Epistemology of Disagreement | A Short Intro

The epistemology of disagreement, especially peer disagreement and its relevance to reasonable belief, has been a central question in social epistemology in recent years. Is it reasonable to hold on to your belief in the face of disagreement? Or is disagreement evidence that you need to revise your belief? Is reasonable disagreement possible?

0:00 Introduction
0:32 Epistemic peers
0:52 The Restaurant Check Case (Christensen 2007)
1:24 The Conciliatory View
2:29 The Equal Weight View
3:46 The Steadfast View
4:20 The Climbers Case

Further Reading

Matheson, Jonathan, 2018, “The Epistemology of Disagreement,” 1000 Word Philosophy

"Disagreement" in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Christensen, David, 2007, “Epistemology of Disagreement: The Good News,” Philosophical Review, 116: 187–218.

Feldman, Richard, “Epistemological Puzzles About Disagreement,” in Stephen Hetherington (ed.), Epistemology Futures. Oxford University Press (2006).

#reasonabledisagreement
#peerdisagreement
#epistemologyofdisagreement

[benjaminhinz]

As one calling myself an atheist I think theism is not comparable. It would be better if another religion challenged Christianity or even some pseudoscience models clashing. Atheism is not making any claim --- you are only stating that you are not convinced and that you will not regard as true what according to you lacks sufficient evidence. Its like saying: I am not convinced that A is a safer route than B, so I will not start climbing. Another religion or worldview could convince you, or maybe theism suddenly does.

[SirRulesalot]

Great, professional quality video! You've got a new subscriber

[CasualPhilosophy]

Great video!

I'm interested in this idea of epistemic values or virtues that we might advocate for others as opposed to practicing ourselves. Like, I could see how being stubborn in one's beliefs could cause me to be mistaken, though I would want some scientists to be stubborn in their beliefs to make sure that every avenue of inquiry gets properly investigated. This amounts to a hope that some people are radically wrong for a long time in their own epistemic endeavors, just so that I can benefit indirectly from the collective epistemic endeavor of which they are a part! That seems really weird!

[vinkosusac]

Did you heard for presuppositional apologetic method? By checking someone's worldview, you are trying to see is that worldview can account preconditions for reason, for intelligibility, morality etc
Jason Lisle is very good at this topic.

[cblinehan]

What if you disagree on if someone's your'e epistemic peer? Can that factor in to the equal weight view? ie, I know slightly more than my peer therefore I'll give my own argument a higher weight?

[kevinbee]

Very interesting!

My opinion on this is probably not very thought out, but I always like forming an opinion on stuff to wrestle with it to understand it better.

What about this: *If two people disagree on something, at least one of them **_has_** to have made a mistake.* It's not possible to rigorously proof two conflicting things. Two people might be experts in their field and they might have very high IQ (whatever that means), but if they disagree, still, at least one of them has to have made a mistake. In complicated subjects it's not that unlikely that even smart experts make mistakes.

There is no threshold where an argument is just "good". Like, if some one has three PHDs, everything they say is a "good" opinion. Every opinion is based on knowledge (premises?) and reasoning and if the way you come up with an opinion is without faults, you can't come up with multiple different conclusions. (But practically we are often forced to make decisions based on incomplete knowledge and complicated circumstances that aren't easy to reason about with exact mathematical logic. That might be a problem. When someone says a tax should be raised by 10% and another says lowered by 10%, we can be nearly be sure that neither of the numbers are exactly optimal, but we still have to make a choice.)

I'd say that makes me team steadfast, although if I _know_ that an opinion I hold isn't very well founded and just a guess because I'm forced to choose, then I should change my view when someone presents an alternative and they seem smart and confident.

For example, I like coffee prepared a certain way, but I know I'm not an expert, so if an expert claims they know a better way, I will probably believe them. When a child tells me that Santa Claus exists, then I _won't_ change my view, because I feel like I know the reasons why it believes in him are bad. (Yes, god isn't exactly Santa Claus.)

In case of the climbers, I'd have to compare the evidence that my path is better vs the evidence that my friend is a good climber. I would certainly reconsider my assessment extra carefully and maybe try to debate and argue about our particular reasons.
I guess my personal reasoning and my trust in the friend can outweigh each other and there _is_ a point of balance, where I'd consider both paths equally safe and if I had to choose, I'd choose randomly. My personal evidence and reasoning counts more, but trust in authority _can_ outweigh it.

Another person is like a second pair of eyes. Two eyes make you see things better (3D) than one eye and another person you can talk to, makes you see things _even_ better. It's the whole "argument from authority" thing: You should trust what a person says exactly if that person is trustworthy.