Abstract
In this paper, I will discuss the relevance of epistemology of disagreement to political disagreement. The two major positions in the epistemology of disagreement literature are the steadfast and the conciliationist approaches: while the conciliationist says that disagreement with one’s epistemic equals should compel one to epistemically “split the difference” with those peers, the steadfast approach claims that one can maintain one’s antecedent position even in the face of such peer disagreement. Martin Ebeling (Conciliatory democracy: from deliberation toward a new politics of disagreement, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2017) applies a conciliationist approach to democratic deliberations, arguing that deliberative participants ought to pursue full epistemic conciliation when disagreeing with their peers on political questions. I argue that this epistemic “splitting the difference” could make participants vulnerable to certain cognitive biases. We might avoid these biases by paying more attention to the deliberative environment in which disagreement takes place.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
To be clear, Kelly currently defends the Total Evidence View (Kelly 2010), mentioned below.
Ebeling appears uncommitted on what kind of function rationality demands we use to bring about full epistemic conciliation. In the above case, it seems like a straightforward arithmetic mean is employed. If this is right, it is far from clear that this function is the optimally rational choice (cf. Jehle and Fitelson 2009).
A position being held in high-confidence does not necessarily mean that confidence is justified: religious zealots and politicians often have high-confidence in their beliefs that is in no way justified. I’m thankful to J.D. Trout for noting this. We might charitably reinterpret Ebeling here as meaning “justifiably high-confidence.”
It is noteworthy that Ebeling has equally given the Nazi permission to downgrade the epistemic status of the liberal democrat. Thanks to the editors for pointing this out.
Another possibility to resist this kind of epistemic domination is by invoking a kind of belief independence where if the majority have their beliefs from an identical source—e.g. acquired from the same news source, same advisor, etc.—then one need not treat every single person like they have acquired it from a wholly unique source. I am thankful to a referee for mentioning this.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this point.
Since Ebeling’s proposal is specifically about the political domain, I limit my discussion to this domain. Certainly the sorts of biases I describe can creep into most kinds of group deliberations and decision-making in other areas like business, health-care, even space travel (Rose 2011). In those domains, however, there are many plausible proposals to mitigate these kinds of biases; they range from leaders focusing on facilitating the feedback from all of their team members (Janis 1982) to more carefully on worst-case scenarios and designating more “devil’s advocate” teams to challenge the consensus of the group (Sunstein and Hastie 2015). The effectiveness of these strategies makes the risk of cognitive failure in these domains more remote. It is unclear how well these strategies would work if applied to political deliberation, so I think that tentatively warrants the distinction between the political domain and non-political domains that I am using in this paper.
One worry is the coherence of permissivism and conciliationism, whether the permissiveness ultimately undermines—if not dissolves—the conciliatory requirement: if two people are already in the range of rationally permissive attitudes on some issue, why are they obligated to conciliate any further? It is unclear if this tension can be overcome.
References
Ackerman B, Fishkin J (2004) Deliberation day. Yale University Press, New Haven
Ballantyne N, Coffman E (2012) Conciliationism and uniqueness. Australas J Philos 90(4):657–670
Bohman J (2012) Domination, epistemic injustice and republican epistemology. Soc Epistemol 26(2):175–187
Christensen D (2007) Epistemology of disagreement: the good news. Philos Rev 116(2):187–217
Cohen GL (2003) Party over policy: the dominating impact of group influence on political beliefs. J Pers Soc Psychol 85(5):808–822
Ebeling M (2016a) Epistemic political egalitarianism, political parties, and conciliatory democracy. Polit Theory 44(5):629–656
Ebeling M (2016b) Epistemic political egalitarianism and conciliatory democracy: a defense. Polit Theory 44(5):664–668
Ebeling M (2017) Conciliatory democracy: from deliberation toward a new politics of disagreement. Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Elga A (2005) On overrating oneself… and knowing it. Philos Stud 123(1–2):115–124
Fogelin R (1985) The logic of deep disagreements. Informal Log 7(1):1–8 (Reprinted in (2005) Informal Log 25:3–11)
