Epistemic Abstainers, Epistemic Martyrs, and Epistemic Converts

Grazer Philosophische Studien

The authors argue in favor of the “nonconciliation” (or “steadfast”) position concerning the problem of peer disagreement. Throughout the paper they place heavy emphasis on matters of phenomenology—on how things seem epistemically with respect to the net import of one’s available evidence vis-à-vis the disputed claim p, and on how such phenomenology is affected by the awareness that an interlocutor whom one initially regards as an epistemic peer disagrees with oneself about p. Central to the argument is a nested goal/sub-goal hierarchy that the authors claim is inherent to the structure of epistemically responsible belief-formation: pursuing true beliefs by pursuing beliefs that are objectively likely given one’s total available evidence; pursuing this sub-goal by pursuing beliefs that are likely true (given that evidence) relative to one’s own deep epistemic sensibility; and pursuing this sub-sub-goal by forming beliefs in accordance with one’s own all-in, ultima facie, epistemic s...

Philosophy Compass

This article is about the implications of a conciliatory view about the epistemology of peer disagreement for our moral beliefs. Many have endorsed a conciliatory view about the epistemology of peer disagreement according to which if we find ourselves in a disagreement about some matter with another whom we should judge to be our epistemic peer on that matter, we must revise our judgment about that matter. This article focuses on three issues about the implications of conciliationism for our moral beliefs. Firstly, whether there is an asymmetry between the implications of conciliationism for the epistemic status of our moral beliefs and the implications of conciliationism for the epistemic status of our non-moral beliefs; for instance, some have argued that conciliationism leads to epistemological moral skepticism but not to epistemological non-moral skepticism. Secondly, what the implications of conciliationism are for the epistemic status of particular moral beliefs. Thirdly, whether conciliationism's impact on the epistemic status of our moral beliefs has practical implications.

Nous

Epistemologists often claim that in addition to belief and disbelief there is a third, neutral, doxastic attitude. Various terms are used: ‘suspending judgment’, ‘withholding’, ‘agnosticism’. It is also common to claim that only epistemic factors relevant to the justification of these attitudes, i.e., only factors that bear on how strongly or weakly placed one is epistemically with respect to the question at issue. This paper addresses two challenges to such traditionalism about doxastic attitudes. The first concerns the relevance of non-epistemic factors we might call "future-comparative" – e.g., that you’ll have more decisive evidence on whether p tomorrow – to the justification of suspending judgment. The second, from Jane Friedman, is to explain the point of the neutral attitude without appealing to inquiry and thus taking goal-related factors, which are not epistemic, such as the value of the goal or the prospects for finding means to achieve it, to bear on the justification of the neutral attitude. My defense of traditionalism relies on distinguishing three ways of being neutral on a question: agnosticism, inquiry and suspension. Traditionalism is saved because of these only agnosticism is a genuine doxastic attitude. An equally important goal of the paper is to consider the nature of suspension and its relation to inquiry. I conclude that suspension is distinct from inquiry and is vital to controlling the epistemic quality of our beliefs.

Spontaneous Generations: A Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science, 2010

Introspection and Consciousness (OUP)

Religious Disagreement and Pluralism, 2021

Religious disagreement, like disagreement in science, stands to deliver important epistemic benefits. But religious communities tend to frown on it. A salient reason is that, whereas scientists should be neutral toward the topics they discuss, religious believers should be loyal to God; and religious disagreement, they argue, is disloyal. For it often involves discussion with people who believe more negatively about God than you do, putting you at risk of forming negative beliefs yourself. And forming negative beliefs about someone, or even being open to doing so, is disloyal. A loyal person, says the objector, should instead exhibit doxastic partiality, doing her best to believe positively about the other party even at the cost of accuracy. I discuss two arguments from doxastic partiality that aim to show that religious disagreement is typically disloyal. I argue that even given doxastic partiality, religious disagreement is not typically disloyal, and can in fact be loyal. But then I argue that doxastic partiality is false. A superior form of loyalty is epistemically oriented: concerned with knowing the other party as she really is. This opens up new ways in which religious disagreement for the sake of learning about God can be loyal to him.

