Epistemic Disagreement Research Articles

Understanding energy conflicts: From epistemic disputes to competing conceptions of justice

Analysing energy conflicts is crucial to realise a successful and just energy transition. In doing so, it is insufficient to understand energy conflicts as epistemic disagreements about risk analyses and safety, as people often voice moral concerns beyond epistemic debates. To analyse grievances of social movements and citizens in energy conflicts, scholars often adopt a tenet-based energy justice framework that distinguishes between distributive, procedural, recognition and restorative justice. However, categorising claims into tenets does not shed light on disagreements within the tenets. As such, the existing conceptual toolkit is insufficient to understand the core of energy justice conflicts. This article proposes to shift focus towards capturing different conceptions of justice. This approach is illustrated by a qualitative analysis of the controversy around underground gas storage Grijpskerk and Norg in the Netherlands. The results show that the conflict is constituted by competing conceptions of restorative justice. The institutionalisation of one conception delegitimises and hides certain justice concerns and reduces the conflict to an epistemic dispute, which leads to misrecognition and possibly to the escalation of the conflict.

Epistemic disagreement in psychopathology research and practice: A procedural model

Clinical psychology is characterized by persistent disagreement about fundamental aspects of the discipline ranging from what mental disorders are to what constitutes effective treatment. Attempts to address the problem of epistemic disagreement have been frequently based on establishing the correct answer by fiat without identifying and addressing the sources of the disagreement. We argue that this strategy has not worked very well and the result is frequently ongoing and intractable disagreement, with each side in an argument convinced they are correct. In this paper, we outline an epistemic disagreement procedural model intended to assist researchers and clinicians in the field of clinical psychology to identify, explore, and develop inquiry strategies that capitalize on situations where competing knowledge claims are made. The result is a flexible conceptual framework committed to a defensible epistemic pluralism, fallibilism, and contextualism, across the various research tasks constituting the field of clinical psychology.

Cognitive Diversity or Cognitive Polarization? On Epistemic Democracy in a Post-Truth World

ABSTRACT Pessimism over a democracy’s ability to produce good outcomes is as longstanding as democracy itself. On one hand, democratic theorists consider democracy to be the only legitimate form of government on the basis that it alone promotes or safeguards intrinsic values like freedom, equality, and justice. On the other, skepticism toward the ordinary citizen’s cognitive capacities remains a perennial concern. Qualms about the epistemic value of democracy have only been made more pertinent by a fundamental problem of deep epistemic disagreement which underlies the post-truth phenomenon. I argue that the democratic theorists who have sought to defend democracy on epistemic grounds have thus far neglected such deep and intractable disagreements. Without addressing this oversight, the epistemic democrat will find that collective decision-making processes quickly become paralyzed and will not be able to yield the epistemic benefits they promise. Hence, the work for epistemic democrats is to recognize and take into account the ramifications of epistemic disagreements so as to make a stronger case for epistemic democracy.

Проблема эпистемического разногласия в современной философии религии Часть I

In this article I focus on the problem of religious disagreement – whether one should lose one’s confidence in his or her religious beliefs in the face of signific­ant disagreement on certain religious issues. The article consists of two large parts. In the first one, the author describes the main categories of the epistemo­logy of disagreement in the focus of religious disagreement (first-order and higher-level significance of evidences in disagreement, fundamental and super­ficial disagreements, and describes the conciliatory approach to the problem within which the question of religious disagreement is usually stated). In the second part the author describes three contemporary projects of philosophical theology (Richard Swinburne’s, Alvin Plantinga’s, and William Alston’s) and analyses how they respond to the problem of religious disagreement. It is shown that in the case of religious disagreement one cannot successfully apply the con­ciliatory approach, which says that religious person should reduce his or her con­fidence in the truth of the religious beliefs he or she holds. The author draws this conclusion relying on two intuitions: 1) we may distinguish between internal (within one belief system, hypothesis, theory) and external (collisions of belief systems, hypotheses, theories with other, competing belief systems, hypotheses and theories) epistemic disagreements; 2) epistemic disagreements are normal for some human intellectual activities, and rather their absence is abnormal and can sometimes lead to undesirable consequences.

