Disagreement Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Set in the context of the current interest among Analytic philosophers in the “epistemology of disagreement”, this paper explores the meta-philosophical problem of philosophical incommensurability. Motivated by Nietzsche’s provocative remark about philosophy as prejudices and desires of the heart “sifted and made abstract”, the paper first outlines the contours of the problem and then traces it through a series of examples. Drawing largely on the tradition of phenomenology and philosophical hermeneutics, a broadly Continental response to this formidable problem is suggested. Disagreement cannot be understood simply in terms of epistemological strategy, but needs to be regarded in a fundamentally hermeneutical light.

- by Ralph Wedgwood
- •
- Disagreement

How could a state have the moral authority to promulgate and enforce laws that citizens are thereby obliged to obey? That is the problem of political authority. The Consequentialist Explanation of Political Authority contends that great social benefits depend upon there being a state with political authority. In his book, 'The Problem of Political Authority,' Michael Huemer considers different types of explanation of political authority and he rejects them all. I show that the objections he raises to consequentialist accounts are confused and that they fail to connect with the Consequentialist Explanation of Political Authority. Huemer argues that anarchy of a particular kind would be better than the states that exist in current Western societies. I explain why that argument, if it were successful, would be an effective objection to the Consequentialist Explanation of Political Authority.

- by Danny Frederick
- •
- Political Philosophy, Legitimacy and Authority, Political Theory, Government
- by Jean-Yves CHEROT
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- Epistemology, Legal Theory, Legal argumentation, Legal Reasoning

A Theory of Knowledge Essay (written for the IB Diploma) which attempts to understand how disagreement arises between experts. By examining relevant examples in the Natural Sciences and in History, it appears that disagreement follows from at least two conditions: weaknesses in theories or as a result of valuing facts differently. Nevertheless, the many benefits of disagreement are also considered.

- by Gustav Christensson
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- Philosophy, Epistemology, Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of History

Le droit n'a-t-il pas pour mission dans la société libérale de laisser à la porte les différentes conceptions du bien à l'appréciation personnelle et les différentes conceptions du juste à l'appréciation du législateur? D'ailleurs, le désaccord sur ces valeurs porté devant le juge est-il encore un désaccord sur le droit, dès lors qu'on peut penser que dans ces cas, le droit n'est pas encore déterminé? Mais ces questions sont plus théoriques que pratiques, car, de fait ces désaccords sont portés devant les juges et la question est de savoir comment ils les tranchent. Les méthodes de construction de l'accord et du désaccord sur le droit par les juges est ainsi un point d'entrée extrêmement important du point de vue de la politique et de la philosophie morale.

- by Jean-Yves CHEROT
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- Jurisprudence, Epistemology, Philosophy Of Law, Judicial review

One of Ronald Dworkin’s most distinctive claims in legal philosophy is that LAW is an interpretative concept. According to Dworkin, interpretative concepts are a special kind of concept—a concept whose correct application depends not on fixed criteria or an instance-identifying decision procedure, but rather on the normative or evaluative facts that best justify the total set of practices in which that concept is used. The main argument that Dworkin gives for interpretivism about a given concept – LAW, among many others – is a disagreement-based argument. In this paper, we argue that Dworkin’s disagreement-based argument relies on a mistaken premise about the nature of disagreement. We propose an alternative analysis of the type of dispute—what we call “Seeming Variation Cases”—that Dworkin uses to motivate the idea of interpretative concepts. We observe that genuine disagreements can be expressed via a range of linguistic mechanisms, many of which do not require that speakers literally assert and deny one and the same proposition. We focus in particular on what we call “metalinguistic negotiations,” disputes in which speakers do not express the same concepts by those words, but rather negotiate how words should be used and thereby negotiate which of a range of competing concepts should be used in that context. Metalinguistic negotiations reflect disagreements that are “genuine” in any plausible sense of the word and they provide the basis for a promising alternative to Dworkin’s interpretivist analysis of Seeming Variation Cases. We claim that this view has quite general theoretical advantages over Dworkin’s interpretivism about Seeming Variation Cases and of the relevant class of legal disputes in particular. This paper thus has two interlocking goals in legal philosophy: 1) to undermine one of Dworkin’s core arguments for interpretivism and 2) provide the foundations for a non-interpretivist alternative account of an important class of legal disputes.