Deference to experts is normal in many areas of inquiry, but suspicious in morality. This is puzzling if one thinks that morality is relevantly like those other areas of inquiry. We argue that this suspiciousness can be explained in terms of the suspiciousness of deferring to an epistemic peer. We then argue that this explanation is preferable to others in the literature, and explore some metaethical implications of this result.

Metaphilosophy, 2019

The current debate about disagreement has as rivals those who take the steadfast view and those who affirm conciliationism. Those on the steadfast side maintain that resolute commitment to a belief is reasonable despite peer disagreement. Conciliationists say that peer disagreement necessarily undermines warrant for one’s belief. This article discusses the relevance of open‐mindedness to the matter of peer disagreement. It shows how both the steadfast and the conciliatory perspective are consistent with a robust and substantive display of open‐mindedness. However, it also turns out that there are more ways to display open‐mindedness on the steadfast view than on the conciliatory view.

In situations of peer disagreement there are two kinds of factors that matter. These are the factors internal to the discussion, such as evidence exposed and arguments presented by both sides and there are also factors external to the discussion, also called " independent factors ". The external factors include mainly virtues and competences of the participants. There are two main theories about epistemic disagreement, " the steadfast view " and " the conciliationism " , and each of them stresses the importance of one group of these factors over the other. This paper is a defense of the greater epistemic significance of independent factors over internal factors. However, it is not a defense of the conciliationism which takes independent factors to be systematically the ultimate arbiter in situations of peer disagreement. The argument in the paper goes like this. Although the steadfast view receives strong intuitive support from two cases presented by Thomas Kelly: " Right and Wrong " and " Wrong and Wronger " , I argue that the view is undermined by Timothy Williamson's recent " Very Improbable Knowing " argument. This argument shows that for some basic type of evidence E when S uses it in favor of p, it is very improbable that S knows that S knows that p. Therefore, in situations of peer disagreement, S is unjustified to push her evidence in support of her side. There are arguably some exceptions, e.g. when one claims to have knowledge based on a priori evidence and on holistic evidence, but these are not sufficient to save the day for the steadfast view. In contrast to that, the reflective knowledge of one's first order competences and virtues (i.e. external factors) is not vulnerable by Williamson's argument. One reason for that is because we know about independent factors on the basis of holistic evidence. I claim that our epistemic goal in the face of peer disagreement is to end up on the side that is non-accidentally closer to truth. In accordance with achieving this goal, it is safer to stick to independent factors in resolving peer disagreement situations than to

Challenges to Moral and Religious Belief: Disagreement and Evolution, 2014

Every known system of religious belief or explicitly irreligious belief has among its core teachings claims that are sharply contested by sizeable contingents of apparently reasonable and well-informed people. Many have argued that reflection on this fact ought to shake our confidence in our religious or irreligious beliefs, leading us to be religious skeptics (e.g., Feldman 2007; Schellenberg 2007, 175-83;. According to these advocates of religious skepticism, confident religious or irreligious belief in the face of pervasive religious disagreement amounts to a kind of dubious epistemic egotism according to which one privileges her own assessment of the relevant evidence simply because it is hers. In this essay, I assess the case for such disagreement-motivated religious skepticism. Specifically, I consider whether there is a good philosophical argument for disagreement-motivated religious skepticism that does not rely on controversial theological claims but that relies only on general epistemic principles and facts about religious disagreement. My argument is that the prospects for such an argument are dim even if there are plausible views on disagreement that support skeptical responses to disagreements in other contexts. Certain features of religious belief make it unlikely that such views will generate skeptical results when applied to religious disagreements.

ProQuest, 2021

It seems like an obviously true claim that people can reasonably disagree. But we should wonder whether it is rational for people to continue to believe what they believe knowing that what they believe is controversial. Under normal circumstances, this question can often be satisfactorily answered by appeal to the opposing agents’ respective reasoning capabilities or their differing evidence. Disagreements between peers, however, are distinctive of the usual variety of reasonable disagreements because the controversy cannot be adequately explained by appeal to their total shared evidence or stronger or weaker reasoning capabilities. Such cases, though they may be infrequent, nevertheless reveal an intriguing multi-faceted puzzle. If, as evidentialists claim, evidence is the only relevant justificatory consideration for beliefs, then peers ought to at least reduce their initial confidence if not give equal weight to the opposing view when they become aware of their peer’s opposition. But simple counterexamples reveal that modifying one's initial belief merely based on the awareness of peer disagreement is not always the rational option. These counter-examples, however, do not help explain how best to respond in other instances when it appears that awareness of peer disagreement has justificatory significance. This project attempts to solve this puzzle by first critically examining how we think about evidence. I conclude that there are actually two senses of evidence: A metaphysical and an epistemic. Distinguishing these senses of evidence reveals that in cases of genuine reasonable peer disagreement, doxastic and propositional justification come apart such that doxastic justification sometimes does not imply propositional justification. When doxastic justification does not imply propositional justification in cases of reasonable peer disagreement, we can see how epistemic pluralism can be rational without falling prey to certain epistemic spinelessness.

