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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Key Concepts in Philosophy
- Sprache: Englisch
Regardless of who you are or how you live your life, you disagree with millions of people on an enormous number of topics from politics, religion and morality to sport, culture and art. Unless you are delusional, you are aware that a great many of the people who disagree with you are just as smart and thoughtful as you are - in fact, you know that often they are smarter and more informed. But believing someone to be cleverer or more knowledgeable about a particular topic usually won't change your mind. Should it? This book is devoted to exploring this quandary - what should we do when we encounter disagreement, particularly when we believe someone is more of an authority on a subject than we are? The question is of enormous importance, both in the public arena and in our personal lives. Disagreement over marriages, beliefs, friendships and more causes immense personal strife. People with political power disagree about how to spend enormous amounts of money, about what laws to pass, or about wars to fight. If only we were better able to resolve our disagreements, we would probably save millions of lives and prevent millions of others from living in poverty. The first full-length text-book on this philosophical topic, Disagreement provides students with the tools they need to understand the burgeoning academic literature and its (often conflicting) perspectives. Including case studies, sample questions and chapter summaries, this engaging and accessible book is the perfect starting point for students and anyone interested in thinking about the possibilities and problems of this fundamental philosophical debate.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
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Table of Contents
Key Concepts in Philosophy
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Stories
Introduction
Part I: Basics of Disagreement
1: Genuine vs. Illusory Disagreement
2: Easier Questions about Disagreement
3: Harder Questions about Disagreement
4: Expert Testimony and Higher-Order Evidence
5: Peers, Inferiors, and Superiors
6: Some Results
7: The Peer Rule and the Superior Rule
8: Disagreement over Facts, Values, and Religion
9: Disagreement over Beliefs vs. Actions
10: What We Should Believe vs. What We Actually Believe
11: Response to Disagreement vs. Subsequent Level of Confidence
12: What it Means to Realize Disagreement
13: The Disagreement Question Refined
14: Disagreement with One vs. Disagreement with Many
15: Some More Results
16: Study Questions and Problems
Part II: Conciliatory or Steadfast?
1: Introduction
2: Revising the Three Rules of Thumb
3: Rethinking Judgments about Peers and Superiors
4: More Revision: Confidence Level vs. Evidence Level
5: When You Have No Idea Who is in the Better Position
6: Split Experts
7: Special Case: Religious Belief
8: Some Results
9: Questions on Uniqueness, Independence, and Peerhood
Uniqueness
Independence
Conditional Peers and Superiors
Feldman's Questions
10: The Disagreement Question Revisited
11: Concluding Thoughts: Does Disagreement Require Suspending Judgment in Important Cases?
12: Study Questions and Problems
Guide to Further Reading
Index
Key Concepts in Philosophy
Copyright © Bryan Frances 2014
The right of Bryan Frances to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2014 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
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Malden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7226-7
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7227-4 (pb)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8523-6 (epub)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8522-9 (mobi)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com
In Part II, much of chapter 7 is taken from Bryan Frances's “Religious Disagreement”, forthcoming in Graham Oppy (ed.), Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Religion, Acumen Press (December 2014); and part of chapter 11 draws on his “Skepticism and Disagreement”, forthcoming in Diego Machuca and Baron Reed (eds), Skepticism: From Antiquity to the Present, Bloomsbury.
For Margaret Frances,
with whom I never disagree
Stories
Introduction
In the summer of 2011 the USA engaged militarily in Libya, leading to the overthrow of the Libyan government. Some informed people think it was an illegal war, since war by the US government has to be approved by the US Congress, which didn't happen. Other informed people disagree, claiming that the military action was not significant enough to qualify as a “war,” so it didn't need Congressional approval in order to be legal.
Some Christians believe that Jesus rose from the dead – quite literally. Other Christians think that, while salvation occurs through Jesus, all that business about rising from the dead is metaphorical or otherwise non-literal: he didn't really, biologically, come back to life after being literally dead. Yet other people – highly intelligent, sober, and reflective non-Christian theists, agnostics, and atheists, for instance – think that Jesus didn't rise from the dead either literally or non-literally.
Disagreement is everywhere and can concern just about anything. It might arise from politics, religion, ethics, sports, philosophy, history, science, entertainment, and business. Controversy is rife.
