Noûs 41 (3):478–502 (2007)
Authors |
|
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.
|
Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) |
Categories | (categorize this paper) |
Reprint years | 2007 |
DOI | 10.1111/j.1468-0068.2007.00656.x |
Options |
![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
Download options
References found in this work BETA
Epistemology of Disagreement: The Good News.David Christensen - 2007 - Philosophical Review 116 (2):187-217.
Reasonable Religious Disagreements.Richard Feldman - 2006 - In Louise Antony (ed.), Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life. Oxford University Press. pp. 194-214.
View all 36 references / Add more references
Citations of this work BETA
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.
Higher Order Evidence.David Christensen - 2010 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 81 (1):185-215.
Evidence: A Guide for the Uncertain.Kevin Dorst - 2020 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 100 (3):586-632.
Permission to Believe: Why Permissivism Is True and What It Tells Us About Irrelevant Influences on Belief.Miriam Schoenfield - 2014 - Noûs 48 (2):193-218.
View all 463 citations / Add more citations
Similar books and articles
Calibrated Probabilities and the Epistemology of Disagreement.Barry Lam - 2013 - Synthese 190 (6):1079-1098.
Disagreement, Equal Weight and Commutativity.Alastair Wilson - 2010 - Philosophical Studies 149 (3):321 - 326.
Disagreeing with the (Religious) Skeptic.Tomas Bogardus - 2013 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 74 (1):5-17.
My Way or Her Way: A Conundrum in Bayesian Epistemology of Disagreement.Tomoji Shogenji - manuscript
Discovering Disagreeing Epistemic Peers and Superiors.Bryan Frances - 2012 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 20 (1):1 - 21.
Analytics
Added to PP index
2009-01-28
Total views
1,070 ( #5,510 of 2,499,036 )
Recent downloads (6 months)
47 ( #17,943 of 2,499,036 )
2009-01-28
Total views
1,070 ( #5,510 of 2,499,036 )
Recent downloads (6 months)
47 ( #17,943 of 2,499,036 )
How can I increase my downloads?
Downloads