Post on 04-Apr-2018
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Jay Carlson
In Defense of Staying the Course
Philosophy of Special Science--Dr. Cameron Buckner
December 18, 2012
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In Defense of Staying the Course: Epistemology of Disagreement Amongst
Philosophers
Abstract: Contemporary epistemologists have concerned themselves with the
epistemic weight we ought to give to the phenomena of peer disagreement. One partysuggests that the rational response to disagreement with an epistemic peer is to revise
ones doxastic statesthat we should either split the difference with our epistemicpeers or suspend judgment on the matter altogether. The other partyknown as the stay
the course approachsuggests that one is permitted to maintain holding ones
antecedent beliefs even in the face of disagreement with epistemic peers. In this paper, Iwill consider how the psychology of expertise affects the way we approach disagreement
among philosophers. This will contribute to an examination of the respective ecologicalrationality of these strategies within the domain of philosophy. Finally, I hope to defend
the claim that the STC-strategy is more ecologically rational in the domain of philosophy.
A recent topic of much discussion in epistemology is what sort of epistemic
weight ought to be given to the phenomena of peer disagreement. Roughly speaking
there are two major strategies for an epistemic agent in a situation of peer disagreement.
The first option is that one should revise ones beliefs in order to accommodate the
beliefs of ones epistemic peer. There are two distinct species of this strategy. The first
is where one attempts to establish a compromise position between the opposing views, as
it were, to split the difference between them. The second species of this position
posits that in a situation of peer disagreement one ought simply to be agnostic on
the matter, that is, one should suspend ones beliefs (Kornblith 2009, 52). Both of
these strategies suggest revision of beliefwhether toward compromise or
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agnosticism; thus I will refer to these strategies collectively as the R-strategy.1 The
second option claims that one can maintain ones antecedent beliefs in the face of peer
disagreement. This option is known as the Stay the Course approach (hereafter STC-
strategy). While these discussions could be about disagreements in any area of life, I will
focus upon disagreement amongst philosophers. I want to argue that the STC-strategy is
still permissible even in cases where a philosopher has reason to believe that her fellow
philosopher interlocutor is in a symmetrical relationship to the truth.
To approach the question of which strategy the philosopher should adopt in a peer
disagreement situation, we have to examine several preliminary issues. First, what sort of
conditions constitutes a peer disagreement situation? To what extent are philosophers
experts in their domain of inquiry, and does that status alter their responsibilities in these
peer disagreement situations? Are they exempt from the sorts of biases that plague the
judgments of the average non-philosopher? Defining thephilosophers epistemic
situation in terms of their expertise allows us to evaluate the ecological rationality of the
R and STC strategies. It might be the case that the environment in which the
philosophers conduct their inquiry makes it rational for them to prefer one of these
strategies to the other.
What is the initial impetus for these strategies of dealing with disagreement? The
R-strategy gets its intuitive force from the fact that we are fallible creatures who
frequently have false beliefs. It also seems plausible that our interlocutors are usually
more or less on an epistemic par with us as it relates to believing the truth. Other things
being equal, we usually do not have reason to believe that we have some privileged
1In previous drafts of this paper, this option was known as the STD-strategy.
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access to truth that other equally bright and reflective people do not. As a result of these
prima facie considerations, it would seem epistemically arrogant for person A who
believes p to think that some person B who is As epistemic peer but believes ~p is
wrong from the outset. A more plausible response in such a situation is that we should
take a humbler attitude toward our antecedent doxastic states and be open to the
possibility of revising them.
In the other direction, however, the impetus behind the STC-strategy is that while
it might be true that some instances of disagreement should lead one to reconsider ones
beliefs, it is not nearly as plausible that disagreement should always warrant
reconsidering ones beliefs. After all, we have justifications for many of ourantecedent
beliefs, and it hardly seems plausible that disagreement by itself would undermine any
justification we might have for a belief. Bluntly stated, to simply surrender ones
antecedent beliefs at the first sign of dissent seems like an epistemic form of cowardice
(Elgin 2009, 57).
