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How to Be a Pluralist About Disagreement

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Epistemic Pluralism

Part of the book series: Palgrave Innovations in Philosophy ((PIIP))

Abstract

There has been little focus on what it means for disagreement to manifest itself in a variety of ways, and how these various forms of disagreement might relate to each other. In this chapter, I focus on doxastic disagreements. I examine four different ways that doxastic disagreement can present itself: descriptive disagreement , conceptual disagreement , full disagreement and credal disagreement . Pluralism is one way to resolve issues concerning doxastic disagreement . One such pluralist account, developed out of John MacFarlane ’s work, is disjunctive pluralism . I criticise Disjunctive Pluralism and argue for an alternative pluralist theory of disagreement that I call kinship pluralism . Moreover, I argue that kinship pluralism can be adequately extended to other varieties of disagreement , namely group and agnostic disagreement .

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Acknowledgments

I gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MINECO) under grant agreement #FFI2016–80588-R, the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 programme under grant agreement H2020-MSCA-ITN-2015-675415, and the Juan de la Cierva postdoctoral fellowship programme. Special thanks are due to Delia Belleri, Annalisa Coliva, and Sven Rosenkranz for discussion of various parts of this material.

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Correspondence to Michele Palmira .

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Palmira, M. (2017). How to Be a Pluralist About Disagreement. In: Coliva, A., Jang Lee Linding Pedersen, N. (eds) Epistemic Pluralism. Palgrave Innovations in Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65460-7_11

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