On behalf of controversial view agnosticism

Abstract

Controversial view agnosticism (CVA) is the thesis that we are rationally obligated to withhold judgment about a large portion of our beliefs in controversial subject areas, such as philosophy, religion, morality, and politics. Given that one's social identity is in no small part of a function of one's positive commitments in controversial areas, CVA has unsurprisingly been regarded as objectionably "spineless." That said, CVA seems like an unavoidable consequence of a prominent view in the epistemology of disagreement-conformism-according to which the rational response to discovering that someone you identify as an epistemic peer or expert about p disagrees with you vis-à-vis p is to withhold judgment. This paper proposes a novel way to maintain the core conciliatory insight without devolving into an agnosticism that is objectionably spineless. The approach offered takes as a starting point the observation that-for reasons that will be made clear -the contemporary debate has bypassed the issue of the reasonableness of maintaining, rather than giving up, representational states weaker than belief in controversial areas. The new position developed and defended here explores this overlooked space; what results is a kind of controversial view agnosticism that is compatible with the kinds of commitments that are integral to social identity. | INTRODUCTIONSuppose you believe that Marilyn Monroe was born before Queen Elizabeth II, and-as you just now find out-I believe that Queen Elizabeth II was born before Marilyn Monroe; prior to our disagreement, we each reckoned the other to be equally likely to be right on this matter-namely, we each took the other to be epistemic peers 1 on matters of 20th century celebrity birthdates. 2 A popular position in recent social epistemology insists that, in situations like the one just described, rationality requires that both parties should "move to the centre." Call here, following Lackey (2008), positions that embrace this general insight about the epistemic significance of peer disagreement conformist views and the general position embraced conformism. In a bit more detail:This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. ? These issues continue to be explored, 10 though in what follows I will be taking a different tack. I will argue that controversial view agnosticism-or at least, a version of it-is true, but that facts about expert (rather than peer) disagreement ultimately provide the most compelling kind of support for the position. I will then proceed to show how the version of controversial view agnosticism I think we should accept is not as objectionable as we would initially be let to think. In order to get the argument up and running, it is important to first look more closely at some of the assumptions lurking in the background of ...

Problems with Publishing Philosophical Claims We Don't Believe

“…Metaphilosophical convictions: These are cases where the author's disbelief towards a claim is rooted in a metaphilosophical stance that requires extremely high standards for belief which are practically impossible to meet, or one that precludes belief in any philosophical claim rather than being the result of a doubt towards the particular claim at hand. These stances are often motivated by epistemological problems such as the problem of persistent peer disagreement in philosophy (Fumerton 2010, Kornblith 2013 or the problem of unconceived objections (Mizrahi 2014), or by the idea that philosophy does not or should not involve belief but some other attitude (Goldberg 2013, Carter 2018, Barnett 2019, Fleisher 2020b. There can also be cases of PWB that result from positions in philosophy of science, when a philosophical claim relies on a scientific theory and the author does not regard any scientific theory to be true due to her instrumentalist or anti-realist views.…”

Risk-limited indulgent permissivism

“…The stance that Rowland and Simpson describe an abstemious permissivist as taking is still indulgent towards belief-holders, and quite different in this sense than the principled agnosticism of J. Adam Carter (2018), for instance, who argues that an agnostic stance of suspension is rationally required, quite uniformly, across domains of controversial views. Even with its rejection of the strict Triad Model an introduction of 'suspecting that' as an allowable (but sub-doxastic) attitude agents may take up towards propositions in these domains, what Carter terms controversial view agnosticism is still an impermissivist view, one that demands the compliance of all agents on pain of doxastic irresponsibility.…”

Philosophical disagreement versus philosophical knowledge

“…Carter (2018) argues that disagreement on central tenets rather than peripheral ones is epistemically relevant to assess the epistemic risk of disagreements.…”