An important variable in this discussion is the notion of epistemic peerhood,
roughly that two agents are on a level epistemic ground regarding the truth of some
proposition. Thomas Kelly describes the conditions for epistemic peerhood thusly:
[T]wo individuals are epistemic peers with respect to some question if and only
if they satisfy the following two conditions: (i) they are equals with respect to
their familiarity with the evidence and arguments which bear on the question, and
(ii) they are equals with respect to general epistemic virtues such as intelligence,
thoughtfulness, and freedom from bias. (Kelly 2005, 1745)
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Neither has privileged access or ability that would make them more likely to possess the
truth than their peer. Though few real-world agents will be in an exactly equal
relationship to the truth with some other agents that these conditions demand, these
conditions nevertheless serve as an epistemic ideal that agents can approximate
seemingly without much lost.
STC advocates will note that there are some fairly uncontroversial conditions
where maintaining ones antecedent beliefs in the face of disagreement is surely
permissible. If one has reason to believe that ones interlocutor has made a mistake or is
simply unreliable on the topic being discussed, then it seems obvious that one has
justification in maintaining ones antecedent beliefs and thus reason to discount the
epistemic weight of the other persons disagreement. It might even be the case that in
such a situation one has an obligation notto revise ones beliefs. It seems plausible to
think that even advocates of R-strategy would accept the justifiability of maintaining
ones belief in these situations because the epistemic peer condition has failed to obtain.
But R advocates would respond in kind that it is surely false that one can disregard
another persons opinion simply because they disagree. In their introduction to their
volumeDisagreement, Richard Feldman and Ted Warfield deny that the mere fact of
person Bs disagreement with A itself counts as evidence that B is unreliable on the given
topic. Such a position seems indicative of the overconfidence that STC advocates would
do well to resist (Feldman and Warfield 2009, 5).
One might find it curious that these epistemic strategies of what one should do in
a disagreement make no reference to the arguments or evidence that underlie either side.
The neglect in this discussion of evidence and arguments as relevant for what one should
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do in a situation of disagreement leads some to object that these strategies are focusing on
the wrong phenomena for the question of how to respond rationally to disagreement. The
proper focus, so this objection goes, in a disagreement is not a matter of who disagrees
with whom, nor of tallying how many people are on each side of the debate, but rather
what evidence can be marshaled for each position. Thomas Kelly thus argues that how
opinions are distributed across the philosophical discipline on a given issue is effectively
a sociological observation that does not provide any philosophically relevant evidence
about what one should do in situations of disagreement: what one should do in a case of
disagreement lies completely on the level of the evidence and arguments for each side
(Kelly 2005, 182). If one has reason to doubt that ones opponents argument or
evidence is somehow deficient, then it is rational to stand ones ground and maintain
ones belief; conversely if one finds the other sides arguments and evidence compelling,
then it would be rational to revise ones beliefs in one aspect or another. The
disagreement itself is therefore either irrelevant or unnecessary for what one should do.
This perspective warrants two responses. First, the assumption that these
strategies are starting from is that the evidence in a given situation is symmetric, meaning
that the evidence is equally balanced on both sides. There are always possibilities that
one could break this symmetry by noticing a hidden inconsistency that ones opponent
has not recognized, by developing an argument that they must respond to, etc. A second
possible response to this objection might be that these strategies are epistemic heuristics
that allow us to make quick but accurate assessments of what one ought to believe in a
given situation in the same way that Gigerenzer and Todds fast and frugal heuristics
allow us to make quick but accurate decisions in certain environments without requiring
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unreasonable amounts of calculations (Todd and Gigerenzer 2000, 731). The rationale
behind the fast and frugal heuristics is that calculating what is optimally rational to do in
a situation solely on the basis of logic and probability theory is very costlyif possible at
alland these heuristics can be approximate the satisfactory decision within that
particular environment at a fraction of cost of standard rational calculations. In the same
way, these epistemic heuristics could be warranted by the difficulty and cost of
calculating what is rational to believe in a given situation and by their ability to
approximate a satisfactory doxastic state without the onerous calculation. I hedge this
claim with could because, to my knowledge, evaluation of whether these epistemic
heuristics regarding disagreement can produce a satisficing doxastic state is an open
empirical question that is awaiting a test.