Or just think about disagreement in your own personal life. Elena thinks that she and her partner Chris should get an apartment near the area in which the two of them work instead of getting a cheaper one that involves a significant commute. Chris thinks otherwise. So, the two of them disagree. They debate the pros and cons of the matter. Elena thinks it's pretty clear that, given the details of their combined financial situation, the hassle of the commute, and other factors, she and Chris should live in the city nearby to everything they typically go to during the week. Chris understands everything she said, but s/he adds things up differently, coming to the opposite conclusion.
Maya thinks that her father had an affair with that neighbor Martha when she and her sister Danling were little kids. Maya tells Danling her reasons but to no avail: Danling is totally unconvinced. Maya is inclined to read the evidence one way, as being very strongly supportive of the idea that Dad had an affair with Martha, whereas her sister is inclined to come to the opposite conclusion, that the evidence is not so supportive. Why should Maya think that her reading of the evidence is better than her sister's for finding the truth of the matter? Why favor her own judgment over her sister's? What if she knows full well that she is no smarter than her sister?
Devin thinks third-trimester abortion is morally unacceptable in almost all cases. But he isn't culturally clueless: he is fully aware that there are loads of people who disagree. Devin's sister Irene is newly pregnant and doesn't want to have a baby now. She doesn't want to marry the father; or maybe he is no longer around. She has little money or other resources, she has little time to devote to a baby since she is still in college and has a part-time job, etc. So, the question of abortion has come up. She discusses her options with Devin. What if Irene thinks there is virtually nothing wrong with it, especially since it's an early stage of the pregnancy? What is Devin going to say to her?
Actually, there are two issues here: Devin needs to figure out how to act and what to believe. He needs to decide what he is going to say to his sister Irene. But he also needs to figure out what to believe regarding the moral permissibility of abortion. He thinks it's almost always morally unacceptable, but he knows that there are loads of people significantly smarter than himself who have thought about the matter a lot longer than he has and have not drawn that conclusion. (And of course he knows that some of the people who agree with him are smarter and better informed than he is.) At the very least, I hope that Devin knows that, because it's just plain true! What makes him think he and the people who agree with him got the issue right and Irene and the people who agree with her got it wrong? What advantage does he think his group has over her group? Or does he think his group has no advantage over her group – in which case why on earth does he stick with his view over theirs? If Irene is similarly aware of disagreement over the moral acceptability of abortion, then she is faced with the same questions on what to believe – and a bigger question on what to do.
Devin is faced with the same two questions – how to act, what to believe – if the views are reversed: Irene thinks abortion is immoral and she says she has to go ahead with the pregnancy. Devin thinks that this move will be disastrous for Irene's future and abortion is fine in her circumstances. What should he say or do about it? And then there is the prior question: how does he know his view is even right, given that there are zillions of very intelligent people who disagree with him on the matter? No matter which side he is on, he is faced with a big problem about how to behave and what to believe.
Disagreements are everywhere, in the public square and our private lives. This book is devoted to the question of what we should do when we realize that there are people who disagree with us.
As we have seen with some of the examples above, the question is of enormous importance, both in the public arena and in our personal lives. You may disagree with your parents about where to go to college, or whom to marry. You may disagree with your spouse or partner about whether to live together, whether to get married, where you should live, or how to raise your children. People with political power disagree about how to spend enormous amounts of money, or about what laws to pass, or about wars to fight. If only we were better able to resolve our disagreements, we would probably save millions of lives and prevent millions of others from living in poverty. If only.
Here are some questions that provoke plenty of disagreement:
Political
Personal
Philosophical
Professional
Scientific
Miscellaneous
This book lies on the border between theoretical and applied epistemology. Theoretical epistemology is the study of the relations among and natures of a group of closely related notions: knowledge, belief, truth, evidence, reason, certainty, rationality, wisdom, understanding, and a few others. We will not focus on those highly theoretical issues. Our center of attention will almost always be on real-life disagreements and what one is supposed to do in deliberating how to react to the discovery of disagreement. For the most part we will ignore the most theoretical issues and idealized cases of disagreement (although we will not shirk them entirely).
