Jay Carlson In Defense of Staying the Course Philosophy of Special Science--Dr.

Cameron Buckner December 18, 2012

Staying the Course

In Defense of Staying the Course: Epistemology of Disagreement Amongst Philosophers Abstract: Contemporary epistemologists have concerned themselves with the epistemic weight we ought to give to the phenomena of peer disagreement. One party suggests that the rational response to disagreement with an epistemic peer is to revise ones doxastic statesthat we should either split the difference with our epistemic peers or suspend judgment on the matter altogether. The other partyknown as the stay the course approachsuggests that one is permitted to maintain holding ones antecedent beliefs even in the face of disagreement with epistemic peers. In this paper, I will consider how the psychology of expertise affects the way we approach disagreement among philosophers. This will contribute to an examination of the respective ecological rationality of these strategies within the domain of philosophy. Finally, I hope to defend the claim that the STC-strategy is more ecologically rational in the domain of philosophy.

A recent topic of much discussion in epistemology is what sort of epistemic weight ought to be given to the phenomena of peer disagreement. Roughly speaking there are two major strategies for an epistemic agent in a situation of peer disagreement. The first option is that one should revise ones beliefs in order to accommodate the beliefs of ones epistemic peer. There are two distinct species of this strategy. The first is where one attempts to establish a compromise position between the opposing views, as it were, to split the difference between them. The second species of this position posits that in a situation of peer disagreement one ought simply to be agnostic on the matter, that is, one should suspend ones beliefs (Kornblith 2009, 52). Both of these strategies suggest revision of beliefwhether toward compromise or

Staying the Course agnosticism; thus I will refer to these strategies collectively as the R-strategy.1 The second option claims that one can maintain ones antecedent beliefs in the face of peer disagreement. This option is known as the Stay the Course approach (hereafter STCstrategy). While these discussions could be about disagreements in any area of life, I will focus upon disagreement amongst philosophers. I want to argue that the STC-strategy is still permissible even in cases where a philosopher has reason to believe that her fellow philosopher interlocutor is in a symmetrical relationship to the truth. To approach the question of which strategy the philosopher should adopt in a peer disagreement situation, we have to examine several preliminary issues. First, what sort of conditions constitutes a peer disagreement situation? To what extent are philosophers experts in their domain of inquiry, and does that status alter their responsibilities in these peer disagreement situations? Are they exempt from the sorts of biases that plague the judgments of the average non-philosopher? Defining the philosophers epistemic situation in terms of their expertise allows us to evaluate the ecological rationality of the R and STC strategies. It might be the case that the environment in which the philosophers conduct their inquiry makes it rational for them to prefer one of these strategies to the other. What is the initial impetus for these strategies of dealing with disagreement? The R-strategy gets its intuitive force from the fact that we are fallible creatures who frequently have false beliefs. It also seems plausible that our interlocutors are usually more or less on an epistemic par with us as it relates to believing the truth. Other things being equal, we usually do not have reason to believe that we have some privileged

In previous drafts of this paper, this option was known as the STD-strategy. 3

Staying the Course access to truth that other equally bright and reflective people do not. As a result of these prima facie considerations, it would seem epistemically arrogant for person A who believes p to think that some person B who is As epistemic peer but believes ~p is wrong from the outset. A more plausible response in such a situation is that we should take a humbler attitude toward our antecedent doxastic states and be open to the possibility of revising them. In the other direction, however, the impetus behind the STC-strategy is that while it might be true that some instances of disagreement should lead one to reconsider ones beliefs, it is not nearly as plausible that disagreement should always warrant reconsidering ones beliefs. After all, we have justifications for many of our antecedent beliefs, and it hardly seems plausible that disagreement by itself would undermine any justification we might have for a belief. Bluntly stated, to simply surrender ones antecedent beliefs at the first sign of dissent seems like an epistemic form of cowardice (Elgin 2009, 57). An important variable in this discussion is the notion of epistemic peerhood, roughly that two agents are on a level epistemic ground regarding the truth of some proposition. Thomas Kelly describes the conditions for epistemic peerhood thusly: [T]wo individuals are epistemic peers with respect to some question if and only if they satisfy the following two conditions: (i) they are equals with respect to their familiarity with the evidence and arguments which bear on the question, and (ii) they are equals with respect to general epistemic virtues such as intelligence, thoughtfulness, and freedom from bias. (Kelly 2005, 1745)