An additional feature of disagreement among philosophers is that many of them
have some prima facie case to being experts on philosophical matters. At first blush, we
might surmise that two philosophers, being well versed in a particular philosophical
vocabulary after continuous study and reflection of the relevant literature, have each
developed a set of relatively stable judgments on some philosophical topic. But is this
expertise claim warranted? While I have sketched how philosophers might have a prima
facie case to expertise, several more substantial accounts of expertise are extant.
Weinberg et al. (2010) note three possible models whereby philosophers might be
appropriately called experts. The impressionistic account ofa philosophers expertise I
have given above will need to be replaced with a more exact account of how philosophers
are experts, if they even are at all. The overarching goal for Weinberg et al. is to respond
to claims like the one given above that since philosophers are well-versed experts in their
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philosophical trade, they are able to make judgments about philosophical matterse.g.
usually focused on thought experiments about casesthat have more epistemic heft than
ordinary folk would be able to (Weinberg et al. 2010, 331). The first possible model is
that philosophers might have superior conceptual schemata relative to everyday folk
theories. On this model philosophers have a special sensitivity to the structure of their
domain of philosophical inquiry such that they are able to pick out the features relevant
for their inquiry to which the ordinary, conceptually unladen folk would not be sensitive
(Weinberg et al. 2010, 337). Another model is that being well-versed in a given domain
makes one more likely to make better domain-related judgments. The idea for
philosophers is that their grasp of philosophical theorizing makes their judgments on
philosophical matters more reliable (Weinberg et al. 2010, 344). The final model is that
philosophers might be experts in the sense of knowing how to effectively and
economically utilize philosophical techniques and procedurese.g. intuitions and
thought experimentsthe way a chess master can utilize the arrangement of pieces to
simulate the variety of moves (Weinberg et al. 2010, 347).
Weinberg et al. deny that philosophers can be categorized as experts on any of
these models. On the possibility of philosophers having superior conceptual schemata,
there is no evidence that philosophers are immune to framing effects that could skew the
philosophers judgments. Indeed, philosophers utilize a framing effect whenever they try
to make subsequent thoughts consistent with an initial judgment or intuition (Weinberg et
al. 2010, 340). On philosophers having a superior theory that renders their judgments
superior, Weinberg et al. give two objections. First, there is no plausible candidate for a
full-bodied philosophical theory that philosophers can point to as the theory in which
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they can claim to have achieved expertise. Second, even if they were to produce one, it
would still be an open empirical question whether that theory would make the
philosophers judgments more resistant to the biases that affect folk intuitions (Weinberg
et al. 2010, 346). The final possibility considered is that philosophers might possess
superior procedural knowledge and ability to extract information from what is given in
thought experiments. Here again, there is no candidate for a procedural decision-aiding
tool that the philosopher is learning to use, in the way, for example, that logicians learn
how to use the rules of formal logic. And even if there were such a tool, it is an empirical
question that it would give the philosopher a systematic edge in knowing how to pick out
the right verdict in a given thought experiment.
One might question whether the expertise of philosophers matters much at all to
the issue of the epistemology of disagreement among philosophers. The thought here
might be that once we have already stipulated that the disputants approximate some
level playing field standard of epistemic peerhood, further stipulation that they are
experts does not alter the case in any significant ways. If Weinberg et al. are correct,
however, then little evidence has been given to think that philosophers are not subject to
the kind of framing effects that plague non-philosophers in the philosophical inquiry.
The philosophers claim to expertise in their field, therefore, is at best unfounded.