- by Tim Sundell
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- Philosophy Of Language, Philosophy Of Law, Ronald Dworkin, Disagreement

This paper discusses the growth of the populist radical right as a concrete example of the scenario where liberal democratic ideas are losing support in broadly liberal democratic societies. Our goal is to enrich John Rawls’s influential theory of political liberalism. We argue that even in that underexplored scenario, Rawlsian political liberalism can offer an appealing account of how to promote the legitimacy and stability of liberal democratic institutions provided it places partisanship centre-stage. Specifically, we propose a brand-new moral duty binding ‘reasonable’ partisans committed to pluralism. This duty establishes conditions where partisans must strategically transform society’s public reason (i.e., transform the visions for society their parties campaign on) in ways that promise to attract back support from illiberal and antidemocratic competitors. While this strategic behaviour might seem impermissible, we show that Rawls’s distinctive account of sincerity in democratic deliberation is uniquely placed to justify it as perfectly ethical.

- by Gabriele Badano and +1
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- Political Philosophy, Political Theory, Liberalism, Political Extremism/Radicalism/Populism
- by Christian Garland
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- Critical Theory, Business, Industrial And Labor Relations, Information Systems
- by Winnie ShumShum
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- Pragmatics, Semantics, Hong Kong, Linguistic (im)politeness
- by Maria Baghramian and +1
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- Epistemology, Metaphilosophy, Relativism, Disagreement

In this entry, I tackle the phenomenon known as "faultless disagreement", considered by many authors to pose a challenge to the main views on the semantics of subjective expressions. I first present the phenomenon and the challenge, then review the main answers given by contextualist, absolutist and relativist approaches to the expressions in question. I end with signaling two issues that might shape future discussions about the role played by faultless disagreement in semantics.

- by Dan Zeman
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- Philosophy Of Language, Aesthetics, Ethics, Languages and Linguistics
- by Teemu Toppinen
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- Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy Of Language, Ethics, Philosophy of Action

A battle over the politics (and philosophy) of time is a major part of what is at stake in the differences between three competing currents of contemporary philosophy: analytic philosophy, post-structuralist philosophy, and phenomenological philosophy. Avowed or tacit philosophies of time define representatives of each of these groups and also guard against their potential interlocutors. However, by bringing the temporal differences between these philosophical trajectories to the fore, and showing both their methodological presuppositions and their ethico-political implications, this book begins a long overdue dialogue on their respective strengths and weaknesses. It argues that there are systemic temporal problems (chronopathologies) that afflict each, but especially the post-structuralist tradition (focusing on Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida and their prophetic future politics) and the analytic tradition (focusing on John Rawls and analytic methodology in general, particularly the tendency to oscillate between forms of atemporality and intuition-oriented “presentism”). What is required is a “middle-way” that does not treat the living-present and the pragmatic temporality associated with bodily coping as an epiphenomenon to be explained away as either a transcendental illusion (and as a reactive force that is ethically problematic), or as a subjective/psychological experience that is not ultimately real.

