Scholarlink

<p>Much of the recent literature on disagreement focuses on cases of epistemic peers who have similar capacities and access to the exact same evidence. Many of the classic cases are accordingly highly idealized and present agents out of any ordinary real-life context. I argue that this contextless picture of agents provides a misleading model when applied to our “deep” practical (moral, political, or religious) disagreements, which are characterized by their systematicity, the absence of a shared evaluative background, and the practical importance of the issues concerned. One such application is Feldman’s argument against the possibility of reasonably agreeing to disagree over moral, political, and religious questions—at best, he suggests, both parties should suspend judgment. Focusing on Feldman’s thought experiment involving a fork in the road, I argue that his account (1) fails to recognize the different ends and values which disagreeing agents may bring to discussions, given the implicit assumption of a common goal; (2) fails to take into account the mutual intelligibility of our beliefs and actions over time, by focusing only on the immediate epistemic reasonableness of beliefs; and (3) fails to adequately account for the practical costs of suspending judgment about our most fundamental practical beliefs, which is only achieved by imposing a questionably sharp separation between epistemic and practical rationality. This critique both vindicates the possibility of reasonably agreeing to disagree, and reveals how the assumptions of epistemic peerhood and completely shared evidence prove problematic when applied to disagreements with strong evaluative and practical components.</p>

错误：搜索内容不能为空，请输入英文关键词
错误：关键词超出字数限制，请精简
高级检索

Putting Deep Disagreements in Context: a Defence of Reasonably Agreeing to Disagree

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年3月26日

查看全文
  • Tayfun Gur

摘要

Much of the recent literature on disagreement focuses on cases of epistemic peers who have similar capacities and access to the exact same evidence. Many of the classic cases are accordingly highly idealized and present agents out of any ordinary real-life context. I argue that this contextless picture of agents provides a misleading model when applied to our “deep” practical (moral, political, or religious) disagreements, which are characterized by their systematicity, the absence of a shared evaluative background, and the practical importance of the issues concerned. One such application is Feldman’s argument against the possibility of reasonably agreeing to disagree over moral, political, and religious questions—at best, he suggests, both parties should suspend judgment. Focusing on Feldman’s thought experiment involving a fork in the road, I argue that his account (1) fails to recognize the different ends and values which disagreeing agents may bring to discussions, given the implicit assumption of a common goal; (2) fails to take into account the mutual intelligibility of our beliefs and actions over time, by focusing only on the immediate epistemic reasonableness of beliefs; and (3) fails to adequately account for the practical costs of suspending judgment about our most fundamental practical beliefs, which is only achieved by imposing a questionably sharp separation between epistemic and practical rationality. This critique both vindicates the possibility of reasonably agreeing to disagree, and reveals how the assumptions of epistemic peerhood and completely shared evidence prove problematic when applied to disagreements with strong evaluative and practical components.