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.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
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.
This example was suggested to me by Samuel Elgin.
References
Aristotle. (1941). The basic works of Aristotle, R. McKeon (Eds). Random House.
Barnett, Z. (2019). Philosophy without belief. Mind, 128, 109–138.
Christensen, D. (2007). Epistemology of disagreement: The good news. Philosophical Review, 116, 187–217.
Cohen, L. J. (1992). An essay on belief and acceptance. Oxford University Press.
Dellsén, F. (2019). Rational understanding: Toward a probabilistic epistemology of acceptability. Synthese, 198, 2475–1494.
Elgin, C. (1996). Considered judgment. Princeton University Press.
Elgin, S. (2015). The unreliability of foreseeable consequences: A return to the epistemic objection. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 18, 459–466.
Elgin, C. (2017). True enough. MIT Press.
Elgin, C. (2018). Reasonable disagreement’. In C. R. Johnson (Ed.), Voicing dissent (pp. 10–21). Routledge.
Fumerton, R. (2010). You can’t trust a philosopher’. In R. Feldman & T. A. Warfield (Eds.), Disagreement (pp. 90–110). Oxford University Press.
Goldberg, S. (2013a). Disagreement, defeat, and assertion’. In D. Christensen & J. Lackey (Eds.), The epistemology of disagreement: New essays (pp. 167–189). Oxford University Press.
Goldberg, S. (2013b). Defending philosophy in the face of systematic disagreement. In D. Machuca (Ed.), Disagreement and skepticism (pp. 277–294). Routledge.
Heydrich, W. (1993). A reconception of meaning. Synthese, 95, 77–94.
Hills, A. (2016). Understanding Why. Noûs, 50, 661–688.
Kitcher, P. (1990). The division of cognitive labor. Journal of Philosophy, 87, 5–22.
Lenman, J. (2000). Consequentialism and cluelessness. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 29, 342–370.
Lewis, D. (2000). Academic appointments: Why ignore the advantage of being right? David Lewis: Papers in ethics and social philosophy (pp. 187–200). Cambridge University Press.
Mill, J. S. (1978). On liberty. Hackett Publishing Co.
Russell, B. (1971). ‘Letter to FREGE’ From Frege to Gödel. In J. Van Heijenoort. Harvard University Press, (pp. 124–125).
van Fraassen, B. (2008). Scientific representation. Clarendon Press.
Vogel, J. (1990). Are there counterexamples to the closure principle? In M. D. Roth & G. Ross (Eds.), Doubting (pp. 13–27). Kluwer.
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.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Elgin, C.Z. Disagreement in philosophy. Synthese 200, 20 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03535-y
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03535-y