The Epistemic Benefits Of Disagreement

This book presents an original discussion and analysis of epistemic peer disagreement. It reviews a wide range of cases from the literature, and extends the definition of epistemic peerhood with respect to the current one, to account for the actual variability found in real-world examples. The book offers a number of arguments supporting the variability in the nature and in the range of disagreements, and outlines the main benefits of disagreement among peers i.e. what the author calls the benefits to inquiry argument.

Discovering someone disagrees with you is a common occurrence. The question of epistemic significance of disagreement concerns how discovering that another disagrees with you affects the rationality of your beliefs on that topic. This book examines the answers that have been proposed to this question, and presents and defends its own answer.

This is a collective study of the epistemic significance of disagreement: 12 contributors explore rival responses to the problems that it raises for philosophy. They develop our understanding of epistemic phenomena that are central to any thoughtful engagement with others' beliefs.

This book brings together philosophers to investigate the nature and normativity of group disagreement. Debates in the epistemology of disagreement have mainly been concerned with idealized cases of peer disagreement between individuals. However, most real-life disagreements are complex and often take place within and between groups. Ascribing views, beliefs, and judgments to groups is a common phenomenon that is well researched in the literature on the ontology and epistemology of groups. The chapters in this volume seek to connect these literatures and to explore both intra- and inter- group disagreements. They apply their discussions to a range of political, religious, social, and scientific issues. The Epistemology of Group Disagreement is an important resource for students and scholars working on social and applied epistemology; disagreement; and topics at the intersection of epistemology, ethics, and politics.

This book-length treatment of reasonable disagreement in politics sheds light on this important and overlooked aspect of political life.

Disagreement is, for better or worse, pervasive in our society. Not only do we form beliefs that differ from those around us, but increasingly we have platforms and opportunities to voice those disagreements and make them public. In light of the public nature of many of our most important disagreements, a key question emerges: How does public disagreement affect what we know? This volume collects original essays from a number of prominent scholars—including Catherine Elgin, Sanford Goldberg, Jennifer Lackey, Michael Patrick Lynch, and Duncan Pritchard, among others—to address this question in its diverse forms. The book is organized by thematic sections, in which individual chapters address the epistemic, ethical, and political dimensions of dissent. The individual contributions address important issues such as the value of disagreement, the nature of conversational disagreement, when dissent is epistemically rational, when one is obligated to voice disagreement or to object, the relation of silence and resistance to dissent, and when political dissent is justified. Voicing Dissent offers a new approach to the study of disagreement that will appeal to social epistemologists and ethicists interested in this growing area of epistemology.

The epistemology of disagreement is primarily concerned with determining the rational response to disagreement. Of particular interest in the literature is the question of peer disagreement: how should you revise your beliefs when faced with the disagreement of an epistemic peer (i.e., someone who is just well-equipped as you are to evaluate the topic of disagreement)? The majority of the disagreement literature is directed toward the question of peer disagreement, and a range of different views have been proposed. Some views maintain that the rational response is to withhold judgment when faced with peer disagreement, while other views maintain that it can be rational to remain steadfast in your initial belief, and still other views hold that each of these responses can be reasonable under the right circumstances. In what follows, however, I will argue that the literature's emphasis on peer disagreement is misguided, because it leads to unnecessary confusion, without offering any additional insight about how to rationally resolve disagreements. After a brief introduction in Chapter 1, I go on in Chapter 2 to argue that, although the concept of epistemic peerhood is useful for identifying epistemically interesting disagreements for study, when it comes to determining the rational response to those disagreements, peerhood becomes more of a hindrance than a help. As an alternative to standard peer-centric views of disagreement, I propose a 'sliding-scale' approach to the epistemic evaluation of interlocutors, a view I refer to as the Variable Weight View of disagreement (the VWV). After proposing the VWV in Chapter 2, I expand upon it in Chapter 3, responding to several potential objections, as well as considering how the VWV might be expanded upon in the future. I pay particular attention to the social dimension of disagreement, and the potential role that collective or community-level epistemic norms might play with respect to disagreement - a topic which I suggest deserves more attention than it presently receives in the literature. In Chapter 4, I consider what I take to be a particularly clear example of how peer-centric views of disagreement can go wrong. I consider the Equal Weight View as defended by Elga (2007), and I argue that his view ultimately fails because it relies for its success on a particularly problematic definition of peerhood. In Chapter 5, I conclude by comparing the VWV to the standard peer-oriented views of disagreement in the literature. I argue that, in each case, the most plausible versions of those views would benefit from abandoning their strict focus on peer disagreement, in favor of adopting a sliding-scale approach to epistemic evaluation, such as that proposed by the VWV.