This rather skeptical conclusion regarding philosophers expertise could be
relevant to the question of disagreement if it elicited the following syllogism: if a
philosopher is aware that her judgments and those of her opponent might be subject to
some framing effect or bias that is distorting their respective views, she might take the
presence of a disagreeing epistemic peer as evidence that someones judgment is being
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distorted on the topic being discussedwhether it is hers, her opponents, or both of
them. Why think such an inference is valid? The implicit premise underlying this
inference might be that disagreement between philosophers is indicative of a mistake on
someones part. If it is valid to conclude that disagreement is a reason to think that a
mistake has been made, then one of the approaches to philosophical disagreement
mentioned above seems particularly tempting: the agnostic form of R-strategy. If one
has reason to believe there is an error somewhere in ones discussion with someone else,
it seems plausible that then one ought to suspend ones belief to make sure the error does
not lie with ones own beliefs.
Another possibility, however, besides this inference from skepticism of
philosophers expertise to the adoption ofagnosticism, is that philosophers are experts in
a field that is not likely to produce agreement. James Shanteau describes two classes of
experts, one where experts display an ability to consistently perform better than a novice
in the same task, while another kind of expert cannot consistently perform better than a
novice at the same task (Shanteau 1992, 257). Philosophers might fit better in this latter
class, not necessarily because they are less intelligent or careful in their inquiry than the
other class of inquirers, but that the environment of the philosophical domain is not as
amenable to producing, among other things, substantial instances of agreement. If this is
the case, philosophical disagreement might be an expected feature of the environment in
which philosophers conduct their inquiry, such that it would not be as appropriate to
adopt a form of the R-strategy. To examine which of these scenarios is more plausible,
we have to inquire about the ecological rationality of inquiry into the philosophical
domain.
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In examining the ecological rationality of various philosophical strategies we are
asking questions about the environment of the philosophical domain. We want to
examine how the philosophers capacities are suited to exploiting the structure of the
information that is found in the domain of philosophy. Some might question whether
ecological rationality is the appropriate method to measure strategies within the domain
of philosophical inquiry. The immediate task of the proponents of ecological rationality
from Herbert Simon to Peter Todd and Gerd Gigerenzer is to develop an account of
rationality that accommodates the various computational limitations that constrain a
subjects ability to make a decision in real world scenarios like emergency rooms and
marketplaces. These limitations seem less pertinent in the more atemporal domain of
philosophizing: the philosopher qua philosopher is not pressed by time constraints that
necessarily limit her ability to arrive at the optimum conclusion. It bears noting,
however, that ecological rationality is not just about the cognitive constraints subject is
under, but also about how the subject makes use of the information of their environment
to inform their choice (Todd and Gigerenzer 2000, 730). In the present context, the issue
is what decision the philosopher should make given the information she has about her
environment. The most immediate of which is that someone with roughly equal
likelihood of being right on an issue nevertheless disagrees with her.
What sort of environmental features are relevant for the acquisition of expertise?
Kahneman and Klein note that what distinguishes skilled intuition from biased judgments
is that the environment provides access to regular statistical cues about the features of
said environment (Kahneman and Klein 2009, 520). A task-environment can have the
property of high validity provided that they exhibit stable correlations of cues and
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outcomes (Kahneman and Klein 2009, 524). In a similar vein, Shanteau notes that ability
for experts within a given domain to achieve a consensus is also a function of the stability
and structure of their domains target: as a target within a domain displays predictable,
repeatable feedback, the inquirers into that target are more likely to develop the ability to
make accurate judgments about that target (Shanteau 1992, 258). Expertise also usually
requires proficiency in the use of external decision aids. All of these features of the
environment characterize how robust the environmental feedback the inquirer receives is,
indicating its usefulness for making predictions about new data. These environmental
signals tell the inquirer when their judgments are right or wrong, thus providing a useful
corrective or checkon the subjects theorizing or decision-making (Weinberg et al. 2010,
349).
What then are some relevant features about the environment of philosophical
inquiry? The first note about the philosophers environment is that it is largely an
intersubjective network of ideas and thoughts. The philosophers environment would
thus include the judgments and ideas of all fellow philosophers, past and present. Given
the vast, unwieldy expanse of such an environment taken so exhaustively, for the present
purposes we can narrow the field to just contemporary academic philosophers. Second,
what target are philosophical inquirers aiming to capture? The question of what
philosophical inquiry targets, however, is itself a massively controversial
metaphilosophical topic; some might say that philosophy aims to capture the analysis of
our concepts, while others think that philosophers are aiming to characterize natural kinds
of one stripe or another as found in the world around us, and many more besides.
