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Graduate Program Tuition and Aid. The problem is difficult enough that any researcher or research group tackling it on their own might easily make a mistake. So far, so parallel to ordinary disagreements. These disagreements are extreme, however, because there is a consensus on the issue, and researchers are highly confident of the claim as a consequence. Because the problem is difficult, errors in generating the solution are highly expectable.
But because errors are expectable, experts have another expectation as well: they expect other researchers who reach solutions contrary to the consensus to lower their confidence in the solution—that is, to conciliate—and take the disagreement as a strong reason to check for errors understood widely, to include checking that data is representative, looking for alternative explanations, and so on.
They expect this conciliation and checking to occur prior to publication of the results. In light of the consensus, they are confident that rechecking will likely expose errors, or that conciliation will have occurred such that responsible researchers will not take their findings to conflict with the consensus they will present them as anomalies to be explained, at most. While an initial disagreement is expectable, a published disagreement is highly unexpected, given that conciliation is assumed already to have taken place.
Instead, the disagreement forces experts to change their credences with regard to the dissenter, relegating them from the status of peers. Once again, agreement is highly expected and uninformative. Before turning to our third kind of case, let me make good on the claim that the typology provides resources for making sense of more messy cases. Obviously, ordinary and extreme disagreements are ends of a continuum, because the difficulty of problems is continuous.
It follows, therefore, that the degree to which a dispute is surprising is itself continuous. Cases midway between ordinary and extreme disagreements are therefore to be expected. In ordinary disagreements, because the disagreement is only somewhat surprising, we best restore coherence in our beliefs by lowering our confidence in the proposition over which we conflict.
In extreme disagreements, our confidence in that proposition is far too high for it to be easily shaken, but we are less confident that our disputant is a peer, and we best restore coherence by reducing our confidence in peerhood. In messier cases, we may be faced with a choice: we might restore coherence either by reducing our confidence in the target proposition, or in peerhood, or by making adjustments in both.
Partisan disagreements—those that paradigmatically give rise to the problem of spinelessness—are deep disagreements. Unlike ordinary and extreme disagreements, deep disagreements are not , or at any rate need not, be unexpected.
A fortiori , they do not carry information about the likelihood that one of us has made an error or is not competent or sincere. Because they do not carry this kind of information, they do not constitute pressure to revise our beliefs about the target proposition or about peerhood.
Locke defines deep disagreements as disagreements that arise out of a disagreement over some principle. Empirically, these kinds of disagreements may usually arise from the different emphasis that the opposing sides place on what Jonathan Haidt and colleagues Graham et al. While their theory was, as the name suggests, developed to explain differences in moral judgements, it appears to explain much of the partisan divide.
Differences in scores on the moral foundations predict allegiance to political parties and even controlling for such allegiances attitudes to polarized issues. Exposure to partisan disagreement is something akin to drawing a black marble from an urn that I believe contains a roughly equal mix of black and white marbles. It does not give me a reason to change my views about the target proposition, any more than I should change my view about the composition of the urn.
Because I expect deep disagreement whether p to occur, and expected it before it occurred, token disagreement does not put me under pressure to conciliate with regard to the target proposition. Ought I to change my view about the sincerity or competence of the disputant? The best explanation of this kind of partisan dissent may indeed impugn either sincerity or competence. Those who are sincere are often in the grip of some poisonous ideology that distorts their capacity to process evidence.
These cases are better seen as cases of extreme, rather than deep disagreement, given that the falsity of the claims should be obvious to everyone, whatever their ideology; correlatively, the best explanation for such disagreements impugns the sincerity or the competence of the disputants.
Ordinary disagreements provide information: because generating the right response in these cases is moderately difficult, and the other person is a peer, disagreement provides evidence that at least one of us has failed to reason properly.
Extreme disagreements also provide information: because generating the right answer in these cases is easy, or because there is a consensus, disagreement provides evidence that the other person is not a peer by casting doubt on their sincerity or their competence. In both cases, disagreement points to a significant probability of error : error in my reasoning or error in taking my disputant to be a competent and sincere reasoner.
