Aleks Knoks

While such epistemic rules as 'If you perceive that X, you ought to believe that X' and 'If you have outstanding testimony that X, you ought to believe that X' seem to be getting at important truths, it is easy to think of cases in which they come into conflict. To avoid classifying such cases as dilemmas, one can hold either that epistemic rules have built-in unless-clauses listing the circumstances under which they don't apply, or, alternatively, that epistemic rules are contributory. This paper explores both responses from a formal perspective, drawing on a simple defeasible logic framework.

Conciliatory views of disagreement say, roughly, that it’s rational for you to become less confident in your take on an issue in case you find out that an epistemic peer’s take on it is the opposite. Their intuitive appeal notwithstanding, there are well-known worries about the behavior of conciliatory views in scenarios involving higher-order disagreements, which include disagreements over these views themselves and disagreements over the peer status of alleged epistemic peers. This paper does two things. First, it explains how the core idea behind conciliatory views can be expressed in a defeasible logic framework. The result is a formal model that’s particularly useful for thinking about the behavior of conciliatory views in cases involving higher-order disagreements. And second, the paper uses this model to resolve three paradoxes associated with disagreements over epistemic peerhood.