Journal article
The surprising truth about disagreement
- 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.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, 391.5KB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1007/s12136-020-00437-x
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer
- Journal:
- Acta Analytica More from this journal
- Volume:
- 36
- Pages:
- 137-157
- Publication date:
- 2020-06-08
- Acceptance date:
- 2020-05-26
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1874-6349
- ISSN:
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0353-5150
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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1107307
- Local pid:
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pubs:1107307
- Deposit date:
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2020-05-28
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Neil Levy
- Copyright date:
- 2020
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s) 2020. Open Access: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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