But deep disagreements do not provide information about the possibility of error. Nor do they arise because one side or the other is incompetent or insincere again, the fact that our dispute is a token of a type serves to rule that out: your side has its experts, after all.
Deep disagreements therefore do not provide us with any new information. Given what I know about you, or what I can infer, I expected you to disagree with me about climate change or gun control. Neither you nor I learn anything new from these expected disputes: they provide no information about our reasoning or that of the other side. They do not challenge our causal model of the world or of each other; rather they confirm it.
Because token deep disagreements do not inform us either about the possibility of error or about the competence or sincerity of the disputants, they do not place pressure on the disputants to conciliate on the target proposition. Might not this merely push the question back, though? While the token disagreement does not indicate that either you or I have made an error in reasoning, given our different starting points, is not the very fact that we expected the disagreement indicative that at least one of us has made a much more fundamental error?
We expected the disagreement because it is one of a series of such disputes— our side disagrees with theirs time and time again—and this pattern of disagreements surely suggests that at least one of us had made an error, if not in the reasoning which leads us to our conclusions, then in the premises from which we reason? Surely, then, we are now under pressure to conciliate with regard to these foundations and principles, rather than the target propositions or the capacities of agents?
Surprise carries information: it provides us with a reason to update our causal model of the world. In its light, we ought to reduce our confidence in the disputed belief, or in our belief that the disputant is a peer. The fact that we expect deep disagreements indicates that this disagreement is predictable given our causal model.
Given further assumptions such as uniqueness—the view that the evidence licenses a single doxastic attitude , this in turn entails that we do not see our disputants as likelihood peers: that is, agents as likely to reach the conclusions on these matters as we are. The other side has in many cases, at any rate the markers of peerhood: intelligence, education, thoughtfulness and so on, and access to the same evidence as we do.
Does not the fact that we reach opposing conclusions place pressure on us to conciliate with regard to our starting points? I will argue that the deep disagreements have a different kind of epistemic significance than ordinary and extreme disagreements. They give rise to concerns about irrelevant influences, not error. In ordinary and extreme disagreement, dissent is unexpected and provides information. At least one of us has made a mistake or is—unexpectedly—not a peer. Deep disagreements do not provide either kind of information.
They do not provide evidence that at least one of us has made a mistake in reasoning. They are precisely what we should expect, given competent reasoning from our divergent principles. The token disagreement provides us with no new information at all, while the pattern helps constitute and provides us with confirmation that we reason from such different principles.
Any pressure to conciliate therefore attaches to these principles, not reasoning or peerhood. Empirical evidence from moral foundations theory supports the commonsensical hypothesis that these differences in basic premises stems from differences in enculturation as well, perhaps, as differences in genetics.
In asking whether deep disagreement provides us with reason to conciliate, we ask about our confidence in these starting points, and whether they constitute irrelevant influences on our beliefs. If my belief that p is counterfactually dependent on factors that do not bear on its truth, then I should lower my confidence in p. But that is not because I have made an error: it is because of the irrelevant influence.
She, too, thinks that partisan disagreement is to be expected. For her, partisan disagreement is expected because the issues are so difficult : given how complex these questions are, we should have low confidence in our answers, and therefore we should not be surprised when disputes arise. For her, these disputes do not place us under pressure to conciliate, not because the disputants are not peers, but because our confidence in our answer should already be low.
The reasons for low confidence and for expecting disagreement are one and the same—the question is difficult. Some of the questions on which partisans divide are difficult. Vavova gives as an example the question whether death penalty is an effective deterrent. Answering that question involves a wide variety of factors, data from multiple jurisdictions and difficulties in controlling for confounds.
But these kinds of difficulties do not prevent us from having justified high confidence in other areas: climate change is equally subject to partisan dispute, equally if not more difficult, and yet one side alone has the right to high confidence in its beliefs. Other deep disagreements may not be especially difficult at all. Conservatives and liberals continue to be deeply divided on the acceptability of homosexuality Brenan , but the question really does not seem all that difficult.
In the recent past, of course, there were deep partisan disagreements on a range of questions that we now see as obvious: the equality of women, for example. We can have justified high confidence in some of our partisan beliefs, either because they are easy for those of us lucky to have the right foundations, or because relevant experts can assess them despite their difficulty, and transmit their findings to us via testimony. We should lower our confidence only when further investigation reveals that the belief forming strategies we competently deploy are not reliable.
