Abstract
There is a controversy, within social epistemology, over how to handle disagreement among epistemic peers. Call this the problem of peer disagreement. There is a solution, i.e. the equal-weight view, which says that disagreement among epistemic peers is a reason for each peer to lower the credence they place in their respective positions. However, this solution is susceptible to a serious challenge. Call it the merely modal peers challenge. Throughout parts of modal space, which resemble the actual world almost completely, there are hordes of epistemic peers, who disagree with almost any arbitrarily chosen belief had by residents of the actual world. Further, the mere modality of these peers is not itself an epistemic difference-maker. Thus, on the equal-weight view, we should significantly lower the credence we place in most of our beliefs. Surely, this is seriously mistaken. Thus, there are serious considerations that cut against the equal-weight view.
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Notes
Although I do not have the space to do it justice, there is a competing view in the literature (cf. Enoch 2010) that if you justifiably believed-that-p, then you will probably have good reason to think that your disagreeing epistemic peer is not as reliable on p-related matters as you; however, Enoch (2010, 993) concedes that the fact that some disagrees with you, who you justifiably take to be your epistemic peer, is a reason to place somewhat less credence in your view, than you did, prior to having a disagreeable peer. But, Enoch (2010, 961) thinks that peer disagreement is a reason to moderate one’s view, rather than matching the degree of credence we place in each respective position; as such, he writes: ‘But, of course, the prior conditional probability mentioned here is your prior conditional probability. And here too you may be wrong’ (961). That is, the datum that I have an epistemic peer, who disagrees with me, is itself a datum that I must evaluate; I could be wrong about how I evaluate that datum as well.
We might think of peer disagreement like so: talking about epistemic peers, who disagree with me in ways related to our expertise, is just another way of describing some of the ways that I could be seriously mistaken; on this reading, it does not matter whether my epistemic peer resides in the actual world, or a nearby, merely modal possible that would be identical to the actual world if it were actualized, for it to have epistemic consequences for the degree of credence I place in my beliefs.
For proponents of modal realism (cf. Lewis 1986), and the equal-weight view (cf. Christensen 2007), the merely modal peer challenge is all the more damning; that is, I do not need the claim that mere modality is not a relevant epistemic difference if modal realism is true, to challenge the equal-weight view.
This is the evidential heft had by my beliefs; e.g. if belief B is produced by a reliable process, while B* is produced by an unreliable process, then, ceteris paribus, B has greater epistemic clout than B*.
The vicious regress problem is similar to the argument by Wilson (2012) employs against the Cartesian sceptic. Wilson argues that Cartesian sceptical scenarios have sceptical implications for our judgments as to what we believe and as a result, this produces a potentially infinite regress of conflicting doxastic attitudes. Thus, she argues that the best, principled way to dissolve this regress is to reject Cartesian scepticism.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Bernard Molyneux; without his help, this article would not have been possible.
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Licon, J.A. On Merely Modal Epistemic Peers: Challenging the Equal-Weight View. Philosophia 41, 809–823 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-012-9412-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-012-9412-3