Staying the Course Neither has privileged access or ability that would make them more likely to possess the truth than their peer. Though few real-world agents will be in an exactly equal relationship to the truth with some other agents that these conditions demand, these conditions nevertheless serve as an epistemic ideal that agents can approximate seemingly without much lost. STC advocates will note that there are some fairly uncontroversial conditions where maintaining ones antecedent beliefs in the face of disagreement is surely permissible. If one has reason to believe that ones interlocutor has made a mistake or is simply unreliable on the topic being discussed, then it seems obvious that one has justification in maintaining ones antecedent beliefs and thus reason to discount the epistemic weight of the other persons disagreement. It might even be the case that in such a situation one has an obligation not to revise ones beliefs. It seems plausible to think that even advocates of R-strategy would accept the justifiability of maintaining ones belief in these situations because the epistemic peer condition has failed to obtain. But R advocates would respond in kind that it is surely false that one can disregard another persons opinion simply because they disagree. In their introduction to their volume Disagreement, Richard Feldman and Ted Warfield deny that the mere fact of person Bs disagreement with A itself counts as evidence that B is unreliable on the given topic. Such a position seems indicative of the overconfidence that STC advocates would do well to resist (Feldman and Warfield 2009, 5). One might find it curious that these epistemic strategies of what one should do in a disagreement make no reference to the arguments or evidence that underlie either side. The neglect in this discussion of evidence and arguments as relevant for what one should

Staying the Course do in a situation of disagreement leads some to object that these strategies are focusing on the wrong phenomena for the question of how to respond rationally to disagreement. The proper focus, so this objection goes, in a disagreement is not a matter of who disagrees with whom, nor of tallying how many people are on each side of the debate, but rather what evidence can be marshaled for each position. Thomas Kelly thus argues that how opinions are distributed across the philosophical discipline on a given issue is effectively a sociological observation that does not provide any philosophically relevant evidence about what one should do in situations of disagreement: what one should do in a case of disagreement lies completely on the level of the evidence and arguments for each side (Kelly 2005, 182). If one has reason to doubt that ones opponents argument or evidence is somehow deficient, then it is rational to stand ones ground and maintain ones belief; conversely if one finds the other sides arguments and evidence compelling, then it would be rational to revise ones beliefs in one aspect or another. The disagreement itself is therefore either irrelevant or unnecessary for what one should do. This perspective warrants two responses. First, the assumption that these strategies are starting from is that the evidence in a given situation is symmetric, meaning that the evidence is equally balanced on both sides. There are always possibilities that one could break this symmetry by noticing a hidden inconsistency that ones opponent has not recognized, by developing an argument that they must respond to, etc. A second possible response to this objection might be that these strategies are epistemic heuristics that allow us to make quick but accurate assessments of what one ought to believe in a given situation in the same way that Gigerenzer and Todds fast and frugal heuristics allow us to make quick but accurate decisions in certain environments without requiring

Staying the Course unreasonable amounts of calculations (Todd and Gigerenzer 2000, 731). The rationale behind the fast and frugal heuristics is that calculating what is optimally rational to do in a situation solely on the basis of logic and probability theory is very costlyif possible at alland these heuristics can be approximate the satisfactory decision within that particular environment at a fraction of cost of standard rational calculations. In the same way, these epistemic heuristics could be warranted by the difficulty and cost of calculating what is rational to believe in a given situation and by their ability to approximate a satisfactory doxastic state without the onerous calculation. I hedge this claim with could because, to my knowledge, evaluation of whether these epistemic heuristics regarding disagreement can produce a satisficing doxastic state is an open empirical question that is awaiting a test. An additional feature of disagreement among philosophers is that many of them have some prima facie case to being experts on philosophical matters. At first blush, we might surmise that two philosophers, being well versed in a particular philosophical vocabulary after continuous study and reflection of the relevant literature, have each developed a set of relatively stable judgments on some philosophical topic. But is this expertise claim warranted? While I have sketched how philosophers might have a prima facie case to expertise, several more substantial accounts of expertise are extant. Weinberg et al. (2010) note three possible models whereby philosophers might be appropriately called experts. The impressionistic account of a philosophers expertise I have given above will need to be replaced with a more exact account of how philosophers are experts, if they even are at all. The overarching goal for Weinberg et al. is to respond to claims like the one given above that since philosophers are well-versed experts in their