Проблема эпистемического разногласия в современной философии религии Часть II

In this article I focus on the problem of religious disagreement – whether one should loose one’s confidence in his or her religious beliefs in the face of signi­ficant disagreement on certain religious issues. The article consists of two large parts. In the first, I describe the main categories of the epistemology of disagree­ment in the focus of religious disagreement (first-order and higher-level signific­ance of evidences in disagreement, fundamental and superficial disagreements, and describe the conciliatory approach to the problem within which the problem of religious disagreement is usually stated). In the second part I describe three contemporary projects of philosophical theology (Richard Swinburne’s, Alvin Plantinga’s, and William Alston’s) and analyse how they respond to the problem of religious disagreement. I show that in the case of religious disagreement one cannot successfully apply the conciliatory approach, which says that religious person should reduce his or her confidence in the truth of the religious beliefs he or she holds. I draw this conclusion relying on two intuitions: 1) we may distin­guish between internal (within one belief system, hypothesis, theory) and ex­ternal (collisions of belief systems, hypotheses, theories with other, competing belief systems, hypotheses and theories) epistemic disagreements; 2) epistemic disagreements is normal for some human intellectual activities, and rather their absence is abnormal and can sometimes lead to undesirable consequences.

Legal Translation: Professional Activities at the Periphery of the Juridical Field

The relevance of this topic is defined by the growing involvement of legal interpreters in legal proceedings. This article aims to study the peculiarities of the professional activities of interpreters in criminal legal proceedings involving migrants from post-Soviet states. The main characteristics of the field of legal translation are analyzed, and the peculiarities of the recruitment of legal interpreters and their interaction with the procedural parties in courts of different jurisdictions are revealed. The theoretical framework of the study is composed of Pierre Bourdieus sociological theory, including his analysis of the juridical field, and contemporary approaches in the anthropology of professions. The main empirical methods include semi-structured interviews and nonparticipant observation. The study singles out the criteria of stratification of legal interpreters, and demonstrates how the institutional and sociocultural contexts influence the professional activities of interpreters. The forms of interaction of interpreters with procedural parties and the judge were analyzed, demonstrating the costs of communication between the interpreters and different actors of the juridical field. According to the results, legal interpreters follow informal rules that have been formed in the process of their everyday interaction with their main clients law enforcement bodies. Structural and epistemic disagreements between jurists and interpreters were revealed. The research data also demonstrate that interpreters are not full-fledged actors of the juridical field, but they fulfill a technical function within that field. A conclusion is made about the weak structuring of the field of legal translation and predominance of precarious employment of actors of this field. The revealed problems could be solved by the institutionalization of the expert position of court interpreters.

Dynamic Research Design: Iteration in Field-Based Inquiry

This article examines how "iteration"–the dynamic updating of a research design in the course of conducting a study–contributes to making fieldwork a powerful form of inquiry. Considering epistemic disagreement on the utility and acceptability of iteration and drawing on published work, our own experiences, and an original survey and interviews, we contend that iteration is a core aspect of field-based inquiry because such work often examines areas for which theory or empirical knowledge is underdeveloped and requires reacting as the research environment evolves. We demonstrate why iteration is challenging, consider the analytic risks it poses, and offer a framework to help scholars iterate in analytically productive ways. We conclude by outlining the implications for the discipline of embracing and being transparent about iteration.

Containment Matters: Set and Setting in Contemporary Psychedelic Psychiatry

Over the past decade and a half, psychedelic drug-induced experiences have been returning to psychiatry as promising new healing modalities. The case of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy can inform how we think about the context of drug use because psychedelics are commonly considered to be sensitive to the ‘[mind]set and setting’ of their use. As such, epistemic and therapeutic concerns amongst psychedelic researchers and therapists over the importance of set and setting are interwoven. My ethnography of psychedelic therapeutics both inside and outside of the clinical trials on the east coast of the US from 2015-2019 suggests that there are added political and economic imperatives to contain psychedelic use. Working with this insight, I suggest psychedelic researchers and therapists are producing immense experiences that tend to overflow the attempts at their containment. I also identify two qualities central to the set and setting of the emerging modality of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. The first is a labor of protecting spaces which reveals an attentiveness to disconnection that can be read as in tension with the more commonly-evoked emphasis on connection found within psychedelic discourses. The second is how psychedelic experiences (as ‘mind-manifesting’) are understood to reflect the self, and in so doing re-present epistemic disagreements about the nature of the self thus reflected. Taken together, I propose that these two qualities of psychedelic containment offer an analytics for reading the contemporary cultural politics of psychedelic use.