Religious Studies, 2019

Scientific researchers welcome disagreement as a way of furthering epistemic aims. Religious communities, by contrast, tend to regard it as a potential threat to their beliefs. But I argue that religious disagreement can help achieve religious epistemic aims. I do not argue this by comparing science and religion, however. For scientific hypotheses are ideally held with a scholarly neutrality, and my aim is to persuade those who are committed to religious beliefs that religious disagreement can be epistemically beneficial for them too.

Social Epistemology

Sinan Dogramaci has recently developed a view according to which epistemic evaluations -like calling someone's behavior 'rational' or 'irrational' -encourages or discourages the behavior evaluated. This view promises to explain the rational authority of testimony, by guaranteeing that, in the long run, epistemic procedures will be shared throughout a community. We argue that Dogramaci's view is unsatisfactory, for two reasons. First, the social practice at its heart is vulnerable to free riders. Second, even if the problem of free riders can be solved, it 'alienates' epistemic agents from the testimony that they receive, in that, though they will accept testimony from their fellows, they will have no reason to do so. We argue that a more satisfactory view can be had if we couple the genuine insights that are to be found in Dogramaci's proposal with the recognition that testimony is an excludible good that is often distributed according to market forces. It is this fact about testimony that discourages free riding, and, when coupled with an amended version of Dogramaci's view, provides agents with a reason to trust testimony.

Can the agnostic—i.e. someone who suspends judgement about a certain proposition <p>—be in a state of disagreement with someone who (dis)believes <p>? One reason for answering negatively has to do with what Sven Rosenkranz has called the alignment problem (Rosenkranz 2007: 63). The thought is that the kind of opposition occurring between the agnostic and someone who believes (or disbelieves) <p> seems to happen on a different level than the opposition occurring between the believer and the disbeliever. Whereas the opposition between the believer and the disbeliever can be put in terms of the incompatibility between the propositions <p> and <not-p>, that between the agnostic and the believer (disbeliever) cannot be put in those terms. Hence there is a misalignment with respect to the subject matter of the disagreement. The project of this paper is to develop a theoretically fruitful account of the notions of suspended judgement and disagreement which explains how and why the agnostic is in a state of disagreement with both the believer and the disbeliever on the very same issue—i.e. the very same proposition or set of propositions—in a way that solve the alignment problem. Following some recent work by Friedman (2013), (2015), I will provide an account of suspended judgement as a sui generis cognitive mental attitude. The focus will be in particular on developing the normative profile associated with the attitude of suspended judgement in contrast with that of belief and disbelief. My proposal is to understand part of the normative profile of these cognitive mental attitudes in terms of the normative commitments that they engender in the context of enquiry. With this on board, I will then elaborate on a doxastic-non-cotenability view of disagreement (MacFarlane 2014) according to which disagreement is explained in terms of the incompatibility between the sets of normative commitments that the agents involved in a situation of disagreement are subject to in virtue of their possessing contrasting attitudes. In this way, the opposition between the believer, the disbeliever, and the agnostic can be put in terms of the conflict between the normative commitments engendered by these different cognitive attitudes. In this way, I will argue, we can fully account for the disagreement between the (dis)believer and the agnostic and thus solve the alignment problem. 1. Suspended Judgement and Disagreement: The Alignment Problem Brigitte, Diana and Amelie are three detectives independently working on a crime case. They enquire into whether Mike is the murderer. After some careful investigation, our three detectives come to different verdicts: Brigitte, the believer, judges that Mike is the murderer, and thus comes to believe that Mike is the murderer; Diana, the disbeliever, judges that Mike is not the murderer,