Abstract
This chapter addresses a core topic in the recent debates about disagreement between peers, namely whether and how you ought to revise your beliefs if you discover that you are disagreeing with a peer – a colleague, fellow expert, or simply someone that you have reason to believe is just as competent as you are on the matter at hand. The topic of disagreement and more specifically the problem of how to respond to disagreement, is relevant in many areas in life where the same information is available to different people that come to hold different beliefs in regard to what that information means. The topic also bears on questions relating to epistemic warrant, namely to what extent one’s beliefs can be justified by evidence, to first-person conviction, epistemic humility, normative epistemology, and self-servicing beliefs.
In this chapter I approach this topic differently to how it has been approached in the recent literature. I believe that there is a difference between addressing the disagreement problem hypothetically, or in theory, as an abstraction of a case of disagreement, and regarding this same problem when it is considered from a practical point of view, in consideration of features that characterize actual cases of disagreement. I believe that the core difference between these two cases relates to judgments relating to the relevance of second-order evidence (roughly, evidence about the viability of inferences made from what we regularly treat as evidence). In actual cases of disagreement, as opposed to hypothetical abstractions of such cases, what is or isn’t relevant depends on how uncertain the situation is seen to be by the person in question. And this depends on the level of confidence as perceived by that person’s subjective first-person judgment. In what follows I show that subjective confidence about first-order judgments can swamp second-order evidence – against a plausible view that it shouldn’t. And I believe that this is a significant problem in practical rationality that is brought into focus by disagreement problems. I focus on the problem of relevancy judgments and how they relate to the calibration of first-person judgments with statistical data, and I demonstrate how this impinges on disagreements when these are considered from the first-person perspective.
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Notes
- 1.
Another subject matter in the literature on disagreement is whether responses to peer disagreement ought to be the same (i.e., should entail the same revisionary response) in all domains. This question is discussed in Konigsberg 2013a.
- 2.
- 3.
While opinions, views, and beliefs may suggest different meanings, each suited more than the other for a particular context; I use them here interchangeably as referring to what a person regards as true.
- 4.
By rational agents I have in mind something similar to what Thaler and Sunstein have recently referred to as Econs. See (Thaler and Sunstein 2008).
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- 8.
Second-order evidence, conceived as I am presently suggesting, provides information about the likelihood of some event, outcome or possibility in some general population of events, outcomes, or possibilities. It may take many different forms and prior experience or performance is only one such form.
- 9.
Bayes’s rule, or theorem, is a rule for operating on numerically expressed probabilities to revise a prior probability (in other words, the base-rate) into a posterior probability after new data have been observed. According to the theorem, the posterior probability for event H1 after data D is observed and accounted for is: p(H1|D) = p(H1) p(D|H1)/p(D), where p(H1) is the prior probability assigned to H1 before D is observed.
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- 11.
Elsewhere I discuss the epistemic significance of relevancy judgments. In this context see also Maya Bar-Hillel’s seminal “The base rate fallacy in probability judgments” (Bar-Hillel 1980), which focuses on relevancy judgments in establishing whether or not base rates ought to be incorporated in probability judgments. See also: (Bar-Hillel and Fischhoff 1981; Bar-Hillel 1982; Welsh and Navarro 2012; Barbey and Sloman 2007; Ajzen 1977).
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- 13.
This is why David Enoch has fittingly called it the “I don’t care view” (Enoch 2010, p. 15); the view is attributed to Thomas Kelly (2005). Neither Enoch nor Kelly contend that this is a plausible response to disagreement, largely because it completely ignores the epistemic significance and corrective role that other people’s opinions can have on our own judgment.
- 14.
Matheson presents a novel argument for why evidence of disagreement is, after all, relevant evidence. According to Matheson, if, to continue our chess example, Jill were to ask Jack which color he thinks has the advantage on the present chess-board position, she would be justified in believing Jack on this matter, since she relies on Jack (in fact she relies on Jack on these matters as much as she relies on herself). If this is so then Jack’s belief does provide Jill with evidence that Black has the advantage. And it is therefore evidence for Jill regardless of what she believes (Matheson 2009).