Staying the Course philosophical trade, they are able to make judgments about philosophical matterse.g. usually focused on thought experiments about casesthat have more epistemic heft than ordinary folk would be able to (Weinberg et al. 2010, 331). The first possible model is that philosophers might have superior conceptual schemata relative to everyday folk theories. On this model philosophers have a special sensitivity to the structure of their domain of philosophical inquiry such that they are able to pick out the features relevant for their inquiry to which the ordinary, conceptually unladen folk would not be sensitive (Weinberg et al. 2010, 337). Another model is that being well-versed in a given domain makes one more likely to make better domain-related judgments. The idea for philosophers is that their grasp of philosophical theorizing makes their judgments on philosophical matters more reliable (Weinberg et al. 2010, 344). The final model is that philosophers might be experts in the sense of knowing how to effectively and economically utilize philosophical techniques and procedurese.g. intuitions and thought experimentsthe way a chess master can utilize the arrangement of pieces to simulate the variety of moves (Weinberg et al. 2010, 347). Weinberg et al. deny that philosophers can be categorized as experts on any of these models. On the possibility of philosophers having superior conceptual schemata, there is no evidence that philosophers are immune to framing effects that could skew the philosophers judgments. Indeed, philosophers utilize a framing effect whenever they try to make subsequent thoughts consistent with an initial judgment or intuition (Weinberg et al. 2010, 340). On philosophers having a superior theory that renders their judgments superior, Weinberg et al. give two objections. First, there is no plausible candidate for a full-bodied philosophical theory that philosophers can point to as the theory in which

Staying the Course they can claim to have achieved expertise. Second, even if they were to produce one, it would still be an open empirical question whether that theory would make the philosophers judgments more resistant to the biases that affect folk intuitions (Weinberg et al. 2010, 346). The final possibility considered is that philosophers might possess superior procedural knowledge and ability to extract information from what is given in thought experiments. Here again, there is no candidate for a procedural decision-aiding tool that the philosopher is learning to use, in the way, for example, that logicians learn how to use the rules of formal logic. And even if there were such a tool, it is an empirical question that it would give the philosopher a systematic edge in knowing how to pick out the right verdict in a given thought experiment. One might question whether the expertise of philosophers matters much at all to the issue of the epistemology of disagreement among philosophers. The thought here might be that once we have already stipulated that the disputants approximate some level playing field standard of epistemic peerhood, further stipulation that they are experts does not alter the case in any significant ways. If Weinberg et al. are correct, however, then little evidence has been given to think that philosophers are not subject to the kind of framing effects that plague non-philosophers in the philosophical inquiry. The philosophers claim to expertise in their field, therefore, is at best unfounded. This rather skeptical conclusion regarding philosophers expertise could be relevant to the question of disagreement if it elicited the following syllogism: if a philosopher is aware that her judgments and those of her opponent might be subject to some framing effect or bias that is distorting their respective views, she might take the presence of a disagreeing epistemic peer as evidence that someones judgment is being

Staying the Course distorted on the topic being discussedwhether it is hers, her opponents, or both of them. Why think such an inference is valid? The implicit premise underlying this inference might be that disagreement between philosophers is indicative of a mistake on someones part. If it is valid to conclude that disagreement is a reason to think that a mistake has been made, then one of the approaches to philosophical disagreement mentioned above seems particularly tempting: the agnostic form of R-strategy. If one has reason to believe there is an error somewhere in ones discussion with someone else, it seems plausible that then one ought to suspend ones belief to make sure the error does not lie with ones own beliefs. Another possibility, however, besides this inference from skepticism of philosophers expertise to the adoption of agnosticism, is that philosophers are experts in a field that is not likely to produce agreement. James Shanteau describes two classes of experts, one where experts display an ability to consistently perform better than a novice in the same task, while another kind of expert cannot consistently perform better than a novice at the same task (Shanteau 1992, 257). Philosophers might fit better in this latter class, not necessarily because they are less intelligent or careful in their inquiry than the other class of inquirers, but that the environment of the philosophical domain is not as amenable to producing, among other things, substantial instances of agreement. If this is the case, philosophical disagreement might be an expected feature of the environment in which philosophers conduct their inquiry, such that it would not be as appropriate to adopt a form of the R-strategy. To examine which of these scenarios is more plausible, we have to inquire about the ecological rationality of inquiry into the philosophical domain.

