Conciliatory Views of Disagreement and the Equal Weight View

Having examined the case for Steadfast Views of disagreement in the previous chapter, in this chapter our inquiry turns to their chief competitor — Conciliatory Views of disagreement.1 According to Conciliatory Views of disagreement, idealized disagreement (or better, evidence thereof) is of epistemic significance. More precisely, according to Conciliatory Views of disagreement, gaining evidence that you are party to an idealized disagreement does affect your justification for the disputed proposition. In particular, such evidence (if undefeated) makes it such that you are no longer justified in adopting your original doxastic attitude toward the disputed proposition. Rather, such evidence (if undefeated) makes it such that the doxastic attitude you are justified in adopting (regarding the disputed proposition) is closer to that of the other disagreeing party. According to Conciliatory Views of disagreement, while the evidence regarding the disagreement can itself be defeated, this evidence is not trivially defeated (it does not itself always come along with a defeater that undermines its own epistemic impact).2 So, Conciliatory Views of disagreement claim that in getting (undefeated) evidence that you are party to an idealized disagreement about p, you should typically move, at least a little, toward the other party’s view on the matter.3