Disagreeing about how to know: The instructional value of explorations into knowing

Events worldwide have heightened concerns that education is failing to prepare students for a “post-truth” world. A core “post-truth” challenge is the prevalence of deep epistemic disagreements: people fundamentally disagree about appropriate ways of knowing. We provide a new analysis of deep epistemic disagreements and propose an educational response based on the Apt-AIR framework of the goals of epistemic education. An apt response to deep epistemic disagreements requires that people develop individual and collective abilities to make epistemic assumptions visible, to justify and negotiate these assumptions, and to develop shared commitments to appropriate standards and processes of reasoning. To develop these meta-epistemic abilities, we propose a cluster of instructional practices and principles called explorations into knowing. We discuss empirical research showing that teachers and students can meaningfully engage in explorations into knowing and productively discuss their deep epistemic disagreements. These proposals lead to new research directions.

Common Sense, Scepticism and Deep Epistemic Disagreements

Considering the persisting disagreement between the common sense philosophers and the sceptics, it seems that they are faced with a deep epistemic disagreement. Taking stock from Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, one generally thinks that deep epistemic disagreements cannot be rationally resolved. Hinge epistemology, inherited from Wittgenstein, is also considered as an illuminating detour to understand common sense epistemology. But is there really a deep epistemic disagreement between the common sense philosophers and the sceptics? Could it not be considered that they share a common background? If so, is the rational resolution of their disagreement logically possible? What rational means can common sense use to convince someone of the privileged status of an epistemic principle? Relying on Reid’s, Alston’s and Lynch’s arguments, I show that common sense epistemology is a more promising approach than hinge epistemology, because it is driven by an optimism about reason in the solving of deep epistemic disagreements.

Varieties of Deep Epistemic Disagreement

In this paper we discuss three different kinds of disagreement that have been, or could reasonably be, characterized as deep disagreements. Principle level disagreements are disagreements over the truth of epistemic principles. Sub-principle level deep disagreements are disagreements over how to assign content to schematic norms. Finally, framework-level disagreements are holistic disagreements over meaning not truth, that is over how to understand networks of epistemic concepts and the beliefs those concepts compose. Within the context of each of these kinds of disagreement it is not possible for the parties to the dispute to rationally persuade one another through only offering epistemic reasons for their conflicting points of view. However, in spite of the inability to rationally persuade, we explore how it may nevertheless be possible to rationally navigate each of these varieties of deep disagreement.

Epistemology of Belief

The following article discovers current trends of contemporary epistemology, related to epistemic agent and his/her activities. A number of issues raised here describe internal experience of the agent, such as (in)voluntary nature of belief formation, trust in one’s faculties of perception, correspondence of formed beliefs to evidence, demarcation between purely epistemic and pragmatic rationality. Another part of the issues is related to external experiences of the agent. The most crucial among them are: blameworthiness of the agent’s belief system, limited intake of testimonial knowledge as a result of social bias; epistemic disagreement and “epistemic peers” as the sources of knowledge or additional pressure from the environment. The author considers virtue epistemology as a new way of performing normativity.

Disagreement or denialism? “Invasive species denialism” and ethical disagreement in science

Recently, invasion biologists have argued that some of the skepticism expressed in the scientific and lay literatures about the risks of invasive species and other aspects of the consensus within invasion biology is a kind of science denialism. This paper presents an argument that, while some claims made by skeptics of invasion biology share important features with paradigm cases of science denialism, others express legitimate ethical concerns that, even if one disagrees, should not be dismissed as denialist. Further, this case illustrates a more general point about ethical disagreement within sciences like invasion biology that constitutively pursue non-epistemic goals and values. While philosophers of science have argued that epistemic disagreement within science can be productive as heterogeneous epistemic communities “hedge their bets,” the case of invasion biology shows how non-epistemic or ethical disagreement within sciences, while carrying significant risks, can also be epistemically and non-epistemically valuable.

Проблема эпистемического разногласия в социальной эпистемологии

The article presents the problem of epistemic disagreement as part of social epistemology, particularly considering the conditions of rational disagreement (equal weight view). Against this background some versions of epistemic “bootstrapping” are addressed that serve to give advantage to one of the disputing parties. As a result, a conclusion is drawn that the kinds of bootstrapping portrayed are epistemically irrelevant, which also casts doubt on Bayesian epistemology, for it mixes two different types of rational decision making – practical and epistemic.