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Staying the Course In examining the ecological rationality of various philosophical strategies we are asking questions about the environment of the philosophical domain. We want to examine how the philosophers capacities are suited to exploiting the structure of the information that is found in the domain of philosophy. Some might question whether ecological rationality is the appropriate method to measure strategies within the domain of philosophical inquiry. The immediate task of the proponents of ecological rationality from Herbert Simon to Peter Todd and Gerd Gigerenzer is to develop an account of rationality that accommodates the various computational limitations that constrain a subjects ability to make a decision in real world scenarios like emergency rooms and marketplaces. These limitations seem less pertinent in the more atemporal domain of philosophizing: the philosopher qua philosopher is not pressed by time constraints that necessarily limit her ability to arrive at the optimum conclusion. It bears noting, however, that ecological rationality is not just about the cognitive constraints subject is under, but also about how the subject makes use of the information of their environment to inform their choice (Todd and Gigerenzer 2000, 730). In the present context, the issue is what decision the philosopher should make given the information she has about her environment. The most immediate of which is that someone with roughly equal likelihood of being right on an issue nevertheless disagrees with her. What sort of environmental features are relevant for the acquisition of expertise? Kahneman and Klein note that what distinguishes skilled intuition from biased judgments is that the environment provides access to regular statistical cues about the features of said environment (Kahneman and Klein 2009, 520). A task-environment can have the property of high validity provided that they exhibit stable correlations of cues and

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Staying the Course outcomes (Kahneman and Klein 2009, 524). In a similar vein, Shanteau notes that ability for experts within a given domain to achieve a consensus is also a function of the stability and structure of their domains target: as a target within a domain displays predictable, repeatable feedback, the inquirers into that target are more likely to develop the ability to make accurate judgments about that target (Shanteau 1992, 258). Expertise also usually requires proficiency in the use of external decision aids. All of these features of the environment characterize how robust the environmental feedback the inquirer receives is, indicating its usefulness for making predictions about new data. These environmental signals tell the inquirer when their judgments are right or wrong, thus providing a useful corrective or check on the subjects theorizing or decision-making (Weinberg et al. 2010, 349). What then are some relevant features about the environment of philosophical inquiry? The first note about the philosophers environment is that it is largely an intersubjective network of ideas and thoughts. The philosophers environment would thus include the judgments and ideas of all fellow philosophers, past and present. Given the vast, unwieldy expanse of such an environment taken so exhaustively, for the present purposes we can narrow the field to just contemporary academic philosophers. Second, what target are philosophical inquirers aiming to capture? The question of what philosophical inquiry targets, however, is itself a massively controversial metaphilosophical topic; some might say that philosophy aims to capture the analysis of our concepts, while others think that philosophers are aiming to characterize natural kinds of one stripe or another as found in the world around us, and many more besides. Perhaps the safest general characterization about what philosophical inquiry targets is