There are two central questions to ask about disagreement, which usually arise in the following situation. You have belief B and come to realize that some people disagree with you regarding B: they think it's false whereas you think it's true. One question is this: after the realization of disagreement, should you continue to believe B? That is an epistemological question. The other central philosophical question is this: after the realization of disagreement, how should you act or behave (e.g., should you continue to act on the assumption that B is true)? That is a question for ethics, including politics, not epistemology. This book is devoted to the first question only.
Philosophy includes the study of what to believe and how to act. So, it's not surprising that philosophers have had some things to say about the topic of disagreement. What is surprising, however, is how little philosophers have said about it, especially the epistemological question. Philosophy has been going strong for well over two thousand years, so you would think that an enormous amount of thought has gone into the two questions raised above. You would be wrong. As far as I know, this is the first textbook devoted to the epistemological question, although Oxford University Press published two collections of research essays on it in 2010 and 2013: Disagreement, edited by Ted Warfield and Richard Feldman, and The Epistemology of Disagreement: New Essays, edited by Jennifer Lackey and David Christensen (I have an essay in the latter work). Unfortunately, those articles tend to ignore the cases of disagreement that pop up in real life – the cases that we actually worry about and even fight over, occasionally to the death.
Since the topic of disagreement is so new, it is hard even to figure out what questions we should be thinking about. The two central ones mentioned above are a good start, but they are ambiguous and require refinement. For what it's worth, I have written many essays on the topic over the last eight years, and every time I write a new one I come to think that my previous ideas were flawed in significant ways; and I have no reason to think the trend is going to stop any time soon. In this book I refrain from offering detailed answers to the most pressing questions regarding the epistemology of disagreement and stick to going over what I take to be ideas that will be most helpful in addressing those questions. This means that I end up not discussing some of the popular views in the current literature, as I think most of them are premature (e.g., the “Equal Weight View”). I include so many examples of disagreement in this book because at this early stage of investigation we need a trove of data in order to explore the topic fruitfully.
In Part I of this book I go over the basics of disagreement. The goal there is to give the reader a sense of what the main issues and questions might be regarding the epistemology of disagreement. Part I ends with a generous selection of “homework” questions for the ambitious reader. In Part II I consider the question of under what conditions one is reasonable – in several senses of that term – in retaining one's beliefs in the face of disagreement; it also includes homework questions. As I said above, since this topic is so new and in so much flux, I decided to adopt the atypical organizational strategy of merely introducing many interesting test cases, arguments, and conclusions: I don't defend the arguments or conclusions and I barely even address the views found in the recent philosophical literature. Instead, I supply the reader with the background necessary to evaluate the arguments and views to be found in the literature. For readers who are old hands on the topic, sections 11, 13, and 14 of Part I will be interesting, as will all of Part II.
Part I
Basics of Disagreement
The most important thing you need to do in this first part of the book is acquire a deep understanding of what may be the most important questions to ask about disagreement. With that understanding secured, plus a raft of test cases of disagreement to think about, in Part II you will be in a good position to look closely at some answers.
1
Genuine vs. Illusory Disagreement
Before one is faced with the question of how to react to a disagreement one needs to have discovered the disagreement. Usually, there is no difficulty: if you think belief B is true and I don't – I either think B is false or I have withheld judgment on B – then we disagree. However, often what looks like a disagreement is actually illusory: there is no genuine disagreement. Surprisingly, a great many apparent disagreements in real life are merely apparent. Consider the following:
If Bo says “Abortion is wrong” and Po says “Abortion isn't wrong,” they might not be disagreeing at all. It all depends on the details of the case. Bo might mean to say that abortion is morally wrong while Po is saying that it isn't legally wrong (both of them talking about the same country and time period). They may well agree that abortion is legally permissible and morally impermissible; so, no disagreement exists even though their language, the sentences they used, made it look like they disagree. Alternatively, they might agree that they are talking about morality as opposed to the law, but they mean different things by “abortion,” with one of them including nothing but third-trimester abortion while the other includes abortions at any time.
In that story the two people, Bo and Po, were using one word (“wrong,” or “abortion”) with different meanings. Here is a slightly different kind of illusory disagreement, one in which the two people are using a word with incomplete meanings.
