either area of discourse. As MacFarlane puts it, the subjectivity consists in the fact that the 'X-neutral' proposition (i.e. “John might be at the store” or “Roller coasters are fun”) which A asserts and B denies has a truth value only relative to an assessment parameter; as such, either of these propositions can be true for A and false for B. Subjectivity is preserved then because it is preserved that the truth of these claims depends in part on how things are for some agent not explicitly mentioned.
This is somewhat oversimplistic; as Lasersohn (2005) points out, in discourse about predicates of personal taste, we can distinguish between autocentric and exocentric perspectives, the latter of which will be ones where we the relevant standards at play in the context of evaluation will be the standards of someone other than the asserter. Consider, for example, a case where a man (having taken his 5-year-old to the carnival) says to his wife (in the presence of his son), that the “The rollercoaster was fun, but and other kiddie rides weren’t fun”.
In their monograph-length argument against truth-relativism (which they call ‘analytic relativism’), Cappelen & Hawthorne write: “Contemporary Analytic relativists reason as follows: ‘Lewis and Kaplan have shown that we need to relativize truth to triples of < world, time, location > . Hence in a way, anyone who follows Lewis and Kaplan is already a relativist. There are only truth and falsity relative to settings along these three parameters, and so there is no such thing as truth simpliciter. But, having already started down this road, why not exploit these strategies further? In particular, by adding new and exotic parameters into the circumstances of evaluation, we can allow the contents of thought and talk to be non-specific (in Kaplan’s sense) along dimensions other than world, time and location,” (2009: 10).
Perhaps as sensible as it is to debate what fixes the judge parameter when it’s you that is evaluating the proposition; and so, perhaps as sensible as debating what your own standards are.
Cf. Egan 2011 for an assertion-based attempt, on behalf of the truth-relativist, to take this problem on.
MacFarlane views Perspectival Accuracy as a component of his account of disagreement, which he calls Can’t Both Be Right. According to Perspectival Accuracy: An acceptance (rejection) of a proposition p at a context Cu is accurate (as assessed from a Context CA) iff p is true (false) at the circumstance Wcu, SCA where Wcu = the world of Cu and SCA = the standard of taste of the assessor at CA.
In Sect. 5, I’ll give some considerations to suppose not that the truth-relativist account of disagreement is ‘incorrect’, but rather, that it is not epistemically significant in the way we should expect genuine disagreements to be.
Or perhaps withhold judgment with respect to p.
Lackey calls these criteria for epistemic peerhood evidential equality and cognitive equality. On her articulation: Evidential equality: A and B are evidential equals relative to the question whether p when A and B are equally familiar with the evidence and arguments that bear on the question whether p. Cognitive equality: A and B are cognitive equals relative to the question whether p when A and B are equally competent, intelligent, and fair-minded in their abilities to assess the evidence and arguments that bear on the question whether p. Cf. Earl Conee (2009) for a thorough discussion of epistemic peerhood.
Christensen (2007) calls this the ‘conciliatory’ view.
See Disagreement, ed. Feldman and Warfield (2010) for an anthology of important recent work on the epistemology disagreement. Also, cf. Lackey “The Epistemology of Disagreement,” in Oxford Bibliographies Online.
An example of a case that would plausibly support a non-conformist approach would be one where the previously recognized epistemic peer disagrees with you about something for which your epistemic justification is overwhelming, direct and immediate. For example, suppose.
See Lackey’s “A Justificationist Account of the Epistemic Significance of Peer Disagreement.”
Thanks to an anonymous referee for pointing out that controversial issues have formed some of the core examples for all participants in the literature on peer disagreement, whatever their preferred view. Perhaps this is, to some degree, a result of non-conformists attempting to meet the challenge posed by conformists, when the challenge is presented vis-à-vis controversial subject matter (a la Feldman). However, as the reviewer points out, this isn’t always the case. Whether and to what extent controversial subject matter is comparatively more fertile ground for the conformist than for the non-conformist is an interesting philosophical question in its own right. For the present purposes, I do not need to weigh in here; my position depends only on the weaker claim that controversial subject matter is typically used to support the non-conformist verdict, and this is so regardless of whether non-conformists appeal in some cases to similar kinds of cases.
Another perhaps equally plausible characterization is: a subject matter is controversial to the extent that the relevant experts in that subject matter disagree about propositions central to that subject matter. Plausibly, in practice, these characterisations will pick out the same subject matter. Even if not, either sufficiently picks out claims of taste as controversial subject matter.
See fn. 25. Also, thanks to an anonymous referee for pointing out that, in aesthetic disputes particularly, a non-conformist position could be potentially be motivated in part by considering that disputants behave in practice as though non-conformism were correct. Does the fact that disputants act as though non-conformism is true (by in fact holding their guns) in area X favour non-conformism in area X as a position about the rationality of doxastic revision in area X? It’s not clear that it does any more than it suggests, as Feldman would contend, that most disputants hold their guns unreasonably in these areas.
Dreier’s observations (considered in Sect. 3) about the apparent futility of the practice of challenging (and successfully replying to) assertions, within the frame-work of truth-relativism could be taken to support such a suggestion.
Consider here Elga’s (2007, 479) discussion of epistemic superiority in a weather forecasting case: “How, exactly, should we be guided by outside opinions?… Start with the simplest case: complete deference. When it comes to the weather, I completely defer to the opinions of my local weather forecaster. My probability for rain, given that her probability for rain is 60 %, is also 60 %”.
Cf. Frances (2009).
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Faultless disagreement-style arguments are typically used motivate truth-relativism in various domains of discourse. For canonical presentations of faultless disagreement arguments for truth-relativism, see Kölbel (2003) and MacFarlane (Relative truth. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007), for a collection of recent papers defending and opposing arguments from faultless disagreement. Cf. Cappelen and Hawthorne (2010) for a recent challenge to these arguments, and to truth-relativism more generally.
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Carter, J.A. Disagreement, Relativism and Doxastic Revision. Erkenn 79 (Suppl 1), 155–172 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-013-9450-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-013-9450-7