Neither East nor West: A Reasoning-First Approach to Reasonable Peer Disagreement

It seems like an obviously true claim that people can reasonably disagree. But we should wonder whether it is rational for people to continue to believe what they believe knowing that what they believe is controversial. Under normal circumstances, this question can be satisfactorily answered by appeal to the agents’ differing reasoning capabilities or their differing evidence. Disagreements between peers, however, are distinctive of the usual variety of reasonable disagreements because the controversy cannot be adequately explained by appeal to their total shared evidence or stronger or weaker reasoning capabilities. Such cases, though they may be infrequent, nevertheless reveal an intriguing multi-faceted puzzle. If, as evidentialists claim, evidence is the only relevant justificatory consideration for beliefs, then peers ought to at least reduce their initial confidence if not give equal weight to the opposing view when they become aware of their peer’s opposition. But simple counterexamples reveal that modifying one's initial belief merely based on the awareness of peer disagreement is not always the rational option. These counter-examples, however, do not help explain how best to respond in other instances when it appears that awareness of peer disagreement does have justificatory significance. This project attempts to solve this puzzle by first critically examining how we think about evidence. I conclude that there are actually two senses of evidence: A metaphysical and an epistemic. Distinguishing these senses of evidence reveals that in cases of genuine reasonable peer disagreement, doxastic and propositional justification come apart such that doxastic justification sometimes does not imply propositional justification. When doxastic justification does not imply propositional justification in cases of reasonable peer disagreement, we can see how epistemic pluralism can be rational without falling prey to certain epistemic spinelessness.