I say to you “Led Zeppelin was very influential” and you say “No they weren't.” Now, we may be disagreeing with each other, but we may not. Perhaps I was really thinking something like “Led Zeppelin was very influential in pop music compared to many other rock groups,” which is completely true, while you were taking a much longer, more historical perspective, according to which only Elvis and the Beatles, among recent popular music artists, count as anywhere near “very influential.” You might have been thinking “very influential” means competing with Chopin, Beethoven, Louis Armstrong, and the Beatles. I may completely agree that Led Zeppelin is not “very influential” compared to them!
In this case we weren't really disagreeing at all, even though our language suggested that we were. Another case:
We are arguing whether basketball great Michael Jordan is tall. I say he is and you say he isn't. At first, it looks like we disagree. But then we realize that I mean that he is tall for an adult male while you mean he isn't tall for a professional basketball player. Naturally, when we discover these different meanings, we may very well admit that we don't disagree at all, since we agree that he is tall for an adult male but he isn't tall for a basketball player. Until you know what the “for” business is, you can hardly evaluate the sentence “Michael Jordan is tall”: you have to answer the question “Tall for whom?”
In this case there is no difference in the meanings of our words – not even regarding the word “tall.” Instead, we have different comparison classes in mind: the class of adult males versus the class of professional basketball players. However, the next story shows that, even if we agree that we are talking about adult males (so we agree on the comparison class), we could still be talking past each other and hence not really disagreeing when debating whether he was tall for an adult male.
Your standard for being tall for a certain group (e.g., the group of adult males) is something like “Taller than around 95 percent of people in the group,” while my standard might be something like “Taller than around 75 percent of people in the group.” Both standards are pretty reasonable (e.g., you can't consult a dictionary to see whose standard is best). In this dispute we are not talking about different comparison classes – the class of basketball players versus the class of adult males. We agree on the “tall for” bit. But we are still disagreeing about the standard for being tall. If we somehow managed to realize that we had been using the different percentage standards, then we would probably admit that we really weren't disagreeing about whether Jordan was tall. Instead, we would probably say that we had been disagreeing about what the word “tall” should mean.
That's a common phenomenon: two people seem to disagree about topic X only to discover, upon further discussion, that they are really disagreeing about what their words mean or should mean, the words they use to talk about X. A final case:
Ugh, Mug, and Bug are debating whether Julia Roberts is a great actress. Ugh insists she is, saying that the fact that Roberts won a Best Actress Oscar award is all you need to know. Mug says he doesn't know what to think on this issue because he doesn't know what experts in acting think about her work; Mug is unimpressed by the fact that she won an Oscar award since he thinks such awards have little to do with acting talent. Bug is with Ugh, but for a different reason: he says the mere fact that her movies have made so much money is all the proof you need that she's a great actress.
Are Ugh and Bug agreeing with each other when they both affirm “Julia Roberts is a great actress”? Maybe not. When Ugh says someone is a great actress, perhaps all he has in mind is this: she has won the acclaim of her peers and other recognized judges of acting ability. That's certainly a reasonable way to fill out the meaning of “So-and-so is a great actress.” But Bug might be filling out “So-and-so is a great actress” with this: So-and-so has successfully entertained a great many people. Ugh and Bug end up saying the same words, “Yes, she is a great actress,” but they are really saying different things, at least at one level of meaning. It's not hard to imagine a situation in which Ugh knows nothing of the monetary success of Roberts's movies and also thinks that monetary success has nothing to do with acting greatness. In addition, perhaps Bug would say that winning awards is utterly irrelevant to acting greatness: the purpose of acting is to entertain, and entertainment success in movies is measured in revenue. Finally, Mug thinks that acting greatness is determined by the opinions of the people who study acting the most, perhaps the instructors at places such as the Juilliard School. The three of them are talking past one another.
We can even conceive of a fourth participant in the discussion, Jug, who conceives acting greatness to be determined by all the factors Ugh, Mug, and Bug focused on. Now we have four people spending an hour or so discussing a “single” question, but in reality there are multiple questions flying around; it may well be the case that each person is entirely correct in his or her conclusions, but the four of them never discover this fact.
