Reflection and disagreement

Noûs 41 (3):478–502 (2007)
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Abstract

How should you take into account the opinions of an advisor? When you completely defer to the advisor's judgment, then you should treat the advisor as a guru. Roughly, that means you should believe what you expect she would believe, if supplied with your extra evidence. When the advisor is your own future self, the resulting principle amounts to a version of the Reflection Principle---a version amended to handle cases of information loss. When you count an advisor as an epistemic peer, you should give her conclusions the same weight as your own. Denying that view---call it the ``equal weight view''---leads to absurdity: the absurdity that you could reasonably come to believe yourself to be an epistemic superior to an advisor simply by noting cases of disagreement with her, and taking it that she made most of the mistakes. Accepting the view seems to lead to another absurdity: that one should suspend judgment about everything that one's smart and well-informed friends disagree on, which means suspending judgment about almost everything interesting. But despite appearances, the equal weight view does not have this absurd consequence. Furthermore, the view can be generalized to handle cases involving not just epistemic peers, but also epistemic superiors and inferiors.

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Adam Elga
Princeton University

Citations of this work

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Epistemology of disagreement: The good news.David Christensen - 2007 - Philosophical Review 116 (2):187-217.
Peer disagreement and higher order evidence.Thomas Kelly - 2010 - In Alvin I. Goldman & Dennis Whitcomb (eds.), Social Epistemology: Essential Readings. Oxford University Press. pp. 183--217.

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References found in this work

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.Thomas S. Kuhn - 1962 - Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Edited by Ian Hacking.
The logic of scientific discovery.Karl Raimund Popper - 1934 - New York: Routledge. Edited by Hutchinson Publishing Group.
Epistemology and cognition.Alvin I. Goldman - 1986 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Epistemology of disagreement: The good news.David Christensen - 2007 - Philosophical Review 116 (2):187-217.
The epistemic significance of disagreement.Thomas Kelly - 2005 - In Tamar Szabó Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.), Oxford Studies in Epistemology, Volume 1. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 167-196.

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