The Epistemology of Group Disagreement

Fernando Broncano-Berrocal, J. Adam Carter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429663581
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildungstheorie & -praxis

This book brings together philosophers to investigate the nature and normativity of group disagreement. Debates in the epistemology of disagreement have mainly been concerned with idealized cases of peer disagreement between individuals. However, most real-life disagreements are complex and often take place within and between groups. Ascribing views, beliefs, and judgments to groups is a common phenomenon that is well researched in the literature on the ontology and epistemology of groups. The chapters in this volume seek to connect these literatures and to explore both intra- and inter- group disagreements. They apply their discussions to a range of political, religious, social, and scientific issues. The Epistemology of Group Disagreement is an important resource for students and scholars working on social and applied epistemology; disagreement; and topics at the intersection of epistemology, ethics, and politics.

1 The Epistemology of Group Disagreement
An Introduction

Fernando Broncano-Berrocal and J. Adam Carter

1.1 Group Disagreement: A Brief Overview

Disagreement is among the most thriving topics in mainstream and social epistemology.¹

The research question responsible for initially launching the epistemology of disagreement as its own subfield in the early 2000s can be put very simply: suppose you believe some proposition, p, is true. You come to find out that an individual whom you thought was equally likely as you are to be right about whether p is true, believes not-p. What should you do? Are you rationally required, given this new evidence, to revise your initial belief that p, or is it rationally permissible to simply ‘hold steadfast’ to your belief that p with the same degree of confidence that you did before you found out your believed-to-be epistemic peer disagreed with you? Call this the peer disagreement question.

How we go about answering this question has obvious practical ramifications: we disagree with people we think are our peers often; knowing what we should do, epistemically, would be valuable guidance. But the peer disagreement question is also important for epistemologists to understand, theoretically speaking, given that it has direct ramifications for how we should understand disagreement itself as a form of evidence.

Unsurprisingly, responses to the peer disagreement question have fallen into two broadly opposing categories: those who think that discovering that an epistemic peer disagrees with you rationally requires of you some substantial kind of conciliation²—perhaps even agnosticism³—and those who think that it does not.⁴ Interestingly, the past ten years or so have shown that—in the close orbit of the peer disagreement question—there are a range of related and interesting epistemological questions, questions that are perhaps just as epistemologically as well as practically significant.⁵

Just consider that the peer disagreement question is individualistically framed. It is a question about what rationality requires of an individual when they disagree with another individual about some contested proposition. Gaining an answer tells us, at most, and in short, what individuals should do in the face of epistemic adversity. But we also want to know what groups should do in the face of epistemic adversity. For example: what should a group—say, a scientific committee—do if it turns out that one of the members on the committee holds a view that runs contrary to the consensus?⁶

It would be convenient if answering questions about how individuals should respond to epistemic adversity implied answers to the interesting questions about how groups should do the same. Unfortunately, though, things are not so simple. This is because, to a first approximation, the epistemic properties of groups are not, as recent collective epistemology has suggested, always simply reducible to an aggregation of the epistemic properties of its members.⁷ If we want to understand what groups should do, rationally speaking, when there is internal disagreement among members, or when there is disagreement between a group and individuals or groups external to the group, we cannot and should not expect to find the answers we need simply by looking to the results social epistemology has given us to questions that were individualistically framed.

The topic of this volume—the epistemology of group disagreement—aims to face the complex topic of group disagreement head on; it represents the first-ever volume of papers dedicated exclusively to group disagreements and the epistemological puzzles such disagreements raise. The volume consists of 12 new essays by leading epistemologists working in the area, and it spans a range of different key themes related to group disagreement, some established themes and others entirely new. In what follows, we offer brief summaries of these 12 chapters, drawing some connections between them where appropriate.

1.2 Overview of Chapters

In general, there are two epistemically significant ways in which intragroup disagreement can be resolved, i.e., in which members of a divided group can come to agree to let a certain view stand as the group’s view: (i) they can deliberate and/or (ii) take a vote. Which is the best strategy and why? In ‘Deliberation and Group Disagreement’, we (Fernando Broncano-Berrocal and J. Adam Carter) open the volume by exploring the epistemic significance that the key difference between deliberative and voting procedures has for the resolution of intragroup disagreement: namely, the fact that only deliberation necessarily requires that group members communicate with each other and by doing so exchange their evidence. In order to make traction on this question, deliberation’s epistemic effectiveness in resolving intragroup disagreement is assessed in some detail with respect to how well, in comparison with voting, it promotes (or thwarts the attainment of) a range of different epistemic goals, including truth, evidential support, understanding, and epistemic justice.

