Rationalist Resistance to Disagreement-Motivated Religious Skepticism

Many epistemologists argue that responses to disagreement should exhibit a certain kind of epistemic impartiality. “Strong conciliationists” claim that we ought to give equal weight to the views of those who, judged from a dispute-neutral perspective, appear to be our “epistemic peers” with respect to some disputed matter. Using a Bayesian framework, Chapter 8 considers whether there is a plausible epistemic impartiality principle that would require us to give up confident religious (or irreligious) belief in favor of religious skepticism. It is argued that the strong conciliationist’s epistemic impartiality is untenable, at least in contexts like the religious domain where the primary questions under dispute cannot be cleanly separated from questions about what qualifications are needed to reliably assess those primary questions. The chapter recommends instead a rationalist view on which rational insight can sustain justified confidence even when impartial grounds are lacking. It closes by defending the “religious acceptability” of this rationalist epistemology.

Moral Judgments, Cognitivism and the Dispositional Nature of Belief: Why Moral Peer Intransigence is Intelligible

Richard Rowland has recently argued that considerations based on moral disagreement between epistemic peers give us reason to think that cognitivism about moral judgments, i.e., the thesis that moral judgments are beliefs, is false. The novelty of Rowland’s argument is to tweak the problem descriptively, i.e., not focusing on what one ought to do, but on what disputants actually do in the light of peer disagreement. The basic idea is that moral peer disagreement is intelligible. However, if moral judgments were beliefs, and beliefs track perceived evidence, then moral peer disagreement would not be intelligible. Hence, moral judgments are not beliefs. The argument is both novel and interesting, but this paper argues that it fails to establish the conclusion. Beliefs are plausibly analyzed as constituted by dispositions to respond to what is perceived as evidence, but dispositions can always be interfered with. Provided a background explanation of why the disposition is not manifested, peer intransigence is quite intelligible.

Epistemic Peerhood and Standpoint Theory

This paper uses standpoint theory to explore whether all there is to establish epistemic peerhood between subjects is that they be (i) equally exposed to or familiar with the evidence pertaining to a disagreed claim, and be (ii) equals with regards to intelligence, freedom from bias and similar epistemic virtues within the domain of the claim in question. I argue that there is at least one general circumstance in which conditions (i) and (ii) are met, but nevertheless the subjects deviate in their likelihood to be mistaken about the claim in question, thus preventing them from being epistemic peers. Such a circumstance presents itself as a case in which the claim in question is part of those aspects of social relations and experiences of the marginalized.

Epistemic self-esteem of philosophers in the face of philosophical disagreement

Our paper consists of four parts. In the first part, we describe the challenge of the pervasive and permanent philosophical disagreement over philosophers’ epistemic self-esteem. In the second part, we investigate the attitude of philosophers who have high epistemic self-esteem even in the face of philosophical disagreement and who believe they have well-grounded philosophical knowledge. In the third section, we focus on the attitude of philosophers who maintain a moderate level of epistemic self-esteem because they do not attribute substantive philosophical knowledge to themselves but still believe that they have epistemic right to defend substantive philosophical beliefs. In the fourth section, we analyse the attitude of philosophers who have a low level of epistemic self-esteem in relation to substantive philosophical beliefs and make no attempt to defend those beliefs. We argue that when faced with philosophical disagreement philosophers either have to deny that the dissenting philosophers are their epistemic peers or have to admit that doing philosophy is less meaningful than it seemed before. In this second case, philosophical activity and performance should not contribute to the philosophers’ overall epistemic self-esteem to any significant extent.

Peer Idealization and Internal Examples in the Epistemology of Disagreement

The epistemology of disagreement has developed around a highly idealized notion of epistemic peers. The analysis of examples in the literature has somewhat entrenched this idealization, when using cases of extant philosophical disputes between named interlocutors. These examples make it hard to emphasize the ordinary ways in which discussants, as disciplinary colleagues, may be wrong. Overlooking these possibilities is probably made easier by widespread attitudes in philosophy about the importance of genius or raw intelligence in doing philosophy. The use of such internal examples needlessly limits consideration of the full range of epistemically relevant features of disagreements.

Moral Realism and the Problem of Moral Aliens

In this paper, I discuss a new problem for moral realism, the problem of moral aliens. In the first section, I introduce this problem. Moral aliens are people who radically disagree with us concerning moral matters. Moral aliens are neither obviously incoherent nor do they seem to lack rational support from their own perspective. On the one hand, moral realists claim that we should stick to our guns when we encounter moral aliens. On the other hand, moral realists, in contrast to anti-realists, seem to be committed to an epistemic symmetry between us and our moral aliens that forces us into rational suspension of our moral beliefs. Unless one disputes the very possibility of moral aliens, this poses a severe challenge to the moral realist. In the second section, I will address this problem. It will turn out that, on closer scrutiny, we cannot make any sense of the idea that moral aliens should be taken as our epistemic peers. Consequently, there is no way to argue that encountering moral aliens gives us any reason to revise our moral beliefs. If my argument is correct, the possibility of encountering moral aliens poses no real threat to moral realism.

Epistemic network injustice

To find out what is in one’s own best interest, it is helpful to ask one’s epistemic peers. However, identifying one’s epistemic peers is not a trivial task. I consider a stylized political setting, an electoral competition of ‘Masses’ and ‘Elites’. To succeed, the Masses need to know which alternative on offer is truly in their interest. To find out, the Masses can pool their privately held information in a pre-election ballot, provided that they can reliably find out with whom they should pool information. I investigate the process of finding the relevant peer group for information pooling by modelling this group formation process as dynamic network change. The simulations show that the Masses can succeed in finding the right peers, but they also suggest reasons why the Elites may often be more successful. This phenomenon generalizes to the notion of Epistemic Network Injustice. Such injustice arises when a subset of citizens is systematically deprived of connections to helpful epistemic peers, leading to their reduced political influence. Epistemic Network Injustice is a new form of epistemic injustice, related to but distinct from the notion introduced by Miranda Fricker.

The Epistemology of Disagreement: Why Not Bayesianism?

Disagreement is a ubiquitous feature of human life, and philosophers have dutifully attended to it. One important question related to disagreement is epistemological: How does a rational person change her beliefs (if at all) in light of disagreement from others? The typical methodology for answering this question is to endorse a steadfast or conciliatory disagreement norm (and not both) on a priori grounds and selected intuitive cases. In this paper, I argue that this methodology is misguided. Instead, a thoroughgoingly Bayesian strategy is what's needed. Such a strategy provides conciliatory norms in appropriate cases and steadfast norms in appropriate cases. I argue, further, that the few extant efforts to address disagreement in the Bayesian spirit are laudable but uncompelling. A modelling, rather than a functional, approach gets us the right norms and is highly general, allowing the epistemologist to deal with (1) multiple epistemic interlocutors, (2) epistemic superiors and inferiors (i.e. not just epistemic peers), and (3) dependence between interlocutors.

Desacuerdo entre pares epistémicos en el debate naturaleza-cultura

Scientific disagreements constitute valuable resources for reflecting on epistemic peer disagreements. In this essay I engage in the debate whether epistemic peers who disagree should be conciliatory or steadfast by examining how scientists actually react in the so called nature-nurture debate. The main conclusion of the analysis is that, when taking into consideration concrete epistemic practices with peers responding to different epistemic perspectives, scientists have good reasons to be steadfast. At the same time, the theoretical conceptualizations of the epistemology of peer disagreement illuminates certain aspects of the nature-nurture debate, such as its long persistence. Therefore, this article contributes both to the debate over the epistemology of disagreement and to the understanding of a never-ending controversy in the life sciences.