While she distinguishes irrelevant influence from disagreement, noting that not all cases of the latter involve the former, she maintains that evidence of irrelevant influence is a genus of the same species as evidence of disagreement, and that species is error.
I have suggested that deep disagreement turns on irrelevant influences, and that it does not constitute evidence of error. But the dispute is more than merely terminological.
The accusation that someone believes something due to an irrelevant influence may sometimes come as a surprise to the accused but it need not; importantly, it retains whatever force it has as an epistemic challenge even after it comes to be expected.
Unexpected input is evidence that my causal model of the world is in some way faulty you are not my peer; I have made a mistake in my reasoning; the beer is not where I thought it was; and so on.
Expected input is consistent with my causal model of the world; if anything, it should raise my confidence that things are as I thought. The fact that deep disagreement is unsurprising demonstrates that it does not have the same kind of epistemic significance as other kinds, and aligns it with accusations of irrelevant influence.
But there are important differences between them and indeed other members of that genus, such as sceptical challenges and it is better to think of them as belonging to quite different categories. I do, however, join with Vavova in thinking that irrelevant influences sometimes and only sometimes weaken the epistemic credentials of our beliefs.
One question is whether the case is a permissive one, and whether permissivism might plausibly stretch to encompass the competing opinions.
There may be symmetry breakers between influences. It is an open question whether our moral foundations are genuinely irrelevant influences and whether there might be such symmetry breakers between those who emphasise different foundations.
Haidt sometimes suggests that there are such symmetry breakers: conservatives are in a better epistemic position than liberals because they are sensitive to a broader range of foundations.
Of course, by itself that is question-begging. Assessing the epistemic credentials of these competing visions is obviously extremely difficult. We might resort to pragmatic criteria which set of foundations better conduces to the welfare of the members of a society, for instance? Perhaps we may be able to undermine one outlook or the other or both on the kinds of grounds invoked in the large literature on evolutionary debunking.
But they do so by providing additional evidence: evidence beyond the fact of deep disagreement itself. Since these disagreements are to repeat expected or expectable, they do not require updating in the absence of such additional evidence. While deep disagreement constitutes a spur to further investigation—to the search for such additional evidence—there is no a priori reason to think that the investigation will reveal that our belief forming processes are not reliable.
If we know that there is some significant probability we are subject to such distorting influences, we should significantly lower our confidence in the affected beliefs, but we have no special reason to think that is true of us just because we are disputants in a deep disagreement. But we cannot ignore these disputes either, refusing to see them as reasons to engage in further investigation.
If we are not in an epistemic situation akin to those just mentioned, we are also not in the position of the person who contemplates whether she is a brain in a vat. Unlike the first kind of case, we lack evidence that there is some significant probability that we are subject to a distorting influence, but unlike the second, we possess evidence that we are subject to an influence that is possibly distorting.
We seem to have reason to conciliate, pending further investigation, but to a far lesser extent than those who have evidence of error, or of irrelevant influence. Epistemologists talk about the epistemic significance singular of disagreement.
If the view put forward here is correct, that is something of a mistake. Different kinds of disagreement have different kinds of significance. I have developed a typology of disagreement, distinguishing ordinary , extreme which itself comes in two kinds and deep disagreement.
I have argued that the first two kinds of disagreement provide information, because they are to some degree unexpected. Disagreement of these kinds inform us of the likelihood of error on one or both sides. When we have no less reason to think the error is on our side than the other, we ought to conciliate. When we have reason to think that the error is on the other side, we ought to relegate the disputant from the status of peerhood.
Deep disagreements— persisting deep disagreements—are beasts of a crucially different kind. They are not evidence of error, either in our reasoning or in identifying peers. Rather, they point to differences in the principles or worldview from which we argue. Surprise is the hallmark of ordinary and extreme disagreements, and surprise points to a need to update our causal model of the world. But deep disagreements are not surprising; at least, they do not owe their significance to surprise.