- by Jack Reynolds
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- Analytic Philosophy, Metaphilosophy, Phenomenology, Politics

Responding to David Harvey’s critique of my paper ‘Why a radical geography must be anarchist’, I once again reiterate the importance of anarchist perspectives in contemporary politics and geographical praxis. In challenging Harvey on the limits to Marx, I urge him to think again about the hidden vanguardism, implied statism, and veiled hierarchy that continue to lurk within the Marxist project, and importantly how these specters constrain both our collective political imagination and the possibilities of radical geography. I am admittedly very critical of Harvey, but I nonetheless refuse to close the door on dialogue between the Black and Red, even in the face of ongoing Marxist ridicule of anarchist politics. Accordingly, I propose an agonistic embrace of a ‘postfraternal’ or ‘postsororal’ politics on the left, where we come to appreciate ongoing conflict as a sign of a healthy leftist milieu. In doing so we can move beyond the misguided idea that all disagreements over strategies, tactics, and organizing methods will ever be resolved. Ultimately, what I have dubbed ‘the condition of postfraternity’ keeps us alert to the continually unfolding possibilities of a thoroughly politicized and forever protean space. By embracing this shifting horizon, not as a static limit to our politics, but as a beautiful enabler of visionary possibilities, the rhizomes of emancipation grow stronger.

- by Simon Springer
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- Critical Theory, Management, History, Economic History

This paper examines the evolution of consumer uncertainty about unemployment one year after the irruption of the covid-19 pandemic in European countries. Since uncertainty is not directly observable, we use two alternative methods to directly approximate it. Both approaches are based on qualitative expectations elicited form the consumer survey conducted by the European Commission. On the one hand, following Dibiasi and Iselin (2019), we use the share of consumers unable to formalize expectations about unemployment (Knightian-type uncertainty). On the other hand, we use the geometric discrepancy indicator proposed by Claveria et al. (2019) to quantify the proportion of disagreement in business and consumer expectations. We have used information from 22 European countries. We find that both uncertainty measures covary. Although we observe marked differences across countries, in most cases the perception of employment uncertainty peaked before the outbreak of the crisis, plummeted during the first months of the lockdown, and started rising again since the past few months. When testing for cointegration with the unemployment rate, we find that the discrepancy indicator exhibits a long- term relationship with unemployment in most countries, while the Knightian uncertainty indicator shows a purely short-run relationship. The impact of both indicators on unemployment is characterised by considerable asymmetries, showing a more intense reaction to decreases in the level of uncertainty. While this finding may seem counterintuitive at first sight, it somehow reflects the fact that during recessive periods, the level of disagreement in the employment expectations of consumers drops considerably.

- by Petar Sorić and +1
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- Unemployment, Expectations, Disagreement, Cointegration

expressing agree and disagree

- by Angela Sinaga
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- Teaching and Learning, Education, Reference, Teacher Education
- by Dimostenis Yagcioglu
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- Peace and Conflict Studies, Values, Conflict, Conflict Resolution

In his recent work, Duncan Pritchard defends a novel Wittgensteinian response to the problem of radical scepticism. The response makes essential use of a form of non-epistemicism about the nature of hinge-commitments. According to non-epistemicism, hinge-commitments cannot be known or grounded in rational considerations, such as reasons and evidence. On Pritchard's version of non-epistemicism, hinge-commitments express propositions but cannot be believed. This is the non-belief theory of hinge-commitments (NBT). One of the main reasons in favour of NBT over rival anti-sceptical Wittgensteinian views is that it has less theoretical costs and revisionary consequences than its rivals. In this paper, I argue that NBT fairs at least as bad as its rivals in terms of its theoretical costs and revisionism. In particular, I argue that NBT is inconsistent with certain kinds of philosophical disagreement; that it faces worries with mental-state scepticism; and that it faces difficulties in explaining how we can represent ourselves as committed to hinge-commitments.

