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Disagreement in philosophy

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Abstract

Recent philosophical discussions construe disagreement as epistemically unsettling. On learning that a peer disagrees, it is said, you should suspend judgment, lower your credence, or dismiss your peer’s conviction as somehow flawed, even if you can neither identify the flaw nor explain why you think she is the party in error. Philosophers do none of these things. A distinctive feature of philosophy as currently practiced is that, although we marshal the strongest arguments we can devise, we do not expect others to agree. Nor are we dismayed then they do not. Through a survey of familiar professional practices, I argue that philosophy rightly revels in responsible disagreement. This discloses important and perhaps surprising facets of the epistemology of philosophy.

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Notes

  1. See Samuel Elgin (2015) and James Lenman (2000) for arguments that show that consequentialists are never in a position to know or reasonably believe that a given action is good. They know that it is good if and only if it maximizes utility. Because causal chains are endless, we cannot know which action satisfies that requirement.

  2. This example was suggested to me by Samuel Elgin.

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Acknowledgement

I am grateful to Greta Turnbull and participants at the 2018 Ryerson University Philosophy Conference for comments on an earlier draft of this paper, and to two anonymous reviewers for comments. In particular I am grateful for the recommendation that I recognize the ways that Mill's views align with mine.

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  1. Graduate School of Education, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA

    Catherine Z. Elgin

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  1. Catherine Z. Elgin
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Correspondence to Catherine Z. Elgin.

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Elgin, C.Z. Disagreement in philosophy. Synthese 200, 20 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03535-y

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