Deep Disagreement, Hinge Commitments, and Intellectual Humility (original) (raw)
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Deep Disagreement and Hinge Epistemology
Synthese, 2018
This paper explores the application of hinge epistemology to deep disagreement. Hinge epistemology holds that there is a class of commitments—hinge commitments—which play a fundamental role in the structure of belief and rational evaluation: they are the most basic general presuppositions of our world views which make it possible for us to evaluate certain beliefs or doubts as rational. Deep disagreements seem to crucially involve disagreement over such fundamental commitments. In this paper, I consider pessimism about deep disagreement, the thesis that such disagreements are rationally irresolvable, and ask whether the Wittgensteinian account of deep disagreement—according to which such disagreements are disagreements over hinge commitments—provides adequate support for pessimism. I argue that while most versions of hinge epistemology support pessimism about deep disagreement, at least one variety of hinge epistemology, the entitlement theory, does not.
Disagreement, Intellectual Humility, and Reflection
Thinking about Oneself: The Place and Value of Reflection in Philosophy and Psychology, 2019
It is often suggested that responding to a disagreement with one's epistemic peer with anything less than conciliation (i.e., a downgrading of one's conviction in the contested proposition) is incompatible with the demands of intellectual humility. I argue that this is mistaken, and that on the most plausible conception of intellectual humility it can be entirely reasonable to stick to one's original judgement. What is required by intellectual humility, I claim, is further reflection on one's epistemic position with regard to the target proposition. Crucially, however, such reflection is not to be understood as being incompatible with continued conviction in the target proposition.
INTELLECTUAL HUMILITY AND THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF DISAGREEMENT
Synthese, 2018
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.
On the rational resolution of (deep) disagreements
Synthese, 2022
Disagreements come in all shapes and sizes, but epistemologists and argumentation theorists have singled out a special category referred to as deep disagreements. These deep disagreements are thought to pose philosophical and practical difficulties pertaining to their rational resolution. In this paper, I start with a critique of the widespread claim that deep disagreements are qualitatively different from normal disagreements because they arise from a difference in 'fundamental principles' or 'hinge commitments.' I then defend the following two claims: (1) All disagreements are deep to the extent that they are actual disagreements. This first claim implies, I will argue, that disagreements typically regarded as normal ('shallow') can be explained away as misunderstandings or communicative mishaps. (2) The resolution of a disagreement can be rational either through a joint experience of mutually recognized facts or through an exchange of arguments that leads to a reformulation of the disagreement that, in this new form, lends itself to a resolution through a joint experience of mutually recognized facts. I conclude with a reflection on the consequences of these two theses for the idea of deep disagreement and that of rational resolution.
Intellectual Humility, Knowledge-How and Disagreement
A familiar point in the literature on the epistemology of disagreement is that in the face of disagreement with a recognised epistemic peer the epistemically virtuous agent should adopt a stance of intellectual humility. That is, the virtuous agent should take a conciliatory stance and reduce her commitment to the proposition under dispute (e.g., Elga 2007; Feldman 2004; Christensen 2007). In this paper, we ask the question of how such intellectual humility would manifest itself in a corresponding peer disagreement regarding knowledge-how. We argue that while it is relatively straightforward to recast this debate in terms of a reductive intellectualist account of knowledge-how (e.g., Stanley & Williamson 2001; Stanley 2011a; 2011b; Brogaard 2008; 2009; 2011), whereby knowledge-how just is a matter of having a particular propositional attitude, the issue becomes more complex once we turn to anti-intellectualist positions (e.g., Ryle 1945; 1949; Poston 2009; Carter & Pritchard 2013; 2014). On these views, after all, such a disagreement won’t be just a matter of disagreeing about the truth of a proposition. Accordingly, to the extent that some kind of conciliation is plausibly required of the virtuous agent in the face of a recognised peer disagreement, this conciliation will not consist simply in belief revision. We propose a novel way to address this problem. We claim that what is required of the epistemically virtuous agent when confronted with peer disagreement regarding knowing how to φ is that thereafter she should be disposed to employ her way of φ-ing across a narrower range of practical circumstances than beforehand. Moreover, just as an agent needs to call on her intellectual virtues in order to determine the extent of conciliation required in an ordinary case of epistemic peer disagreement, so the intellectual virtues will play an important role in determining this shift in dispositions to φ that occurs as regards epistemic peer disagreement about knowledge-how.