- by Chris Ranalli
- •
- Disagreement, Hinge Propositions, Conceivability & Possibility, G E Moore
- by Ian Walkinshaw
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- Linguistic Politeness, Speech Act Theory, Agreement, Disagreement

This paper evaluates the dynamic response of economic activity to shocks in agents' perception of uncertainty. The study focuses on the comparison between manufacturers' and consumers' perception of economic uncertainty, gauged by a geometric discrepancy indicator to quantify the proportion of disagreement in eleven European countries and the Euro Area. A vector autoregressive framework is used to estimate the impulse response functions to innovations in disagreement, both for manufacturers and consumers. The effect on economic activity of shocks to the perception of uncertainty is found to differ markedly between both types of agents. On the one hand, shocks to consumer discrepancy tend to be of greater magnitude and duration than those to manufacturer discrepancy. On the other hand, innovations in disagreement between the two collectives have an opposite effect on economic activity: shocks to manufacturer discrepancy lead to a decrease in economic activity, as opposed to shocks to consumer discrepancy. This finding is of particular relevance to researchers when using cross-sectional dispersion of survey-based expectations for approximating and assessing economic uncertainty, since the effect on economic growth of shocks to disagreement may be dependent on the type of agent and the way in which expectations have been elicited.

We analyse the effects of aggregating the level of disagreement in survey-based expectations. With this aim, we construct several indicators based on two metrics of disagreement: the standard deviation of the balance and a geometric measure of discrepancy. We use data from business and consumer surveys in eleven European countries and the Euro Area. We evaluate the dynamic response of economic growth to shocks in agents' uncertainty gauged by the discrepancy measures in a bivariate vector autoregressive framework. We find that while the effect on economic activity to a shock in aggregate discrepancy is always negative for firms' disagreement, the effect to consumers' disagreement is positive in all countries except Italy. To shed some light regarding the effect of aggregating disagreement both across variables and economic agents on forecast accuracy, we also examine the predictive performance of the discrepancy indicators, using them to generate out-of-sample forecasts of economic growth. We do not find evidence that the aggregation of disagreement improves forecast accuracy. These findings are especially relevant when using cross-sectional dispersion of survey-based expectations of firms and households.

- by Oscar Claveria González
- •
- Business, Economic Growth, Forecasting, Uncertainty

This essay looks closely at the relationship between British authors J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis particularly regarding Tolkien's rejection an disapproval toward Lewis' "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe". Many authors attribute Tolkien's rejection of Narnia to that of jealousy or an overly critical nature on Tolkien's part. However this essay argues that Tolkien's disapproval what eventually lead to the chilling in Tolkien and Lewis' friendship can be traced to their profound denominational differences and a growing lack of sympathy on C.S. Lewis' part.

- by Emma Probst
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- Literary Theory, Writing, Catholicism, C.S. Lewis

(Oxford Handbook of Distributive Justice, uncorrected proofs)
To most philosophers, unmet claims based on distributive justice imply a political injustice—some have a complaint of justice against their political system. This article explores a variety of views about how this connection may be grounded or qualified: political institutions may be one tool among others to realize an independent good, distributive principles might regulate the distributive activities of political institutions, or distributive principles might apply in light of a special relation of a political institution and its members. We also consider a view prevalent in the social contract tradition that, in light of reasonable disagreement, one cannot demand that shared political institutions conform to one’s own contentious distributive theory: members must seek terms with which all can live, even though such terms may not be anyone’s most preferred possibility.

- by Chad Van Schoelandt and +1
- •
- Social Contract Theory, Distributive Justice, Institutions, Disagreement

My contribution to a debate with Roger White (MIT). I argue against the “Uniqueness Thesis”, according to which a given body of evidence always singles out some uniquely rational doxastic attitude towards a particular proposition, for any agent. Although this short paper is written as a response to White, it should be intelligible when read on its own.

- by Thomas Kelly
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- Epistemology, Evidence, Epistemology of Disagreement, Rationality

Semantic description of nouns of doctrines, ideologies, beliefs, movements, attitudes... ending in -ism according to both their form (morphology) and a context of rivalry as their raison d'être (pragmatics).