Perhaps the safest general characterization about what philosophical inquiry targets is
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that there are numerous kinds of phenomena that different philosophical inquiries want to
capture, but there probably is no single unifying thing they all striving to capture. A third
feature about this environment is how the collective opinions among these philosophers
are distributed, whether they converge at points of consensus and whether the history of
this environment shows a tendency toward such convergences. Here again, the truest
answer about the domain seems to be that philosophy does not currently have many
substantial points of consensus, nor does its history lead one to think that consensus is
forthcoming.
It seems that a common theme about the philosophical environment is widespread
disagreement on almost every level. Hilary Kornblith contrasts this persistent
disagreement in the domain of philosophy with the more formalized disciplines of logic,
mathematics, and decision theory. In contrast to philosophy, Kornblith explains that these
latter domains have a track record of eventually producing such stable convergences of
opinions that it seems warranted to claim that they are probably true; he cites the
Newcomb Problem as a specific example of a problem in decision theory where a stable
consensus emerged after an initial stage of disagreement (Kornblith 2010, 40). Kornblith
would probably also list the empirical sciences as further examples of domains in which
practitioners historically have converged toward consensus. If one is in such a domain
that has a track record of producing such stable consensuses, then one has reason to think
that that these consensuses are probably true. Kornblith draws an epistemic conclusion
about disagreement within these domains from their tendency to produce consensus: in
these domains one cannot rationally maintain a belief that is in disagreement with a given
consensus (Kornblith 2010, 43). If one finds oneself in disagreement with the majority in
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this kind of domain, Kornblith claims, one ought to revise ones beliefs to accommodate
the consensus.2 The strategy Kornblith is suggesting is a form of R-strategy, though not
one that fits cleanly with the R-strategies as I have presented them abovein the cases
Kornblith is discussing one is neither adopting an agnostic stance nor splitting the
difference with ones opponents but outright conceding the debate to ones opponent.
The R-strategy Kornblith recommends is ecologically rational in consensus-conducive
domains because in these domains one has reason to believe, ceterusparibus, that an
established consensus has a good probability of being true. Thus it seems that it would
be to ones advantage to revise ones belief toward a belief that had a good probability of
being true.
What epistemic conclusion does Kornblith draw about disagreement in
philosophy, since it does not have this tendency toward producing consensus in the way
that the empirical sciences, math, and formal logic do? He concludes that the rational
strategy in a non-consensus-forming domain like philosophy is to suspend ones belief
(Kornblith 2010, 46). Using the terminology of this paper, we can take Kornblith to be
claiming that the agnostic R-strategy is the ecologically rational in domains where one
cannot reasonably expect convergence of opinion. His reason for this conclusion seems
to be that because philosophy has no history of producing stable consensus, we are not
likely to receive strong signals as to when our judgments are on track or not (Kornblith
2Kornbliths position seems to have the odd feature that anomalists, i.e. those whomaintain that a given consensus paradigm is inadequate, are doing so on pain of
irrationality. I think he can avoid this problem in the following way. Kornblith
qualifies his claim about consensus in a footnote that one can maintain ones
position in the face of a consensus if one has discovered an argument that the
consensus has not yet considered (Kornblith 2010, 43n). Kornbliths thesis would
also presumably not hold if one had reason to believe that one was in the early or
middle stages of a paradigm before a consensus had emerged.
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2010, 45). In the absence of getting any robust feedback from ones environment,
Kornblith would claim we cannot adequately assess whether ones judgments are
accurate or not, and so it is best to adopt agnosticism.