Fricker M (2007) Epistemic injustice: power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Fricker M (2015) Epistemic contribution as a central human capability. In: Hull G (ed) The equal society: essays on equality in theory and practice. Lexington Books, Lanham
Gilovich T (1991) How we know what isn’t so: the fallibility of human reason in everyday life. Free Press, New York
Goldin C (2014) The grand gender convergence: its last chapter. Am Econ Rev 104(4):1091–1119
Gutmann A, Thompson DF (1998) Democracy and disagreement. Harvard University Press, Cambridge
Janis I (1982) Groupthink: psychological studies of policy decisions and fiascoes, 2nd edn. Houghton Mifflin, Boston
Jehle D, Fitelson B (2009) What is the “equal weight view”? Episteme 6(3):280–293
Kahan D, Peters E, Dawson E, Slovic P (2013) Motivated numeracy and enlightened self-government. Behav Public Policy 1:54–86
Kelly T (2005) The epistemic significance of disagreement. In: Gendler T, Hawthorne J (eds) Oxford studies in epistemology, vol 1. Oxford University Press, New York
Kelly T (2008) Disagreement, dogmatism, and belief polarization. J Philos 105(10):611–633
Kelly T (2010) Peer disagreement and higher order evidence. In: Feldman R, Warfield TA (eds) Disagreement. Oxford University Press, New York
King N (2012) Disagreement: what’s the problem? or a good peer is hard to find. Philos Phenomenol Res 85(2):249–272
Lackey J (2012) What’s the rational response to everyday disagreements? Philos Mag 59:101–106
Lazer D, Rubineau B, Chetkovich C, Katz N, Neblo M (2010) The cevolution of networks and political attitudes. Polit Comm 27(3):248–274
Lindell M, Bächtiger A, Grönlund K, Herne K, Setäla M, Wyss D (2017) What drives the polarization and moderation of opinions? Evidence from a Finnish citizen deliberation experiment on immigration. Eur J Polit Res 56:23–45
List C, Luskin R, Fishkin J, McLean I (2013) Deliberation, single-peakedness, and the possibility of meaningful democracy: evidence from deliberative polls. J Polit 75(1):80–95
Lord C, Ross L, Lepper M (1979) Biased assimilation and attitude polarization: the effects of prior theories on subsequently considered evidence. J Pers Soc Psychol 37:2098–2109
Luskin R, Fishkin J, Jowell R (2002) Considered opinions: deliberative polling in Britain. Br J Polit Sci 32(3):455–487
Mulligan T (2016) A note on epistemology of disagreement and politics. Polit Theory 44(5):657–663
Neblo MA (2012) Deliberation’s legitimation crisis: reply to Gleason. Crit Rev 23(3):405–419
Nguyen CT (forthcoming) Echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. Episteme 1–21
Ortoleva P, Snowberg E (2015) Overconfidence in political behavior. Am Econ Rev 105(2):504–535
Prithcard D (2016) Epistemic risk. J Philos 113(11):550–571
Ravazzi S, Pomatto G (2014) Flexibility, argumentation and confrontation: how deliberative minipublics can affect policies on controversial issues. J Public Delib 10(2):1–23
Rawls J (2005) Political liberalism. Expanded edition. Columbia University Press, New York
Riggs W (2008) Epistemic risk and relativism. Acta Anal 23:1–8
Rose JD (2011) Diverse perspectives on the groupthink theory—a literary review. Emerg Leadersh Journeys 4(1):37–57
Solomon M (2006) Groupthink versus the wisdom of crowds: the social epistemology of deliberation and dissent. South J Philos 44(S1):28–42
Suhay E (2016) Political conformity: evidence & mechanisms. Political persuasion conference (Jan 9). University of California, Irvine, Laguna Beach, CA
Sunstein C (2003a) Why societies need dissent. Harvard University Press, Cambridge
Sunstein C (2003b) Deliberating groups versus prediction markets (or Hayek’s challenge to Habermas). In: Goldman A, Whitcomb D (eds) Social epistemology: essential readings. Oxford University Press, New York
Sunstein C, Hastie R (2015) Wiser: getting beyond groupthink to make groups smarter. Harvard Business Press, Cambridge
Sunstein C, Thaler R (2008) Nudge: improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness. Yale University Press, New Haven
Thune M (2010) Partial defeaters and epistemology of disagreement. Philos Q 60(239):355–372
Acknowledgements
Thanks to David Ingram, Joe Vukov, J.D. Trout, and all the participants of the Loyola Workshop on Social, Political, and Legal Philosophy and 2017 Loyola Philosophy Graduate Conference for their helpful feedback in preparing this article. In addition, I want to thank the editors, David Godden and Patrick Bondy, as well as two anonymous referees for their insightful comments and clarifying suggestions.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The author declares that he has no conflict of interest.
Research Involving Human and Animal Participants
This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Carlson, J. Epistemology of Disagreement, Bias, and Political Deliberation: The Problems for a Conciliatory Democracy. Topoi 40, 1161–1171 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-018-9607-8
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-018-9607-8