Abstract
Relativism and contextualism are the most popular accounts of faultless disagreement, but Crispin Wright once argued for an account I call divergentism. According to divergentism, parties who possess all relevant information and use the same standards of assessment in the same context of utterance can disagree about the same proposition without either party being in epistemic fault, yet only one of them is right. This view is an alternative to relativism, indexical contextualism, and nonindexical contextualism, and has advantages over those views. Wright eventually abandoned this view in favor of relativism for reasons related to a conciliationist view of disagreement between epistemic peers. I argue that he gave up on divergentism too soon.
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Notes
I defended this view in Davis (2010). The arguments in that paper partly overlap with those in this paper, particularly in the responses to objections. That paper focuses on metaethics and the argument from disagreement in ethics, while this one focuses on disagreement epistemology and Crispin Wright, and contains an expanded argument for divergentism.
To see why it seems impossible, try to imagine disagreeing about whether, for example, there is life on Mars, once we have all relevant information about that issue—reality seems determinate in a way that precludes deep disagreement. That said, I cannot rule out the possibility that some issues in a realist discourse, such as certain mathematical issues or some aspects of the mind of God, might be unknowable for humans even under ideal conditions. In such cases the subjects would lack some information, so they would not be free of cognitive shortcomings. However, such cases seem to be rare. This does not affect the argument for divergentism, for the significance of this is merely that our intuitions about deep disagreement have been shaped by the usual cases in realist discourses, where deep disagreement is impossible.
Under ideal conditions one will have all relevant information, including information that is not knowable given current methods and technology. Strictly speaking, this includes propositions—if any—that entail p or not-p (where p is the disputed proposition), but in cases where some other proposition logically entails p or its negation, p is probably not something about which it is possible to deeply disagree. Deep disagreements will not occur over matters that are subject to proofs in a formal system, any more than they will over questions of mathematics (or at least ones where the truth is knowable).
Such malfunctions and information deficits are what Crispin Wright called “cognitive shortcomings” (1992, pp. 92–93).
This does not preclude the possibility of other varieties of faultless disagreement; the claim is simply that they can occur this way. Relativism might be correct for disagreements between those who do not share the same standards of assessment, while divergentism can explain disagreements between those who do.
Wright argued that discourses might be realist to various degrees, for there is more than one realism-making feature. I am using “antirealist” in a more narrow sense: statements in the discourse are not made true by something that exists independently of us or our practices and conventions—such as physical objects.
Unless “excusable as a result of vagueness in a disputed statement, or in the standards of acceptability, or variation in personal evidence thresholds.” (Wright 1992, p. 144).
This account is similar to Max Kölbel’s suggestion that there are a priori rules for forming certain kinds of beliefs, and that those rules allow for deep disagreement (Kölbel 2003, p. 68). Kölbel, however, explains this in relativistic terms.
Karl Schafer defends a view that resembles divergentism in some ways, but differs from it on one crucial point. He says that when two aesthetic beliefs conflict, one of them must be false, and contends that a party can hold a false belief without being epistemically at fault (Schafer 2011, pp. 274–275). I believe that divergentism and his view differ in this respect: Schafer defines realist semantics to hold that there is a “straightforward matter of fact” about who is right (Id. at p. 268). I take this to mean that, under his realism, there can be no deep disagreement. In divergentism, by contrast, there is only one truth of the matter, but it is not straightforward, for we may disagree even under ideal epistemic conditions.
Wright (2006, p. 52). His response has changed over time. In Truth and Objectivity he responded to the objection that someone’s faculty of intuition must be malfunctioning by arguing that we should not invoke an “intuitionist epistemology” unless the best explanation of the discourse has to invoke such a faculty (Wright 1992, p. 153). In “On Being in a Quandary” he gave up on the best explanation response (presumably because the argument above does not require positing such a faculty), and claimed that the argument should be handled with intuitionistic logic (because the discourse is evidentially constrained): we cannot get to the conclusion that some party has a cognitive shortcoming unless we use the rule of double negation elimination, which is unavailable in intuitionistic logic (Wright 2003, p. 504). However, this shows that we cannot rule out divergentism; that is far from showing that divergentism is true. See Kölbel (2003, pp. 61–2). Perhaps this is what drove him to relativism.
Beliefs that are weakly false can also be considered weakly true, for we deeply disagree about their truth-value, and one party considers the belief true.
See the “burdens of judgment” in Rawls (1993, p. 55). All of them except the first kind are bare mistakes. Rawls contended that “many of our most important judgments are made under conditions where it is not to be expected that conscientious persons with full powers of reason, even after free discussion, will all arrive at the same conclusion” (Rawls 1993, p. 58).
As for explaining why that subject was convinced by the wrong arguments, that asks for too much. If someone makes an error in reasoning, for example, we explain the mistake by pointing out where the reasoning went wrong; we do not go on to demand an explanation of why that person engaged in that reasoning.
We do not deeply disagree about cognition mistakes. For example, failure to follow the rule of modus ponens seems a clear case of failing to follow the norms of assertion, and therefore a cognition mistake. It really is a cognition mistake if, under ideal conditions, we all agree that we must follow it—as I expect we do. If, perchance, we deeply disagree about modus ponens, then we are mistaken in thinking that failure to follow it counts as a cognition mistake.
For example, under actual conditions peer disagreement may be evidence that the discourse is not evidentially constrained—that not all truths in that discourse are knowable. In that event, the subject should suspend belief, at least in the face of peer disagreement; it would be a mistake not to. Note, however, that this scenario is not possible under ideal conditions, for if the subject cannot be sure she has all the evidence, or sure that being cognitively faultless reliably leads to the truth (in other words, that the truth is detectable with sufficient certainty to make justified true belief possible), then the conditions are, by definition, not ideal.
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Acknowledgments
I thank Richard Feldman, Graham McFee, Christopher McMahon, Edward Minar, Folke Tersman for comments on previous drafts. I particularly want to thank two reviewers from this journal for their comments as well.
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Davis, J.K. Faultless disagreement, cognitive command, and epistemic peers. Synthese 192, 1–24 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0543-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0543-x