Of course, we sometimes learn of a new disagreement that turns out to be deep, and that is surprising. But when that happens we mistakenly assimilate it to extreme or ordinary agreement; we take it to be evidence of error. It takes time to learn that the disagreement is deep and that those who disagree with us are, in some sense, our peers, if not our likelihood peers. Rather than pointing to error, deep disagreement points to worries about the starting points from which we reason.
They provide us with grounds for worrying that these starting points are arbitrary: that they are irrelevant influences on belief. They do not provide us with reasons to conciliate, since we have no reason to think those with whom we disagree in these cases are likelihood peers.
Rather, they provide us with a reason to investigate these starting points. This is not a reason to conciliate because the evidence of irrelevant influences is weak. I do not gain evidence that one of us has made a mistake and that it might just as likely be me as them. Rather, I gain evidence that one of us might have made a mistake and it just might be me. Perhaps that is a reason to lower my confidence a little, but not to anything like the degree we see in ordinary and extreme disagreements.
Any such conciliation should take place early, but deep disagreements persist. Encountering yet another token of the type is entirely expectable and should not lead to any further reduction in confidence.
Whereas ordinary and extreme disagreements are the province of epistemology, traditionally conceived, deep disagreements require us to move beyond epistemology. Deep disagreements are the product of social facts, and they are the province of social epistemology.
Their assessment may take us further afield, too: into sociological and psychological inquiry into the nature of the mechanisms involved. The significance of deep disagreement is quite different from that of the other kinds, and calls for a different response and different kinds of inquiry.
While my focus is on these kinds of moral and political disputes, conciliationism might entail agnosticism about religious beliefs too. See De Cruz for discussion and proposals for leveraging religious diversity to better justify religious belief. This example is based on the infamous case of David Irving, who unsuccessfully sued Deborah Lipstadt for calling him a Holocaust denier.
Unlike the Holocaust cases which feature in the disagreement literature see, for instance, Christensen , we cannot dismiss Irving from peerhood on the basis of lack of acquaintance with the evidence. It is worth noting that switching the focus from disagreement between isolated epistemic peers to disagreement between large numbers of people, or between individuals who recognize themselves to be representative of such groups, helps to avoid the worry is that it rarely or never is the case that two people have access to the same set of evidence.
When we focus on real-world disagreements, there is no real question whether one side has access to evidence that the other lacks. When a dispute is years or even decades old, we can be confident that all evidence has been shared.
I cannot reasonably speculate most partisan disputes arise from these kinds of factors as a reviewer points out, however, there are exceptions. The most obvious are conspiracy theories. Partisans are often obsessive consumers of information about their favoured conspiracy, so cannot be accused of lack of evidence, but there is a strong case for thinking they can be dismissed from peerhood by reference to personal information, such as our confidence we are sincere and not suffering from certain psychological dysfunctions.
Note that in saying that partisan dissenting peers may constitute pressure to conciliate that falls short of splitting the difference, I do not beg the question against the equal weight view.
The numbers count; pressure to conciliate will be proportional to the numbers on each side perhaps weighted for expertise. Taking the numbers into account is a way of giving each equally expert dissent equal weight. But there is every reason to think that moral and nonmoral beliefs hang together in a mutually reinforcing, if not entailing, web. It is the web of belief, and not inference from first principles, that those who urge the no determinate answer view presuppose.
This way of describing unexpected input and how it causes belief update is inspired by predictive processing models of cognition see Hohwy ; Clark Other elements of the predictive processing framework, such as the significance of the precision of expectations and of unexpected input, could also be incorporated smoothly into a model of disagreement, though I will not attempt to fill in these kinds of details.
Cases like Holocaust can be handled in analogous ways. This highly unexpected input calls for revision, but not revision of the belief that the Holocaust occurred. This typology builds on, but goes considerably further than, Locke To see this, consider a counterexample to conciliationism put forward by Decker and Groll Intuitively, Savant was correct to hold fast in the face of such widespread and expert dissent.
But first she should lower her confidence and recheck her answer. At t 1, she should be surprised but not shocked that there is such a dispute and its existence informs her that she or her opponents have made an error though she put forward her solution after careful consideration, so did her opponents, and the problem is difficult enough that mistakes may occur. At t 2, however, a time that occurs after she has carefully checked her answer and those of her opponents hours or days after t 1 , she should return to her earlier confidence.