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Staying the Course that there are numerous kinds of phenomena that different philosophical inquiries want to capture, but there probably is no single unifying thing they all striving to capture. A third feature about this environment is how the collective opinions among these philosophers are distributed, whether they converge at points of consensus and whether the history of this environment shows a tendency toward such convergences. Here again, the truest answer about the domain seems to be that philosophy does not currently have many substantial points of consensus, nor does its history lead one to think that consensus is forthcoming. It seems that a common theme about the philosophical environment is widespread disagreement on almost every level. Hilary Kornblith contrasts this persistent disagreement in the domain of philosophy with the more formalized disciplines of logic, mathematics, and decision theory. In contrast to philosophy, Kornblith explains that these latter domains have a track record of eventually producing such stable convergences of opinions that it seems warranted to claim that they are probably true; he cites the Newcomb Problem as a specific example of a problem in decision theory where a stable consensus emerged after an initial stage of disagreement (Kornblith 2010, 40). Kornblith would probably also list the empirical sciences as further examples of domains in which practitioners historically have converged toward consensus. If one is in such a domain that has a track record of producing such stable consensuses, then one has reason to think that that these consensuses are probably true. Kornblith draws an epistemic conclusion about disagreement within these domains from their tendency to produce consensus: in these domains one cannot rationally maintain a belief that is in disagreement with a given consensus (Kornblith 2010, 43). If one finds oneself in disagreement with the majority in

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Staying the Course this kind of domain, Kornblith claims, one ought to revise ones beliefs to accommodate the consensus.2 The strategy Kornblith is suggesting is a form of R-strategy, though not one that fits cleanly with the R-strategies as I have presented them abovein the cases Kornblith is discussing one is neither adopting an agnostic stance nor splitting the difference with ones opponents but outright conceding the debate to ones opponent. The R-strategy Kornblith recommends is ecologically rational in consensus-conducive domains because in these domains one has reason to believe, ceterus paribus, that an established consensus has a good probability of being true. Thus it seems that it would be to ones advantage to revise ones belief toward a belief that had a good probability of being true. What epistemic conclusion does Kornblith draw about disagreement in philosophy, since it does not have this tendency toward producing consensus in the way that the empirical sciences, math, and formal logic do? He concludes that the rational strategy in a non-consensus-forming domain like philosophy is to suspend ones belief (Kornblith 2010, 46). Using the terminology of this paper, we can take Kornblith to be claiming that the agnostic R-strategy is the ecologically rational in domains where one cannot reasonably expect convergence of opinion. His reason for this conclusion seems to be that because philosophy has no history of producing stable consensus, we are not likely to receive strong signals as to when our judgments are on track or not (Kornblith Kornbliths position seems to have the odd feature that anomalists, i.e. those who maintain that a given consensus paradigm is inadequate, are doing so on pain of irrationality. I think he can avoid this problem in the following way. Kornblith qualifies his claim about consensus in a footnote that one can maintain ones position in the face of a consensus if one has discovered an argument that the consensus has not yet considered (Kornblith 2010, 43n). Kornbliths thesis would also presumably not hold if one had reason to believe that one was in the early or middle stages of a paradigm before a consensus had emerged.
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Staying the Course 2010, 45). In the absence of getting any robust feedback from ones environment, Kornblith would claim we cannot adequately assess whether ones judgments are accurate or not, and so it is best to adopt agnosticism. How should one respond to this? Several things could be noted about Kornbliths advocacy for agnosticism in moments of peer disagreement. One might respond that his position entails a rather sweeping form of skepticism, where one should suspend ones judgment on many matters. It might well be incoherent because even Kornblith is willing to admit that this position renders his own philosophical beliefs unjustified (Kornblith 2010, 44). But in the present context we are concerned with the matter of ecological rationality, so the question is whether the agnostic R-strategy allows the subject to exploit the structure of the environment in which she is. But the presumption of adopting the agnostic R-strategy is that one is taking the safe bet by refraining from making a choice in an environment where cues are not robust enough to generate much confidence. But that safety is not guaranteed: to remain agnostic on a central question of ones inquiry or on any controversial question is precisely to have ones investigation stall out. Furthermore, it might be the case that responding to any cues even ones that are intermittent could advance ones inquiry more than simply refraining from believing. On these grounds I think one is justified in adopting an STC-strategy. How then do I avoid the problem of dogmatism that made the STC-strategy unpalatable in the beginning? I think one starting point lies in an ambiguity at the end of Kornbliths article. Previously he had stated that in a peer disagreement situation, one should adopt agnosticism, but at one point he describes his position as one of epistemic modesty (Kornblith 2010, 52). This suggests less about a strategy of revising the