Javier González de Prado Salas and Xavier de Donato-Rodríguez, in their contribution ‘Disagreement Within Rational Collective Agents’, are primarily concerned with the question of what a group must do to be rational as a group when members of that group hold disagreeing views. One answer that they consider and reject holds that group attitudes are rational if they result from the application of appropriate judgement aggregation methods. On the proposal they favour, group (epistemic) attitudes are rational insofar as they are formed by responding competently or responsibly to the (epistemic) reasons available to the group as a group, where this requires the exercise of reasons-responding competences attributable to the group. In developing this proposal, González de Prado and de Donato-Rodríguez defend conciliationism as having an important role to play, and offer a positive characterization of group deliberation according to which deliberation in collective agents tends to facilitate the achievement of internal agreement, not only about what attitude to adopt collectively but also about the reasons for doing so.

Whereas González de Prado and de Donato-Rodríguez helpfully show the positive implications of conciliationism about group disagreement—in that it offers an optimistic picture of collective deliberation as a rational method for intragroup disagreement resolution—Mattias Skipper and Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen highlight its shortcomings. In particular, in their chapter ‘When Conciliation Frustrates the Epistemic Priorities of Groups’, Skipper and Steglich-Petersen argue that conciliatory responses on behalf of individual group members to intragroup disagreement—even if rational qua response types to individual disagreement—can have adverse epistemic consequences at the group level. In particular, as they see it, the problem is that such conciliatory responses to an internal disagreement can frustrate a group’s epistemic priorities by changing the group’s relative degree of reliability in forming true beliefs and avoiding false ones. Finally, Skipper and Steglich-Petersen suggest a solution to this epistemic priority problem that does not imply abandoning conciliationism.

The next two papers in the volume continue follow suit in investigating the relationship between group disagreement and conciliationism, albeit in different ways. In his chapter ‘Intra-Group Disagreement and Conciliationism’, Nathan Sheff’s objective is to defend a form of conciliationism in the specific context of intra-group disagreements. Conciliationism in this context holds when an individual dissenter finds herself in disagreement with the other members of a deliberative group, the rational response for the disagreeing member is lowering confidence in their view. Sheff argues first that (i) intra-group conciliationism does not enjoy ex ante the intuitive plausibility that ordinary conciliationism, viz., individualistically framed, does, but (ii) difficulties facing the view can be overcome when we suitably appreciate, with reference to Margaret Gilbert’s account of joint commitment,⁸ the kind of normativity that constrains an individual dissenter in the predicament of an intragroup disagreement. In particular, they find themselves epistemically responsible for contradictory views: their own view, and that of the group and accordingly pulled in contrary directions. In this circumstance, Sheff argues, the rational response is at least to lower their confidence in their view.

In ‘Bucking the Trend: The Puzzle of Individual Dissent in Contexts of Collective Inquiry’, Simon Barker, like Sheff, is concerned with the predicament of an individual dissenter in her capacity as a group member. As Barker observes, there is pressure to suppose that when an individual dissents with intragroup members, the greater the number of one’s peers against one, the more significance one should afford the disagreement—viz., what he calls the principle of collective superiority. At the same time, he notes, discussions of disagreement within collective inquiry have maintained that justified collective judgements demand methods of inquiry that permit and preserve (rather than eliminate) dissent—viz., a principle that Barker labels epistemic liberalism. Taken together, these principles seem to make different and incompatible demands, what Barker calls the ‘puzzle of individual dissent’. Barker’s objective in the paper is to sharpen this puzzle by tracing out the consequences of rejecting either of the two principles jointly responsible for the dilemma, and to assess the significance of the dilemma more widely in epistemology.

The next three papers in the volume engage in different ways with the social and power dynamics of group disagreement. In ‘Gender, Race, and Group Disagreements’ Mona Simion and Martin Miragoli take as a starting point two cases of group disagreement, one involving gender discrimination, the other involving the marginalization of racial and religious minorities. Both, they argue, feature a distinctive form of epis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1 The Epistemology of Group Disagreement: An Introduction
• 2 Deliberation and Group Disagreement
• 3 Disagreement within Rational Collective Agents
• 4 When Conciliation Frustrates the Epistemic Priorities of Groups
• 5 Intra-Group Disagreement and Conciliationism
• 6 Bucking the Trend: The Puzzle of Individual Dissent in Contexts of Collective Inquiry
• 7 Gender, Race, and Group Disagreement
• 8 Disagreement and Epistemic Injustice from a Communal Perspective
• 9 Group Disagreement in Science
• 10 Disagreement in a Group: Aggregation, Respect for Evidence, and Synergy
• 11 Why Bayesian Agents Polarize
• 12 The Mirage of Individual Disagreement: Groups Are All that Stand between Humanity and Epistemic Excellence
• 13 A Plea for Complexity: The Normative Assessment of Groups’ Responses to Testimony
• Notes on Contributors
• Index