APA Newsletter Hispanic/Latino Issues in Philosophy , 2019
In this paper I argue that epistemic humility, understood as the thesis that the multiplicity of things we can name and describe is far smaller than the multiplicity of things we can’t name or describe, is in a much better position to understand divergence in world-views than untethered relativism (understood as the thesis that there are no facts, but only interpretations). First, because epistemic humility is not a self-stultifying position, as untethered relativism is. Second, because epistemic humility can say why, in principle, all perspectives of subjects with similar cognitive capacities are equally valid, namely because the universe exceeds their cognitive capacities to the same extent. I take Friedrich Nietzsche as a paradigmatic representative of untethered relativism, while I take Thomas Nagel as a paradigmatic representative of epistemic humility.
The Methodologically Flawed Discussion about Deep Disagreement
Episteme , 2024
Questions surrounding deep disagreement have gained significant attention in recent years. One of the central debates is metaphysical, focusing on the features that make a disagreement deep. Proposals for what makes disagreements deep include theories about hinge propositions and first epistemic principles. In this paper, I criticize this metaphysical discussion by arguing that it is methodologically flawed. Deep disagreement is a technical or semi-technical term, but the metaphysical discussion mistakenly treats it as a common-sense concept to be analyzed and captured by our pre-theoretical intuitions. Since the literature on deep disagreement is subject to this fundamental confusion and deep disagreement is not a helpful umbrella term either, I propose eliminating the notion of deep disagreement from the philosophical discourse. Instead of analyzing the nature of deep disagreement, we should develop theories about different forms of disagreement, including disagreement about hinge propositions and disagreement about epistemic principles, and, in particular, a theory of rationally irresolvable disagreement.
Neither East nor West: A reasoning-first approach to disagreement between epistemic peers
ProQuest, 2021
It seems like an obviously true claim that people can reasonably disagree. But we should wonder whether it is rational for people to continue to believe what they believe knowing that what they believe is controversial. Under normal circumstances, this question can often be satisfactorily answered by appeal to the opposing agents’ respective reasoning capabilities or their differing evidence. Disagreements between peers, however, are distinctive of the usual variety of reasonable disagreements because the controversy cannot be adequately explained by appeal to their total shared evidence or stronger or weaker reasoning capabilities. Such cases, though they may be infrequent, nevertheless reveal an intriguing multi-faceted puzzle. If, as evidentialists claim, evidence is the only relevant justificatory consideration for beliefs, then peers ought to at least reduce their initial confidence if not give equal weight to the opposing view when they become aware of their peer’s opposition. But simple counterexamples reveal that modifying one's initial belief merely based on the awareness of peer disagreement is not always the rational option. These counter-examples, however, do not help explain how best to respond in other instances when it appears that awareness of peer disagreement has justificatory significance. This project attempts to solve this puzzle by first critically examining how we think about evidence. I conclude that there are actually two senses of evidence: A metaphysical and an epistemic. Distinguishing these senses of evidence reveals that in cases of genuine reasonable peer disagreement, doxastic and propositional justification come apart such that doxastic justification sometimes does not imply propositional justification. When doxastic justification does not imply propositional justification in cases of reasonable peer disagreement, we can see how epistemic pluralism can be rational without falling prey to certain epistemic spinelessness.
Intellectual Humility without Open-mindedness: How to Respond to Extremist Views
Episteme, 2025
How should we respond to extremist views that we know are false? This paper proposes that we should be intellectually humble, but not open-minded. We should own our intellectual limitations, but be unwilling to revise our beliefs in the falsity of the extremist views. The opening section makes a case for distinguishing the concept of intellectual humility from the concept of open-mindedness, arguing that open-mindedness requires both a willingness to revise extant beliefs and other-oriented engagement, whereas intellectual humility requires neither. Building on virtue-consequentialism, the second section makes a start on arguing that intellectually virtuous people of a particular sort-people with 'effects-virtues'-would be intellectually humble, but not open-minded, in responding to extremist views they knew were false. We suggest that while intellectual humility and open-mindedness often travel together, this is a place where they come apart.