Abstract
In this article we discuss what we call the deliberative division of epistemic labor. We present evidence that the human tendency to engage in motivated reasoning in defense of our beliefs can facilitate the occurrence of divisions of epistemic labor in deliberations among people who disagree. We further present evidence that these divisions of epistemic labor tend to promote beliefs that are better supported by the evidence. We show that promotion of these epistemic benefits stands in tension with what extant theories in epistemology take rationality to require in cases of disagreement. We argue that the epistemic benefits that result from the deliberative division of epistemic labor can provide epistemic reason to maintain confidence in cases of disagreement. We then show that the deliberative division of epistemic labor constitutes a distinct kind of epistemic dependence.
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Notes
In the classical version of the task, participants are presented with four cards stipulated to have a letter on one side, and a number on the other. The visible sides of the cards might read E, K, 4, and 7. They are then asked which cards they must turn over in order to test the rule “if there is a vowel on one side, then there is an even number on the other side”. The correct response to the task is taken to be the E card and the 7 card.
We thank Giacomo Melis and an anonymous reviewer for pressing us about this issue.
See the supplemental materials to Hall et al. (2012) for some striking examples of such justifications in the moral domain.
Epistemic peerhood is defined in various ways. Rationality peers are agents with cognitive and evidential equality (Lackey 2008), or are approximate equals with respect to various intellectual virtues such as intelligence or diligence (Christensen 2009). An accuracy peer is someone I consider as likely as myself to be correct prior to discovering disagreement (Elga 2007).
This can be cashed out in various ways: coming to know whether p, coming to have a true belief about whether p, coming to have a justified belief about whether p, or coming to have a justified true belief about whether p.
An anonymous reviewer pointed us toward a discussion by White (2010) of cases that are somewhat similar. White argues that one need not feel any epistemic discomfort in cases where one knows that it would seem as if one is rational regardless of whether one is in a good case (where one actually is rational), or a bad case (where one is not), even if one has no independent way to know that one is in a good rather than a bad case. But note that in our case, subjects do have an independent reason to think that they are in a bad case at t3.
We can distinguish normative epistemic teleology from meta-epistemic teleology, which holds that epistemic norms have force in virtue of promoting value. One could be a meta-epistemic teleologist while holding a non-teleological view about normative epistemology, or vice versa. For example, one could hold that epistemic norms have force due to their promotion of one’s practical goals while being an evidentialist about normative epistemology (Cowie 2014).
Berker traces this type of critique to Firth (1981).
We borrowed this formulation from an anonymous reviewer, with thanks.
Although Ahlstrom-Vij and Dunn argue that the tradeoff in Berker’s Prime Numbers case is permissible.
Berker is here targeting teleology with a veritistic theory of final value, but the same point would supposedly hold for the promotion of any other epistemic value.
Theories of time-slice rationality, which hold that the relationship between two time-slices of the same person is not importantly different from the relationship between different persons, for the purposes of rational evaluation, might provide a possible way to motivate this view (Hedden 2015; Moss 2015). Engaging thoroughly with time-slice rationality would be beyond what we have space for here.
Goldman (2015) offers some considerations against such a general principle.
This assumption is quite strong, but it might be acceptable to Berker since the dialectic concerns whether a tradeoff between a belief about the existence of God and new future beliefs is permissible.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Josefine Pallavicini, Giacomo Melis, Frederik J. Andersen, Fernando Broncano-Berrocal, Emil F. L. Møller, and participants at workshops at the University of Copenhagen in November 2015 and the Autonomous University of Madrid in January 2016 for fruitful discussions. In addition, the authors thank three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments.
Funding
This work was funded by a grant from the Danish Free Research Council (Grant No. 4001-00059B FKK) to Klemens Kappel for the project “The social epistemology and social psychology of complex disagreement”.
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Hallsson, B.G., Kappel, K. Disagreement and the division of epistemic labor. Synthese 197, 2823–2847 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1788-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1788-6