An optimality-argument for equal weighting

There are several proposals to resolve the problem of epistemic peer disagreement which concentrate on the question of how to incorporate evidence of such a disagreement. The main positions in this field are the equal weight view, the steadfast view, and the total evidence view. In this paper we present a new argument in favour of the equal weight view. As we will show, this view results from a general approach of forming epistemic attitudes in an optimal way. By this, the argument for equal weighting can be massively strengthened from reasoning via epistemic indifference to reasoning from optimality.

Intellectual humility and the epistemology of disagreement

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.

Epistemic Self-Trust and Doxastic Disagreements

The recent literature on the epistemology of disagreement focuses on the rational response question: how are you rationally required to respond to a doxastic disagreement with someone, especially with someone you take to be your epistemic peer? A doxastic disagreement with someone also confronts you with a slightly different question. This question, call it the epistemic trust question, is: how much should you trust our own epistemic faculties relative to the epistemic faculties of others? Answering the epistemic trust question is important for the epistemology of disagreement because it sheds light on the rational response question. My main aim in this paper is to argue—against recent attempts to show otherwise—that epistemic self-trust does not provide a reason for remaining steadfast in doxastic disagreements with others.

De-idealizing Disagreement, Rethinking Relativism

Relativism is often motivated in terms of certain types of disagreement. In this paper, we survey the philosophical debates over two such types: faultless disagreement in the case of gustatory conflict, and fundamental disagreement in the case of epistemic conflict. Each of the two discussions makes use of a (largely) implicit conception of judgement: brute judgement in the case of faultless disagreement, and rule-governed judgement in the case of fundamental disagreement. We show that the prevalent accounts work with unreasonably high levels of idealization. We defend two claims. First, philosophical discussions of disagreement need to be de-idealized. Second, once a less idealized account of disagreement is available, both our conception of judgement and our understanding of relativism need to be revised. Our example is a case study in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge: Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s classic Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985). This case study gives a less idealized account of disagreement that conceptualizes judgements as situated (rather than brute or rule-governed). We argue that this conception can and should be applied to cases of gustatory and epistemic disagreement. The payoff will be a reformulation of relativism in terms of rationally resolvable yet contingent disagreements.

Epistemic Disagreement and’Elu We’Elu

AbstractA lively exchange in recent epistemology considers the problem of epistemic disagreement between peers: disagreement between those who share evidence and have equal cognitive abilities. Two main views have emerged about how to proceed in such circumstances: be steadfast in maintaining one’s own view or conciliate, and suspend or reduce one’s confidence in one’s belief. Talmudic debates do seem to promote steadfastness, as the disputants are not called on to conciliate purely because they confront a disagreeing peer. But why? Third party judgments are even more problematic, for what epistemic warrant is there for choosing between a disagreement of superiors? A common explanation for Talmudic steadfastness is the notion’elu w’elu divrey ’Elohimkayim– both sides of Talmudic (or, more generally,halakhic) disputes have ‘heavenly’ legitimacy. But a closer look at this oft-quoted dictum and its various interpretations does not, in fact, reveal such support for steadfastness. Other explanations for Talmudic steadfastness are, therefore, required.

Modal Disagreements

It is often assumed that when one party felicitously rejects an assertion made by another party, the first party thinks that the proposition asserted by the second is false. This assumption underlies various disagreement arguments used to challenge contextualism about some class of expressions. As such, many contextualists have resisted these arguments on the grounds that the disagreements in question may not be over the proposition literally asserted. The result appears to be a dialectical stalemate, with no independent method of determining whether any particular instance of disagreement is over the proposition literally asserted. In this paper, I propose an independent method for assessing whether a disagreement is about what’s literally asserted. Focusing on epistemic modals throughout, I argue that this method provides evidence that some epistemic modal disagreements are in fact not over the proposition literally asserted by the utterance of the epistemic modal sentence. This method provides a way to break the stalemate, and reveals a new data point for theories of epistemic modals to predict—that is, how there can be such modal disagreements. In the rest of the paper, I motivate a general theory of how to predict these kinds of disagreements, and then offer some brief remarks about how contextualist, relativist, and expressivist theories of epistemic modals might accommodate this new data point.