My dissertation offers a picture of what we learn when we disagree and how we can rationally respond to such information. In short, disagreement with a peer tells us that we may have been in error. We then have to remove the doubt by engaging in reconsideration. If we do not reconsider then we cannot know what we believe because knowledge cannot exist alongside these kinds of doubts. Eventually we might reaffirm the challenged belief enough times to reach a level of certainty that puts the doubts to rest, at this point our belief is justifiably retained and again a candidate for knowledge. I have also given an account of what sorts of individuals can provide us with legitimate doubts, namely those individuals who we cannot rule out as peers. I have motivated this choice of principle for selecting peers by saying that reconsideration should be welcomed broadly with respect to any doubted belief. I have argued that we base our beliefs on reasons, and that reasons may or may not be `evidence' in the proper sense of the term. Evidence consists of facts, so whether our reasons constitute evidence depends on whether our reasons are in fact true. As such our disagreements are only sometimes based on a common store of evidence, many times they are based on a common store of reasons, or some mixture of reasons and evidence, and many times also our opposed views are not based on the same evidence or reasons but on two pools of evidence/reasons that overlap to some degree. Finally I argue that contrary to popular belief disagreement is valuable and not to be avoided. This is because disagreement often furnishes us with additional evidence to base our opinions on thereby enhancing our reliability. Even when additional evidence is not obtained we can benefit from being alerted to beliefs that we may have formed unreliably. Besides these epistemic values disagreement carries with it social benefits. It is unlikely if not impossible to achieve either the epistemic or the non-epistemic values of disagreement through alternative methods of belief maintenance.

What happens when we have second thoughts about the epistemic standing of our beliefs, when we stop to check on beliefs which we have already formed or hypotheses which we have under consideration? In the essays collected in this volume, Hilary Kornblith considers this and other questions about self-knowledge and the nature of human reason. The essays draw extensively on work in social psychology to illuminate traditional epistemological issues: in contrast with traditional Cartesian approaches to these issues, Kornblith engages with empirically motivated skeptical problems, and shows how they may be constructively addressed in practical and theoretical terms. As well as bringing together ten previously published essays, the volume contains two entirely new pieces that engage with ideas of self and rational nature. Kornblith's approach lays the foundations for further development in epistemology that will benefit from advances in our understanding of human psychology.

This book features original essays by leading epistemologists that address questions related to epistemic dilemmas from a variety of new, sometimes unexpected, angles. It seems plausible that there can be "no win" moral situations in which no matter what one does one fails some moral obligation. Is there an epistemic analog to moral dilemmas? Are there epistemically dilemmic situations—situations in which we are doomed to violate an epistemic requirement? If there are, when exactly do they arise and what can we learn from them? The contributors to this volume cover a wide variety of positions on epistemic dilemmas. The coverage ranges from discussions of the nature of epistemic dilemmas to arguments that there are no such things to suggestions for how to resolve (or at least live with) epistemic dilemmas to proposals for how thinking about epistemic dilemmas can be used to inform theorizing in other areas of epistemology. Epistemic Dilemmas will be of interest to scholars and advanced students in epistemology working on the nature of justification and evidential support, higher-order requirements, or suspension of judgment.