A justificationist view of disagreement’s epistemic significance

Abstract

The epistemic significance of peer disagreement is best understood through a justificationist framework that rejects the prevailing Uniformity thesis. While nonconformist and conformist models offer conflicting accounts of whether doxastic revision is required in the face of peer dispute, neither provides a universally applicable rule. Doxastic revision is not rationally mandatory when a subject holds a belief with a high degree of justified confidence and possesses “personal information”—asymmetric knowledge regarding their own cognitive functioning—that serves as a symmetry breaker. In such instances, the disagreement itself provides grounds to downgrade the epistemic status of the interlocutor. Conversely, when justified confidence is relatively low, the epistemic symmetry remains intact, necessitating substantial doxastic adjustment. This approach accounts for divergent intuitions across different scenarios, ranging from clear perceptual judgments to complex mental calculations. By grounding the rational response to disagreement in the prior justificatory status of the belief and the availability of internalist defeater-defeaters, this model avoids the dogmatism associated with strict nonconformism and the skepticism inherent in rigid conformism. – AI-generated abstract.