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Staying the Course content of ones beliefs as revising the confidence with which one holds those beliefs. I think these are separable kinds of strategies. In fact, I think the revision of the confidence of ones beliefs could be wedded to a straightforward STC-strategy: one can stick to ones antecedent belief, but downgrade ones confidence in it. It is worth reflecting on whether Kornbliths gloss on scientific domains of inquiry as consensus-conducive finds support in the strategies that scientists go about disagreements in their domain. One reason disciplines like the sciences are taken to be consensus conducive is because participants in these domains make predictions about empirical phenomena. Proponents of theory A predict that some phenomena will occur under some conditions, while proponents of theory B predict that will occur under those same conditions. These theories are then put to the test, and the theory whose prediction is repeatedly demonstrated under the stipulated experimental conditions is taken to be the theory that one should be assented to. To give an historical example, when Einstein and Eddington made predictions based on their models of relativity that were repeatedly demonstrated in empirical tests, an opponent of relativity theory presumably would have been obligated to revise their opinion. But this simple story glosses over many non-trivial aspects of scientific practice where disagreement manifests itself. Disagreement is not only about what empirical phenomena will arise in some set of conditions. For example, in the debate over whether non-verbal animals display understanding the unobserved states of conspecifics, the disagreement is not only over what empirical data will arise, but also what empirical data counts as evidence for or against this claim. What sorts of tasks do animals have to

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Staying the Course perform to demonstrate that they have this capability? Even the semantics of such a claim are under dispute (Penn and Povinelli 2007, 731). Perhaps the characterization of philosophy as a nonconsensus conducive domain is also too sweeping. While one might grant that philosophers disagreements often seem interminable, nevertheless there are some examples in recent philosophical history that could be plausible candidates of genuine progress in philosophy. For instance, Edmund Gettiers thought experiments seemed to generate a broad consensus among the vast majority of philosophers that justified true belief was not sufficient for knowledge. Kornblith dismisses this sort of example as an insignificant exception to the rule (Kornblith 2010, 45). Here he seems to be on more solid ground, since even if we grant that there is general assent about the correct answer of Gettier problems and their theoretical significance, this is a relatively narrow place of consensus. In this final section, I will examine a formalized approach to adjudicating between R and STC-strategies to measure their relative reliability. Barry Lam examines two ways of measuring the reliability of these approaches. The first is calibration of the subjective credence in ones beliefs to the actual probability that the content of ones beliefs are true. One is considered well calibrated when ones degree of confidence in some belief matches with the objective probability that that belief is true. Even if two epistemic agents disagree, they can still be equally well calibrated; an example of this would be if one agent was overconfident in the truth of A while the other was underconfident in the truth of A, but each deviation is the same. The second method of measurement, known as Brier scoring, measures the distance of a subjects beliefs about p from the truth-value

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Staying the Course of p by taking the squared distance from the truth of the proposition. (Lam forthcoming, 4). Lams argument for the superiority of R-strategy is as follows. Suppose that two agents, A and B, disagree over some issue , but they are equally well-calibrated so that their distances from the truth of is equal. A and B thus satisfy the epistemic peerhood condition. How reliable would a hypothetical agent C be, whose constant strategy in every situation is to split the difference between A and B? On the calibration test, the Rstrategy C showed improved calibration in about 15% of the simulations, leading Lam to conclude that STC-strategy of maintaining ones belief fares better than the R-strategy of splitting the difference (Lam forthcoming, 14). In the case of Brier scoring, Lam imagines that A and B disagree on two propositions P and Q. A and B are epistemic peers because As beliefs are distances and from the truth about propositions P and Q respectively, while Bs beliefs are and from the truth about propositions Q and P, respectively. In this case, a hypothetical agent C that splits the difference between A and B necessarily has a lower Brier score, which means that Cs position is closer to the truth of the matter. Thus, on a Brier score, splitting the difference between two positions results in proximity to truth (Lam forthcoming, 17). Lams conclusion seems to resemble the conclusion of the Monty Hall problem, that changing ones choice always increases the odds of getting the prize over sticking with ones original choice. Lams results purport to show that choosing the R-strategy of splitting the difference performs at least as well as the STC-strategy and sometimes better. On the calibration test, splitting the difference between epistemic peers preserved the reliability and proximity to truth; on the Brier test, however the R-strategy was able

