Conciliation, Uniqueness and Rational Toxicity¹

Abstract

Conciliationism holds that disagreement of apparent epistemic peers often substantially undermines rational confidence in our opinions. Uniqueness principles say that there is at most one maximally rational doxastic response to any given batch of total evidence. The two views are often thought to be tightly connected. This paper distinguishes two ways of motivating conciliationism, and two ways that conciliationism may be undermined by permissive accounts of rationality (those that deny uniqueness). It shows how conciliationism can flourish under certain strongly permissive accounts of rationality. This occurs when the motivation for conciliationism does not come (as is sometimes supposed) from taking disagreement as evidence of one's own rational failings. However, divorcing the motive for conciliating from worries about rationality does not remove a feature of conciliationism that some find troubling: that conciliationism can lead to cases of "rational toxicity," in which the most rational response to one's evidence involves violating some rational ideal.

The Uniqueness Thesis

“…(Whether Intrapersonal Uniqueness would also be false, as in the case of Subjective Bayesianism, would depend on the specific contours of the view.) As Rubin () and Christensen (forthcoming) note, any view that makes rational (or justified) belief dependent upon an agent's particular practical interest, such as Fantl and McGrath (), might similarly have to deny (Interpersonal) Uniqueness…”

“…For example, Feldman (), Kelly (), Ballantyne and Coffman (), Cohen (), and Schoenfield (), among others, have argued that there are tight relationships between various versions of Uniqueness and conciliatory views about disagreement. But others (e.g., Christensen , forthcoming; Lee ; Peels and Booth ; Levinstein forthcoming; Titelbaum and Kopec ms.) have made the case that the relationship between Uniqueness and conciliatory views is much more complicated. And outside of the epistemology of disagreement, Uniqueness is proving to have implications for topics as far ranging as the epistemology of trust and friendship (Hawley ), diachronic rationality (Hedden ), and the epistemic value of deliberation (Peter ).…”

Group disagreement: a belief aggregation perspective

“…This sort of reliabilist conception of epistemic peerhood has been discussed by Christensen (2016) and Lam (2011) in the context of individual peer disagreement, and has been used by Easwaran et al (2016) to investigate how individuals should in general revise their credences upon learning the credences of other persons. Furthermore, philosophers who work within an aggregation framework often measure epistemic performance in reliabilist terms.…”

“…Furthermore, philosophers who work within an aggregation framework often measure epistemic performance in reliabilist terms. Nevertheless, we should not be taken to say that a reliabilist conception of epistemic peerhood 5 See, e.g., Christensen (2007), Levinstein (2015), and Rasmussen et al (2017). 6 See, e.g., List (2005) and Hartmann and Sprenger (2012).…”

“…2 Second, we will assume that a theory of group peer disagreement should respect the basic intuition behind the equal weight view of individual peer disagreement, according to which the parties to an individual peer disagreement should place 'equal weight' on each other's opinions. This view has been prominently defended by Christensen (2007) and Elga (2007) and remains a popular view of individual peer disagreement. That being said, neither of our two core assumptions are uncontroversial, and those who reject either or both assumptions will perhaps find our investigation fundamentally misguided.…”