- 15.
In doing so it violates what Christensen has recently called “independence”: “In evaluating the epistemic credentials of another’s expressed belief about P, in order to determine how (or whether) to modify my own belief about P, I should do so in a way that doesn’t rely on the reasoning behind my initial belief about P” (Christensen 2011).
- 16.
This is someone reminiscent of Kelly’s view according to which a disagreement is already an indication that asymmetry exists between peers; the fact that there is disagreement (and assuming epistemic permissiveness is not permitted) already indicates that someone is right and someone is wrong. And supposedly, the one who got it right should not revise his beliefs (Kelly 2005). See also Enoch for a critical evaluation of Kelly’s early view (Enoch 2010).
- 17.
This line of thought is somewhat reminiscent of Kripke’s dogmatism paradox. Gilbert Harman transmitted Kripke’s Dogmatism Paradox (Harman 1973), which is also presented in revised form in (Kripke 2011). See also Kelly’s treatment of the paradox in relation to disagreement and higher-order evidence (Kelly 2008).
- 18.
It is, in this context, sometimes referred to as the Extra Weight View. See Elga 2007; Kelly 2009; Enoch 2010. In a wider context, the bootstrap approach disregards the awareness that people normally have of their own fallibility and the corrective role that they attribute to other people’s opinions as a means for arriving at better conclusions. It grants first-person conviction about first-order evidence a justificatory role that is normally attributed to independent standards. In so doing it uses circular reasoning to bootstrap the justification of a belief to conviction about it. In itself, this doesn’t necessarily pose a problem, yet once relevant second-order evidence is available, dismissing it altogether is wrong.
- 19.
Matheson (2009) clarifies and defends weak and strong conciliatory responses, from very little movements to strong movements, entailing, for instance, the suspension of judgment.
- 20.
See also Konigsberg 2013b.
- 21.
This is largely based on Elga’s formulation for the Equal Weight View (Elga 2007): “Upon finding out that an advisor disagrees, your probability that you are right should equal your prior conditional probability that you would be right. Prior to what? Prior to your thinking through the disputed issue, and finding out what the advisor thinks of it. Conditional on what? On whatever you have learned about the circumstances of the disagreement” (Elga 2007).
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- 23.
And in the actual disagreement this might be explained in a number of ways. The dissenting person, in view of his divergence of opinion, may be thought to have slipped in performance – made a mistake that is, a performance-error, perhaps misapplying the proper rules of inference. Alternatively, the divergence itself may be regarded as a reason, or perhaps even a proof, that that person ought to be demoted from the level of peer.
- 24.
To dismiss first-order evidence altogether, as egalitarian positions seek to do, leads to a sort of real-world skepticism (Feldman 2006, p. 415), according to which the level of credence attributed to many of our commonly held beliefs ought to be reduced, which is implausible.
- 25.
Kelly has recently pursued this direction further in his, “Disagreement and the Burdens of Judgment,” unpublished but available online at: http://www.princeton.edu/~tkelly/datbj.pdf
- 26.
Kelly also observes that a person’s psychological persuasion about first-order evidence may determine the way in which they consider second-order evidence: “In some cases, the first order evidence might be extremely substantial compared to the higher-order evidence; in such cases, the former tends to swamp the latter. In other cases, the first order evidence might be quite insubstantial compared to the higher order evidence; in such cases, the latter tends to swamp the former” (Kelly, in: Whitcomb 2011, p. 202). This appears to be an important observation about human reasoning and in particular it emphasizes the force that psychological conviction can have on the assessment and evaluation of evidence.
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Konigsberg, A. (2014). Judgments About the Relevance of Evidence in the Context of Peer Disagreements and Practical Rationality. In: Martini, C., Boumans, M. (eds) Experts and Consensus in Social Science. Ethical Economy, vol 50. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08551-7_5
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