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Staying the Course but to actually improve the chance of approximating the truth on a matter over users of the STC-strategy (Lam forthcoming, 17). In another paper Lam notes that the STC-model is rationally permissible in some casesnamely when ones peer is using a less discriminating metric of reliability like calibration (Lam 2011, 243). How helpful is Lams approach? First, Lams only focusing on splitting the difference form of revision does not evaluate the agnostic form of revision that Kornblith supports. Kornbliths support for the agnosticism strategy is hardly idiosyncratic. It is difficult to know whether it would helpful for Lams overall claim. Second, it seems that Lams framework requires discerning the truth of matter on some given issue, which is precisely what is often under debate. Perhaps this is only giving an a priori setting with artificial numbers to illustrate why Another issue is that there seems to be a conflation of revising the content of ones beliefs and revising ones confidence in said beliefs. The rough scenarios Lam utilizes seem to make the same conflation of the revision of ones confidence in a belief with revision of the content on ones beliefs that Kornblith was guilty of. As was the case with Kornblith, making this ambiguity actually confuses as kind of R-strategy with an STC-strategy. Even if we put aside the technical worries of how to apply Lams approach to the real life situations of disagreement, there are practical reasons to be wary of Lams position. He insists that adopting the R-strategy consistently will result in closer proximity to knowledge (Lam 2011, 244). But one issue seems to be that adopting a simple strategy of accommodating a disagreeable peer seems to move too quickly to the reconciling position. Philip Kitcher notes that there are cognitive goals that are not met by simply revising ones beliefs in the face of disagreement (Kitcher 1990, 20). Pushing

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Staying the Course back on critics objectionssometimes even with pugnacityallows for a refining of ones positions that benefits the entire epistemic community. These benefits are lost if the inquiry is short-circuited by automatic revision in response to peer3 disagreement in the way that Lam suggests. As noted earlier, insofar as the strategies for philosophical disagreement can be considered kinds of epistemic heuristics, they have not been subjected to any form of model or simulation that would verify the claims of ecological rationality that I have presented here. Absent empirical tests that would confirm this, my tentative conclusion is that the STC-strategy seems like a more ecologically rational response to philosophical disagreement.

To the objection that our disposition to revise is dependent on the level of confidence of ones peer, it would be true that a highly confident peer would give us a reason to adjust our beliefs while a lower confidence peer would not. It seems to me, though, that Lams scenarios include in the peerhood conditions that peers are either equally confident or at least approximately so (Lam 2011, 3).
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Works Cited

Elgin, C. Persistent disagreement. Feldman, R., & Warfield, T. (2010). Disagreement. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Feldman, R. & Warfield, T. Introduction. Feldman, R. & Warfield, T. (2010). Disagreement. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Kahneman, D., & Klein, G. (2009). Conditions for intuitive expertise: A failure to disagree. American Psychologist; American Psychologist, 64(6), 515. Kelly, T. The epistemic significance of disagreement. Hawthorne, J and Gendler Szabo, Tamar (2005). Oxford Studies in Epistemology, vol. 1. New York: Oxford University Press, 16796. Kitcher, P. The division of cognitive labor. Journal of Philosophy, 87 (1990), 5-22. Kornblith, H. Belief in the face of controversy. Feldman, R., & Warfield, T. (2010). Disagreement. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Lam, B. On the rationality of belief-invariance in light of peer disagreement. Philosophical Review, 120.2 (2011), 207-245. ---. Calibrated probabilities and the epistemology of disagreement. Synthese. Forthcoming. Shanteau, J. Competence in experts: The role of task characteristics. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 53 (1992), 252-266. ---. What does it mean when experts disagree? Salas, E., & Klein, G. (Eds.). (2001). Linking expertise and naturalistic decision making. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Todd, Peter M. & Gigerenzer, Gerd (2000). Prcis of simple heuristics that make us Smart. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23 (5):727-741. Weinberg, J. M., Gonnerman, C., Buckner, C., & Alexander, J. (2010). Are philosophers expert intuiters? Philosophical Psychology, 23(3), 331-355.

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