How should one respond to this? Several things could be noted about Kornbliths
advocacy for agnosticism in moments of peer disagreement. One might respond that his
position entails a rather sweeping form of skepticism, where one should suspend ones
judgment on many matters. It might well be incoherent because even Kornblith is willing
to admit that this position renders his own philosophical beliefs unjustified (Kornblith
2010, 44). But in the present context we are concerned with the matter of ecological
rationality, so the question is whether the agnostic R-strategy allows the subject to exploit
the structure of the environment in which she is. But the presumption of adopting the
agnostic R-strategy is that one is taking the safe bet by refraining from making a choice
in an environment where cues are not robust enough to generate much confidence. But
that safety is not guaranteed: to remain agnostic on a central question of ones inquiry or
on any controversial question is precisely to have ones investigation stall out.
Furthermore, it might be the case that responding to any cues even ones that are
intermittent could advance ones inquiry more than simply refraining from believing. On
these grounds I think one is justified in adopting an STC-strategy.
How then do I avoid the problem of dogmatism that made the STC-strategy
unpalatable in the beginning? I think one starting point lies in an ambiguity at the end of
Kornbliths article. Previously he had stated that in a peer disagreement situation, one
should adopt agnosticism, but at one point he describes his position as one of epistemic
modesty (Kornblith 2010, 52). This suggests less about a strategy of revising the
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content ofones beliefs as revising the confidence with which one holds those beliefs. I
think these are separable kinds of strategies. In fact, I think the revision of the confidence
of ones beliefs could be wedded to a straightforward STC-strategy: one can stick to
ones antecedent belief, but downgrade ones confidence in it.
It is worth reflecting on whether Kornbliths gloss on scientific domains of
inquiry as consensus-conducive finds support in the strategies that scientists go about
disagreements in their domain. One reason disciplines like the sciences are taken to be
consensus conducive is because participants in these domains make predictions about
empirical phenomena. Proponents of theory A predict that some phenomena will occur
under some conditions, while proponents of theory B predict that will occur under
those same conditions. These theories are then put to the test, and the theory whose
prediction is repeatedly demonstrated under the stipulated experimental conditions is
taken to be the theory that one should be assented to. To give an historical example,
when Einstein and Eddington made predictions based on their models of relativity that
were repeatedly demonstrated in empirical tests, an opponent of relativity theory
presumably would have been obligated to revise their opinion.
But this simple story glosses over many non-trivial aspects of scientific practice
where disagreement manifests itself. Disagreement is not only about what empirical
phenomena will arise in some set of conditions. For example, in the debate over whether
non-verbal animals display understanding the unobserved states of conspecifics, the
disagreement is not only over what empirical data will arise, but also what empirical data
counts as evidence for or against this claim. What sorts of tasks do animals have to
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perform to demonstrate that they have this capability? Even the semantics of such a claim
are under dispute (Penn and Povinelli 2007, 731).
Perhaps the characterization of philosophy as a nonconsensus conducive domain
is also too sweeping. While one might grant that philosophers disagreements often seem
interminable, nevertheless there are some examples in recent philosophical history that
could be plausible candidates of genuine progress in philosophy. For instance, Edmund
Gettiers thought experiments seemed to generate a broad consensus among the vast
majority of philosophers that justified true belief was not sufficient for knowledge.
Kornblith dismisses this sort of example as an insignificant exception to the rule
(Kornblith 2010, 45). Here he seems to be on more solid ground, since even if we grant
that there is general assent about the correct answer of Gettier problems and their
theoretical significance, this is a relatively narrow place of consensus.
In this final section, I will examine a formalized approach to adjudicating between
R and STC-strategies to measure their relative reliability. Barry Lam examines two ways
of measuring the reliability of these approaches. The first is calibration of the subjective
credence in ones beliefs to the actual probability that the content of ones beliefs are
true. One is considered well calibrated when ones degree of confidence in some belief
matches with the objective probability that that belief is true. Even if two epistemic
agents disagree, they can still be equally well calibrated; an example of this would be if
one agent was overconfident in the truth of A while the other was underconfident in the
truth of A, but each deviation is the same. The second method of measurement, known
as Brier scoring, measures the distance of a subjects beliefs about p from the truth-value
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of p by taking the squared distance from the truth of the proposition. (Lam forthcoming,
4).
