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The Epistemology of Disagreement: Why Not Bayesianism?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 September 2019

Thomas Mulligan Open the ORCID record for Thomas Mulligan [Opens in a new window]
Thomas Mulligan*
Affiliation:
Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., USA
*
*Corresponding author. Email: thomas.mulligan@georgetown.edu
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Abstract

Disagreement is a ubiquitous feature of human life, and philosophers have dutifully attended to it. One important question related to disagreement is epistemological: How does a rational person change her beliefs (if at all) in light of disagreement from others? The typical methodology for answering this question is to endorse a steadfast or conciliatory disagreement norm (and not both) on a priori grounds and selected intuitive cases. In this paper, I argue that this methodology is misguided. Instead, a thoroughgoingly Bayesian strategy is what's needed. Such a strategy provides conciliatory norms in appropriate cases and steadfast norms in appropriate cases. I argue, further, that the few extant efforts to address disagreement in the Bayesian spirit are laudable but uncompelling. A modelling, rather than a functional, approach gets us the right norms and is highly general, allowing the epistemologist to deal with (1) multiple epistemic interlocutors, (2) epistemic superiors and inferiors (i.e. not just epistemic peers), and (3) dependence between interlocutors.

Keywords

DisagreementBayesian inferenceprobabilistic modellingstatistical independenceepistemic peerhood
Type
Article
Information
Episteme , Volume 18 , Issue 4 , December 2021 , pp. 587 - 602
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

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