But at t 3 perhaps months or even years down the track , she should conciliate if she has not succeeded in convincing her opponents. She should think she has made an error or that she has lost her competence in this domain. Of course, that would entail losing confidence in the correct view, but we are fallible epistemic beings, and misleading evidence has the power to lead us astray.
It is, nevertheless, evidence. As a consequence, they might relegate someone from the status of peerhood on illegitimate grounds. She recommends we treat the credibility of the testimony and of the informant independently.
However, her worry seems to be the product not of in my view correctly relegating an informant from peerhood on the basis of her testimony, but a kind of double counting: when we take the incredibility of the report as a basis to discount the informant and then refer to the unreliability of the informant to further discount the testimony.
That is clearly illegitimate. Jones is surely right that we sometimes illegitimately relegate someone from peerhood on the basis that we find her report incredible; that is a sad fact of epistemic life and of our fallibility as agents. Of course, deep disagreements may be unexpected: encountering a partisan of a particular view for the very first time is not all that unusual a reviewer for this journal gives the example of encountering in graduate school people who believe that every logically possible world exists.
Such cases illustrate how a disagreement may belong to more than one category at once. When we first encounter such a partisan, our surprise indicates that our model of the world requires revision. Summarising a large body of evidence, and abstracting from a number of complications and subtleties, those on the political left tend to emphasise the care and fairness foundations to a greater extent than those on the right, while those on the right place more emphasis on the loyalty, authority and purity foundations.
The differences are very significantly driven by the latter three foundations: the extent to which the left puts a greater emphasis on care and fairness is relatively small, but the right place very much more emphasis on the latter three than the left indeed, those on the left may see deference to authority as a vice, rather than a virtue. It is easy to see how MFT helps explain why Republicans and Democrats diverge on some of the issues that characterise the partisan divide. For instance, differences in attitudes to illegal immigration are surely at least partially explained differences in concerns for group loyalty, as well as respect for authority.
Hallsson puts forward an alternative view that entails that partisan disagreements do not provide unexpected information about the target proposition or the disputants. He cites empirical evidence that more able partisans have more extreme beliefs, and suggests that this shows that the more able we are, the more we are susceptible to bias. This entails, he argues, that able partisans on both sides are unreliable. Disagreement should give such partisans no reason to conciliate, but they should not be confident in any case.
I think Hallsson mischaracterizes the empirical evidence and its import. The polarization he points to does not arise from a boost in our capacity to confabulate provided by sophistication: rather, it arises from the facility it provides with regard to the capacity to recognize genuine problems with claims to which we are ill-disposed, while failing to subject our own views to much scrutiny see Levy for discussion.
Hallsson also overplays the evidence: the phenomenon is genuine, but not so powerful that real expertise cannot swamp it. Where are the genuinely sophisticated climate science denialists he seems to predict? The consensus among climate scientists demonstrates that when problems are empirically tractable, disputes can be resolved despite our biases.
I thought I was complaining to my coworker but I was actually sending Marguerite a direct email about what a pain I felt she was. My boss suggested I stop at the florist on my way.
To her credit, she told me it happens and that she preferred that the next time I disagree with her, I just tell her so that we could talk about it. It was generous and helpful advice. To be fair, agreeing is usually easier than confronting someone, at least in the short run. By thinking that way, I lost out on a potentially productive working relationship.
In fact, disagreements — when managed well — have lots of positive outcomes. Here are a few. Better work outcomes. Opportunities to learn and grow. By listening and incorporating feedback, you gain experience, try new things, and evolve as a manager.
Improved relationships. My year-old daughter knows this intuitively. We fought the whole time. Higher job satisfaction. Instead of feeling as if you have to walk on eggshells, you can focus on getting your work done.
A more inclusive work environment. If you want to have diversity and inclusion in your organization, you have to be prepared to disagree. In a well-run diverse team, substantive disagreements do not need to become personal: Ideas either have merit and posits of connection or they do not. Put simply, we have to learn how to disagree more, and managers need to take responsibility for making it comfortable and OK for people to dissent, debate, and express their true opinions.
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