Lams argument for the superiority ofR-strategy is as follows. Suppose that two
agents, A and B, disagree over some issue , but they are equally well-calibrated so that
their distances from the truth of is equal. A and B thus satisfy the epistemic peerhood
condition. How reliable would a hypothetical agent C be, whose constant strategy in
every situation is to split the difference between A and B? On the calibration test, the R-
strategy C showed improved calibration in about 15% of the simulations, leading Lam to
conclude that STC-strategy of maintaining ones belief fares better than the R-strategy of
splitting the difference (Lam forthcoming, 14). In the case of Brier scoring, Lam
imagines that A and B disagree on two propositions P and Q. A and B are epistemic
peers because As beliefs are distances and from the truth about propositions P and Q
respectively, while Bs beliefs are and from the truth about propositions Q and P,
respectively. In this case, a hypothetical agent C that splits the difference between A and
B necessarily has a lower Brier score, which means that Cs position is closer to the truth
of the matter. Thus, on a Brier score, splitting the difference between two positions
results in proximity to truth (Lam forthcoming, 17).
Lams conclusion seems to resemble the conclusion of the Monty Hall problem,
that changing ones choice always increases the odds of getting the prize over sticking
with ones original choice. Lams results purport to show that choosing the R-strategy of
splitting the difference performs at least as well as the STC-strategy and sometimes
better. On the calibration test, splitting the difference between epistemic peers preserved
the reliability and proximity to truth; on the Brier test, however the R-strategy was able
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but to actually improve the chance of approximating the truth on a matter over users of
the STC-strategy (Lam forthcoming, 17). In another paper Lam notes that the STC-model
is rationally permissible in some casesnamely when ones peer is using a less
discriminating metric of reliability like calibration (Lam 2011, 243).
How helpful is Lams approach? First, Lams only focusing on splitting the
difference form of revision does not evaluate the agnostic form of revision that Kornblith
supports. Kornbliths support for the agnosticism strategy is hardly idiosyncratic. It is
difficult to know whether it would helpful for Lams overall claim. Second, it seems that
Lams framework requires discerning the truth of matter on some given issue, which is
precisely what is often under debate. Perhaps this is only giving an a priori setting with
artificial numbers to illustrate why Another issue is that there seems to be a conflation of
revising the content of ones beliefs and revising ones confidence in said beliefs. The
rough scenarios Lam utilizes seem to make the same conflation ofthe revision of ones
confidence in a belief with revision of the content on ones beliefs that Kornblith was
guilty of. As was the case with Kornblith, making this ambiguity actually confuses as
kind of R-strategy with an STC-strategy.
Even if we put aside the technical worries of how to apply Lams approach to the
real life situations of disagreement, there are practical reasons to be wary ofLams
position. He insists that adopting the R-strategy consistently will result in closer
proximity to knowledge (Lam 2011, 244). But one issue seems to be that adopting a
simple strategy of accommodating a disagreeable peer seems to move too quickly to the
reconciling position. Philip Kitcher notes that there are cognitive goals that are not met
by simply revising ones beliefs in the face of disagreement (Kitcher 1990, 20). Pushing
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back on critics objectionssometimes even with pugnacityallows for a refining of
ones positions that benefits the entire epistemic community. These benefits are lost if
the inquiry is short-circuited by automatic revision in response to peer3
disagreement in
the way that Lam suggests.
As noted earlier, insofar as the strategies for philosophical disagreement can be
considered kinds of epistemic heuristics, they have not been subjected to any form of
model or simulation that would verify the claims of ecological rationality that I have
presented here. Absent empirical tests that would confirm this, my tentative conclusion
is that the STC-strategy seems like a more ecologically rational response to philosophical
disagreement.
3 To the objection that our disposition to revise is dependent on the level of
confidence of ones peer, it would be true that a highly confident peer would give us
a reason to adjust our beliefs while a lower confidence peer would not. It seems to
me, though, that Lams scenarios include in the peerhood conditions that peers are
either equally confident or at least approximately so (Lam 2011, 3).
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Staying the Course
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