- by Grigory Agabalian
- •
- Pragmatics, Semantics, Ideology, Ideologies

In this short paper I survey recent contextualist answers to the challenge from disagreement raised by contemporary relativists. After making the challenge vivid by means of a working example, I specify the notion of disagreement lying at the heart of the challenge. The answers are grouped in three categories, the first characterized by rejecting the intuition of disagreement in certain cases, the second by conceiving disagreement as a clash of non-cognitive attitudes and the third by relegating disagreement at the pragmatic level. For each category I present several important variants and raise some (general) criticisms. The paper is meant to offer a quick introduction to the current contextualist literature on disagreement and thus a useful tool for further research.

- by Dan Zeman
- •
- Pragmatics, Semantics, Contextualism, Relativism
- by Justin Marquis
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- Epistemology, Continental Philosophy, Friedrich Nietzsche, 19th Century Philosophy

Disagreement in philosophy has the tendency to pull us toward philosophical skepticism: skepticism about the extent to which we can know or justifiably believe the philosophical views we defend and advance. One reason for this is because widespread disagreement, whether in philosophy or elsewhere, is typically thought of as a symptom of a larger problem. Where there is pervasive, systematic disagreement there is thought to be little convergence to the truth, where there is little convergence to the truth there is thought to be little progress, and where there is little progress, there is a floundering discipline; a discipline of experts with big opinions to be sure, but with a seemingly unreliable connection to the truth. Disagreement, then, seems to be a good sign, not of progress, but a lack of it. On this picture of things, what is epistemically problematic about disagreement, specifically disagreement in philosophy-i.e., widespread, pervasive disagreement-is that it yields no clear convergence to the truth. On the assumption that large, collective, expert convergence to the truth on an is

- by Annalisa Coliva
- •
- Philosophy, Epistemology, Metaphilosophy, Wittgenstein

We frequently find ourselves in intractable disagreements about the morality of abortion, euthanasia, restrictions to freedom, or eating meat for fun. An adequate reaction to a disagreement requires knowing which type of disagreements we are confronted with. The main aim of my paper is to explain the source of moral disagreements and clarify their nature. I will argue that some moral disagreements are deep conceptual disagreements that similarly to disagreements in logic or ontology, are not resolvable, as the resolution of the disagreement requires the disputants to adopt perspectives that are conceptually unavailable to them. I will suggest four possible sources of moral disagreements: incommensurable fundamental values, different concepts of the good life, different motivating reasons and different concepts of morality.

- by Margit Sutrop
- •
- Philosophy, Ethics, Social sciences and values, Moral Philosophy

This paper investigates disagreement constructions on online social networking sites (SNS). It forms part of a wider project on hate and conflict speech modelling. Combining different research theories from conversational analysis and corpus linguistics, we have devised a six-class disagreement typology that we have manually tested on a 20 000-word corpus of Reddit comments on media posts. We then completedthis analysis with a description of linguistic markers that pave the way towards future automated research. Finally, we present politeness strategies and repairs that maintain mutual understanding in media posts’ comments. Our analysis proposes new classifications adapted to SNS. Moreover, it highlights regular forum trends, face-to-face and group threatening acts and Reddit-specific strategies to maintain or repair disagreement.

- by Bob Beddor
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- Contextualism and relativism, Epistemic Modals, Disagreement, Predicates of Taste

In this critical paper, we engage with a recent absolutist proposal to account for faultless disagreement: that of Jeremy Wyatt (2018). We first introduce the phenomenon to be explained and briefly present Wyatt's account. The bulk of the paper is dedicated to spelling out objections to various aspects of the view, related to his adherence to semantic minimalism, to the interpretation of the empirical data he relies on, and to his construal of both faultlessness and disagreement. We end with a comparison of the proposal with other views on the market from the point of view of theoretical economy.

