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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Notes
You take me to be your peer about p just in case you respect my opinion about p as much as your own. If someone were to inquire, “Whom should I ask about p?” you’d say, “Ask me or ask her. It doesn’t matter. We are equally likely to be right.” Cf. Elga (2007).
Christensen (2009), Feldman (2006), (2007) and Elga (2007) present similar examples. All three hold that disagreement is often epistemically significant in exactly this sort of case. But even opponents of the kind of conciliatory views of disagreement that Christensen et al. favor, agree that revision is required in cases like Math. Cf. Kelly (2010), (2013), Lackey (2010a, b), and Sosa (2010). Possible exceptions include Weatherson (ms) and Kelly (2005).
Lackey defends something like this view in her (2010a, b). In the latter, she writes:
At the heart of my justificationist view is the thesis that the amount of doxastic revision required in the face of peer disagreement tracks the amount of justified confidence present: the more justified and confident a belief is, the less doxastic revision is required, and the less justified and confident a belief is, the more doxastic revision is required (48-9).
Lackey later qualifies this statement in subtle ways that allow her to sidestep some counterexamples. Although important for understanding Lackey’s view, these adjustments do not matter for my purposes here. Once I dispose of the Intuitive Thought as stated, I will argue that this focus on rational confidence is just the wrong way to approach the epistemic significance of disagreement.
For one, it isn’t immediately obvious that the Intuitive Thought could help with the more difficult cases. It is clear what it would say: if you are rationally highly confident in your belief that abortion is permissible, then you needn’t revise when someone disagrees with you. But one of the reasons these cases are difficult is that it isn’t clear whether we can be rationally highly confident about such matters. Maybe there is more that the proponent of the Intuitive Thought could say here. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter because the proposal succumbs to the following counterexamples.
Christensen develops this kind of response to this case in his (2007). I will say a bit more about this shortly.
Christensen (2007) develops this kind of response to the CrazyMath case. What I say here helps buttress that approach.
Cf. Christensen (2007).
Cf. Kornblith (2010).
References
Christensen, D. (2007). Epistemology of disagreement: The good news. Philosophical Review, 116, 187–217.
Christensen, D. (2009). Disagreement as evidence: The epistemology of controversy. Philosophy Compass, 4(1), 1–12.
Christensen, D. (2011). Disagreement, question-begging, and epistemic self-criticism. Philosopher’s Imprint, 11(6), 1–22.
Elga, A. (2007). Reflection and disagreement. Noûs, 41, 478–502.
Feldman, R. (2006). Epistemological puzzles about disagreement. In S. Hetherington (Ed.), Epistemology futures (pp. 216–236). New York: Oxford University Press.
Feldman, R. (2007). Reasonable religious disagreements. In L. Antony (Ed.), Philosophers without Gods (pp. 194–214). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Lackey, J. (2010a). A justificationist view of disagreement’s epistemic significance. In A. Haddock, A. Millar, & D. Pritchard (Eds.), Social epistemology (pp. 298–325). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lackey, J. (2010b). What should we do when we disagree? In T. Szabó Gendler & J. Hawthorne (Eds.), Oxford studies in epistemology (Vol. 3, pp. 274–293). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sosa, E. (2010). The epistemology of disagreement. In A. Haddock, A. Millar, & D. Pritchard (Eds.), Social epistemology (pp. 278–297). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Weatherson, B. (ms.) Do Judgments Screen Evidence? available at http://brian.weatherson.org/JSE.pdf.
Acknowledgments
This paper has benefited from many comments and conversations. I would particularly like to thank the following: Rachael Briggs, David Christensen, Tom Dougherty, Shamik Dasgupta, Adam Elga, Catherine Elgin, Caspar Hare, Sophie Horowitz, Thomas Kelly, Hilary Kornblith, Leon Leontyev, Heather Logue, Elisa Mai, Alejandro Pérez Carballo, David Plunkett, Paulina Sliwa, Agustín Rayo, Paolo Santorio, Bob Stalnaker, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Kenneth Walden, Roger White, Stephen Yablo and audiences at Duke University, Mount Holyoke College, MIT, the Pacific APA in Seattle (2010), the University of Kentucky, and the University of North Florida.
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Vavova, K. Confidence, Evidence, and Disagreement. Erkenn 79 (Suppl 1), 173–183 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-013-9451-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-013-9451-6