Revised in Defense of Staying the Course

7/29/2019 Revised in Defense of Staying the Course

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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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Works Cited

Elgin, C. Persistent disagreement. Feldman, R., & Warfield, T. (2010). Disagreement.New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

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