Abstract
Conciliationism—the thesis that when epistemic peers discover that they disagree about a proposition, both should reduce their confidence—faces a major objection: it seems to require us to significantly reduce our confidence in our central moral and political commitments. In this paper, I develop a typology of disagreement cases and a diagnosis of the source and force of the pressure to conciliate. Building on Vavova’s work, I argue that ordinary and extreme disagreements are surprising, and for this reason, they carry information about the likelihood of error. But deep disagreement is not surprising at all, and token deep disagreements do not put pressure on us to conciliate. However, a pattern of deep disagreements points to a different concern: not the problem of disagreement but the problem of irrelevant influences. Deep disagreement constitutes some pressure to examine the foundations from which we reason, rather than to conciliate on our central moral and political claims.
Highlights
Conciliationism—the thesis that when epistemic peers discover that they disagree about a proposition, both should reduce their confidence—faces a major objection: it seems to require us to significantly reduce our confidence in our central moral and political commitments
Conciliationism is the view that discovering that an epistemic peer disagrees about a proposition should make agents less confident in their opinions
Disagreement is unexpected but not shocking, and we should conciliate by significantly reducing our confidence in the proposition at issue
Summary
Most philosophers agree that in some such cases, we ought to reduce our confidence in the belief we held prior to discovering the disagreement Consider this familiar case (based on Christensen 2007): Restaurant Check: Anika and Bindi are old friends who eat out together once a fortnight. Due to the symmetry in their epistemic positions, neither has a good reason to prefer her own judgement to that of the other person, and they ought to conciliate They should think that they should assign (more or less) identical probabilities to $43 and $45 being the right figure. Flouting Independence seems to allow us egregiously to beg the question against those who disagree with us It would clearly be improper for Anika to use her own belief as a reason to discount Bindi’s: she cannot say ‘you must have made a mistake, because the total is $43’. It seems illegitimate to appeal to our own reasoning to dismiss others from peerhood in some cases, but not others; we need a principled account of when such appeal is in order
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