The Epistemology of Political Disagreement

Abstract

After arguing for the equal epistemic authority of the citizens of sufficiently deliberative democracies in the preceding chapter, the present chapter sets out to answer the question of how citizens ought to react to their political disagreements with other citizens whom they regard as equal epistemic authorities on justice. To this end, the chapter introduces the debate about the epistemology of peer disagreement. It explains the dialectic between the most prominent positions in the debate and engages with them in detail. In the course of the discussion, it defends the contested principle (Independence) that downgrading the epistemic status of a peer with whom one disagrees is only permissible if there exist independent reasons for doing so. The principle supports the Equal Weight View according to which the rational reaction to peer disagreement is the epistemic conciliation of conflicting judgments. After defending the principle against various arguments aiming to undermine it, the chapter proposes a dynamic model of peer disagreement. This model is then applied to political disagreements, which ushers in an epistemic conception of public reason.