Abstract
It is widely accepted that one strong motivation for adopting a conciliatory stance with regard to the epistemology of peer disagreement is that the non-conciliatory alternatives are incompatible with the demands of intellectual character, and incompatible with the virtue of intellectual humility in particular. It is argued that this is a mistake, at least once we properly understand what intellectual humility involves. Given some of the inherent problems facing conciliatory proposals, it is maintained that non-conciliatory approaches to epistemic peer disagreement are thus on much stronger dialectical ground than many suppose, including some defenders of this line. In particular, non-conciliatory proposals can resist the idea that epistemic peer disagreement directly weakens one’s epistemic justification, as conciliatory views maintain. This means that the epistemic justification that our beliefs in this regard enjoy, and thus our knowledge, is more secure than conciliatory approaches to epistemic peer disagreement would suggest.
Highlights
It is often suggested that there is an essential tension between taking a non-conciliatory approach to epistemic peer disagreement and the requirements of good intellectual character, especially in the sense of being suitably intellectually humble
If I stick to my opinion regardless, aren’t I inevitably displaying a worrying degree of epistemic arrogance, of a kind that is incompatible with the requirements of a good intellectual character? In particular, wouldn’t this apparently dogmatic stance demonstrate that I am failing to exhibit the virtue of intellectual humility?
Conciliatory approaches to the epistemology of peer disagreement hold that discovering the disagreement entails that one’s justification for one’s belief is at the very least weakened by the fact of the epistemic peer disagreement
Summary
It is often suggested that there is an essential tension between taking a non-conciliatory approach to epistemic peer disagreement and the requirements of good intellectual character, especially in the sense of being suitably intellectually humble. Conciliatory approaches to the epistemology of peer disagreement hold that discovering the disagreement entails that one’s justification for one’s belief is at the very least weakened by the fact of the epistemic peer disagreement (if one’s belief continues to count as justified at all). This means that such disagreements have the potential to undermine our knowledge. Once we characterise intellectual humility correctly, we can account for how a subject can regard themselves as no less justified than they were before the epistemic peer disagreement without this entailing that they lack intellectual humility This means that epistemic peer disagreement does not immediately weaken, still less completely undermine, our justification. I think that the problems that face a conciliatory stance as regards epistemic peer disagreement have been given a far too easy ride precisely because there has been held to be this supposedly overarching difficulty afflicting the non-conciliatory line. The net effect of these points is that the non-conciliatory stance as regards epistemic peer disagreement is on much stronger ground than many suppose, including those who currently defend the view
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