Notice that discovering that there is no real disagreement might take considerable time; it's not as though the discovery will always be revealed in a minute or so. In the abortion case, Po and Bo might argue for quite a while, talking past each other for hours, before they figure out that they are using “wrong” in two ways: legal and moral. I have witnessed this happen on multiple occasions in my role as a teacher. The same holds for you and me with our fictional debate over the influence of Led Zeppelin, or the case with Mug, Bug, Ugh, and Jug.
In fact, in many real-life cases it's worse than that: Bo and Po may have started their discussion with no real inkling of the moral/legal distinction. But once they discuss things in a fruitful manner, they may, if they are lucky and persistent, finally discover that what Bo “really meant all along” is that abortion is morally wrong and what Po “really meant all along” is that abortion is legally allowed. But it might be even worse still: at the start of their discussion they might not have had any real solid view at all. When they used “wrong” they didn't mean morally wrong, legally wrong, or anything else that specific. They were just plain confused, as they hadn't really carefully considered the moral/legal distinction. And when people are that confused – which I think happens a lot: the Julia Roberts story is another real-life case – it can be extremely hard to discover whether there is any genuine disagreement.
Note, however, that it would be asking too much to demand perfect precision and understanding in order for there to be genuine disagreement. Suppose Sam and Pam disagree over whether third-trimester abortion is morally permissible in cases in which the woman's life is not in danger. There's no confusion over kinds of abortion: they agree that the method of abortion can be anything that is currently used. Nor is there disagreement about what the third trimester is or any confusion over legal versus moral permissibility. So far, it looks like a case of genuine disagreement. If a third party then pipes up and says, “But it's not a case of genuine disagreement unless they can agree on a strict definition of ‘moral’,” we would not be impressed with her objection. After all, who can define just about any word? Suppose you and I disagree about whether our cat is in the den. This can be a case of genuine disagreement despite the fact that neither of us can define “cat” or has perfect understanding of what a cat is. Similarly, we can disagree over the morality of third-trimester abortion even though we don't have a perfect knowledge of what morality is.
Here is another case, one that will look like the ones just discussed but really isn't:
Lee, Bee, and Gee are at a bar watching a baseball game and Lee asks, “Okay, who was the greatest baseball player of all time?” Gee replies with “Babe Ruth!,” Bee replies with “Ty Cobb!,” and Lee comes back with “Cy Young!” (Ruth and Cobb were hitters; Young was a pitcher.) And the argument is off and running, for hours on end – until the alcohol runs out, the money runs out, or the bar closes.
At first, this looks like a case in which there is no truth of the matter. One might think that “greatest baseball player” is too vague or ambiguous for there to be one true answer to “Who was the greatest?” After all, one person might value home runs very highly, in which case she will probably rank Ruth over Cobb (Ruth had 714 lifetime home runs while Cobb had 117). Another person might think that, since getting hits is the key, Cobb wins over Ruth (Cobb had a lifetime batting average of .366 while Ruth's was .342; Cobb had 4,189 hits while Ruth had 2,873). Yet another insists that pitching is the real key to the game, and so he picks Young over the others. Each of these “value systems” is pretty reasonable, and none is clearly the superior of the others. It's easy to convince yourself that there is no right answer here, because it all depends on what you mean by “greatest.”
But this view – that there is no truth of the matter – does not hold in this specific case. It's true that there are lots of different intelligent and roughly equally good ways to weigh baseball greatness – no doubt about it. To that extent, the view of the previous paragraph contains some important truth! So I'm not saying that the view is worthless or lacks insight. However, the interesting thing about this particular case is this: no matter what value system you adopt in order to rank baseball greatness, as long as it's not a ridiculous value system Ruth is going to come out on top. The primary reason is that he is the only player in history to be excellent at both hitting and pitching – and he was fantastic at both of them. No one else comes remotely close.1 In the story above, Gee really did have the right answer. (If they had been debating the question of who was the greatest baseball hitter, instead of player, then everything changes.) The lesson is this: even if the disagreement concerns some vague, ambiguous matter that is open to several reasonable yet differing interpretations, there can be genuine disagreement and an absolutely true answer. This shows how tricky things can get when attempting to discover genuine disagreement.
Note
1 Provided we ignore Josh Gibson and Oscar Charleston, neither of whom played in the major leagues as a result of segregation. But even they didn't pitch, so Ruth still wins.
2
Easier Questions about Disagreement
