Abstract
There seem to be cases where A believes p, and B believes not-p, but neither makes a mistake. This is known as faultless disagreement. According to the (realist) epistemic account, in at least some cases of faultless disagreement either A or B must believe something false, and the disagreement is faultless in the sense that each follows the epistemic norm. Recently, philosophers have raised various objections to this account. In this paper, I propose a new version of the epistemic account and show how it can handle those objections.
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Notes
The example of Olivia and Felicity is provided by Kölbel (2004) who seems to coin the term “faultless disagreement.” Faultless disagreement is not unique to the domain of aesthetics. As Kölbel (2004, p. 53) notes, it also appears in domains such as “culinary or moral value, probability, justification of beliefs, and many others.” Take the question whether eating meat is morally permissible. Suppose you think it permissible while your friend does not think so. It may well be the case that neither of you make a mistake.
To be sure, not everyone thinks that there are such borderline cases. For example, Williamson (1994, p. 195) suggests that to say that a proposition is indeterminate in truth-value is not to say that it does not have a truth-value, but just to say that it has an unknowable truth-value.
Different philosophers use “contextualism” and “relativism” in different senses. For example, what I call contextualism is sometimes referred to as “appraiser relativism” or “speaker relativism.” What I call “relativism” is sometimes referred to as “non-indexical contextualism” or “perspectivalism.”
In this paper, I appeal to an intuitive understanding of epistemic blamelessness. For a detailed account, see Greco (2010, p. 43).
Clearly, there a time index to each sense of justification. For it is possible that one might be unjustified at Time T1 but become justified at Time T2.
Some might think that the relevant belief-forming process in question is the specific process that produces beliefs about whether Matisse is better than Picasso. Here I will simply assume that the relevant belief-forming process in question should be understood in a broad sense: it is concerning aesthetic issues in general or at least various aesthetic issues with regard to Matisse and Picasso. And I will not address the generality problem for reliabilism in this paper.
It has been revealed that Picasso kept portraits of the key women he enjoyed relationships with until the end of his life.
Kölbel (2004, p. 54) thinks the disagreement between Olivia and Felicity is faultless at least in the following two senses: (b1) each has exactly the view they ought to have, and for both of them changing their belief would constitute a mistake; (b1’) there is nothing either of them could learn so that it would make it recommendable for them to change their mind. (b1) seems to entail (b1’). So if an account can accommodate (b1), it can also accommodate (b1’).
This point is suggested by Schafer (2011).
By “method” I mean something similar to what Schafer calls “second-order norms.” Olivia believes that Matisse’s work is more beautiful than Picasso’s, while Felicity believes the opposite. Schafer calls such beliefs first-order beliefs. The first-order beliefs are formed by following certain second-order norms such as “When your response to some work of art (that is, your aesthetic experience) is R, all other things being equal, form belief B about this work of art.” The second-order norms, Schafer notes, “will be like the norms we accept concerning how to respond to our perceptual experiences in forming new empirical beliefs” (Schafer 2011, p. 272). They are epistemic norms determining which beliefs about aesthetic matters we take to be rational given a certain sort of aesthetic experience. A correct norm will be sensitive to one’s own aesthetic experiences: it will tell one to form different beliefs (at least in some cases) if one has different aesthetic experiences.
By contrast, the J3 epistemic account of faultless disagreement cannot deal with these three cases, for when one is J3 justified, there is reason to believe that the reliability of one’s belief-forming process can be improved in the future, and consequently, it would not be fault for either party to change her belief by employing a more reliable method.
To be sure, Khoo and Knobe’s (2016, p. 2) major conclusion (i.e., the three experiments they conducted show that “people’s judgments about exclusionary content systematically come apart from their judgments about disagreement” in paradigm moral cases, that is, people are more inclined to say that the two speakers disagree than to say that at least one of their judgments must be false) may well be true.
By contrast, the J3 epistemic account cannot well accommodate our intuition that it is difficult to figure out which party believes a false proposition in a faultless disagreement, because when one is J3 justified, there is reason to believe that the reliability of one’s belief-forming process can be improved in the future, and accordingly, it might be very easy to figure out which party’s belief is false. I will address this issue further in Sect. 3.3.
From the fact that it is easy for us to figure out that the proposition S believes is false, it does not follow that S is not epistemically blameless. For example, it is easy for us to figure out that some people in North Korea believe something false about America. But they are epistemically blameless for having these false beliefs.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Nathan Ballantyne, Jiahong Chen, Fabian Freyenhagen, Stephen Grimm, Zhiheng Tang, Mengyao Yan, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of this paper or on related material. I would especially like to thank my editor Wiebe van der Hoek for his helpful suggestions and great patience. I am sure that the paper is much better on account of their efforts. This research was supported by the National Social Sciences Fund of China (16CZX046).
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Hu, X. The epistemic account of faultless disagreement. Synthese 197, 2613–2630 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1848-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1848-y