- by Dan Zeman
- •
- Philosophy Of Language, Semantics, Contextualism, Truth
- by David Christensen
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- Epistemology, Epistemology of Disagreement, Disagreement
- by Annalisa Coliva
- •
- Philosophy, Epistemology, Metaphilosophy, Social Epistemology

Epistemology is, roughly, the philosophical theory of knowledge, its nature and scope. What is the status of epistemological claims? Relativists regard the status of (at least some kinds of) epistemological claims as, in some way, relative--viz., that the truths which (some kinds of) epistemological claims aspire to are relative truths. Self-described relativists vary, sometimes dramatically, in how they think about relative truth and what a commitment to it involves. Section 1 outlines some of these key differences and distinguishes between broadly two kinds of approaches to epistemic relativism. Proposals under the description of traditional epistemic relativism are the focus of Sections 2-4. These are, (i) arguments that appeal in some way to the Pyrrhonian problematic; (ii) arguments that appeal to apparently irreconcilable disagreements (e.g., as in the famous dispute between Galileo versus Bellarmine); and (iii) arguments that appeal to the alleged incommensurability of epistemic systems or frameworks. New (semantic) epistemic relativism, a linguistically motivated form of epistemic relativism defended in the most sophistication by John MacFarlane (e.g., 2014), is the focus of Sections 5-6. According MacFarlane’s brand of epistemic relativism, whether a given knowledge-ascribing sentence is true depends on the epistemic standards at play in what he calls the context of assessment, which is the context in which the knowledge ascription (e.g., ‘Galileo knows the earth revolves around the sun’) is being assessed for truth or falsity. Because the very same knowledge ascription can be assessed for truth or falsity from indefinitely many perspectives, knowledge-ascribing sentences do not get their truth values absolutely, but only relatively. The entry concludes by canvassing some of the potential ramifications this more contemporary form of epistemic relativism has for projects in mainstream epistemology.

- by J. Adam Carter
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- Philosophy, Philosophy Of Language, Epistemology, Philosophy of Science
- by Cassidy Oonk
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- Landscape Ecology, Geology, Observational Astronomy, Plant Ecology
- by Filippo Ferrari
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- Philosophy Of Language, Truth, Normativity, Disagreement

In the present thesis my purpose is to investigate whether contemporary intuitionism can rebut recent criticism that builds on the phenomenon of moral disagreement. I argue that it can. In chapter one I specify in what sense do I use the terms ‘intuitionism’ and ‘intuition’. In chapter two I describe the intuitionists’ theories of how intuitions are justified. In chapter three I explain how present-day intuitionists answered some problems coming from disagreement. Having presented the intuitionist theory, I turn to new criticisms in chapter four and five. Firstly, I introduce Walter Sinnott-Armstrong’s challenge. He argues that since moral beliefs are often subjects to various defeaters, including being subject to disagreements, moral intuitions cannot enjoy the justification that intuitionists claim they do. I point out that Sinnott-Armstrong’s characterization of intuitionism is misleading. I argue that using a more appropriate characterization and the theories about justification that intuitionists put forward his challenge can be answered satisfactorily, and even without these since it cannot fulfil its own requirements. Secondly, I introduce Roger Crisp’s challenge. He argues that in case of peer disagreement regarding a moral belief the believer who does not suspend that particular belief is in error. I argue in the contrary and show that the one who does suspend belief can just as well be in error. In the concluding chapter I summarize the results of my investigations and point out what kind of significance they ascribe to moral disagreement.

- by Tamás Paár
- •
- Ethics, Meta-Ethics, Intuition, Metaethics

The aim of this paper is to show the
bargaining possibilities when there are three involved
parties on a labor market and two of them are active
decision-makers. The continuous conflict is between the
three main bargaining power poles i.e., State; Company;
Citizen. This conflict landscape is directly correlated with
the development dynamical trends coming especially from
the rapid rate of world urbanization: Market forces based
on Instant Reflection Individual Mixed Strategies (IRIMS)
between the three power poles i.e. Business, Citizen and
the Community (State) shape the labor market by a
continuous dynamic evolution. We will show possible
solutions for increasing the benefit for all three parties.
The “win-win-win papakonstantinidis model” with a 3-ple
view in the labor market as the result of a continuous
conflict among interests’ power poles' i.e.
Business-Citizen and the Community (State) for the
domination over the labor market The 3ple win
involvement, able to create equilibrium point in a pay-off
matrix coming from “best responses", of the three
stakeholders As introduction basic statistical data from
Greece and Germany will be presented and structured.
After this the different behaviors of the parties in both
countries will be regarded and their bargaining success
will be illustrated.
Keywords Social Welfare Systems, Labor Market,
Bargaining Problem Decision Making, Stakeholders,
Win-win-win, Profit Maximization

- by Leonidas Papakonstantinidis
- •
- Political Economy, Disagreement, Marginalization, Bargaining Theory

In this paper, I argue that citizens have an entitlement to sanction representatives, but representatives have tools to anticipate this sanction and reconstruct their views in order to anticipate the views of the people they are supposed to represent. I also argue that represented and representatives have an entitlement to sanction democratic representative institutions and practices, but, unless citizens across the spectrum of all representative relationships agree on many fronts, sanctions are likely to violate the democratic requirement that all subjected to a collective decision should not be mere objects of coercion.

- by Corrado Fumagalli
- •
- Democratic Theory, Populism, Democracy, Political Representation

Is agreement the purpose of argumentation? This article compares two different approaches to argumentation, analysing its political effects. The comparison is undertaken in the first section of the paper considering two main groups of argumentation theories; one group in which argumentation aims to resolve a disagreement or a difference of opinion in order to reach an agreement (e.g. VAN EEMEREN e GROOTENDORST 2004; VAN EEMEREN et. al. 1993) and one group which is concerned with deep disagreements. The second section questions some political implications of the agreement-oriented perspective, which is often connected with a normative discussion model and with a negative evaluation of pathos and ethos. The last part of the paper outlines the socio-political advantages of a rhetorical approach to agreement and disagreement, which includes logos as well as pathos and ethos. In particular, the so-called rhetoric of dissensus, which takes into account the personal dimension of argumentation, shows the constructive dimension of conflict and the democratic value of polemic discourses and ad hominem arguments.

- by Roberta Martina Zagarella
- •
- Philosophy Of Language, Rhetoric, Argumentation, Democracy

In this paper, I try to show that democratic consensus – one of the more prominent ideals in recent political thought – is an essential byproduct of epistemically warranted beliefs about political action and organization, at least in those cases where the issues under dispute are epistemic in nature. An essential byproduct (to borrow Jon Elster’s term) is a goal that can only be intentionally achieved by aiming at some other objective. In my usage, a political issue is epistemic when there is some right (or at least best) answer concerning how it ought to be resolved that is independent of people’s beliefs or desires about how it ought to be resolved. An important secondary claim, then, is that it is difficult to explain the presumptive value of political deliberation unless we understand a very large share of political issues as epistemic in nature. This view implies a considerably more contentious model of political deliberation but is not incompatible with familiar forms of conciliatory behavior in our public disputes.

- by Michael Fuerstein
- •
- Liberalism, Deliberative Democracy, Consensus, Disagreement

Courts play a key role in deciding on public health controversies, but the legitimacy of judicial intervention remains highly controversial. In this article I suggest that we need to carefully distinguish between different reasons for persistent disagreement in the domain of public health. Adjudicating between public health controversies rooted in factual disagreements allows us to investigate more closely the epistemic capacities of the judicial process. While the critics typically point out the lack of appropriate expertise of judges—in particular with respect to health and public health—we should not move too fast in inferring from this a generalized competence problem. This article offers four reasons for vindicating the importance of judicial intervention in factual disagreements: the relative independence of judges from the political establishment, the judicial commitment to evidence, the specific nature of judicial reasoning and an additional voice for the people in the policy-making process.

- by Leticia Morales
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- Constitutional Law, Judicial review, Judicial Politics, Health