Abstract
In this chapter I develop and defend an important argument in the epistemology of disagreement literature, initially gestured at by Catherine Z. Elgin (2010). This argument advances the idea that there are possible future epistemic benefits to be gained if an agent continues to develop and defend her beliefs in the face of peer disagreement, particularly within research contexts. These potential epistemic benefits justify a researcher remaining steadfast in the face of peer disagreement. After outlining the broad contours of the argument, I explore some empirical evidence in support of Elgin’s claim. For instance, I examine an economic model developed by Scott Page which demonstrates that in certain scenarios, peer disagreement tends to enhance epistemic practices such as problem solving and prediction making. I also outline some ideas found in psychology regarding bias and motivated reasoning which also lend empirical support to Elgin. I believe that this is one of the most promising arguments for non-conciliationism, albeit a limited version of it since it only applies in research context and as such it will be my focus for the rest of this book.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Recently epistemologists have examined understanding as an important epistemic goal. I intend my argument to be consistent with this goal too.
- 2.
I assume that truth is correspondence. To succeed this argument must also assume that scientific realism is true.
- 3.
I suppose one worry here is that this might violated ought implies can.
- 4.
Elgin (2018) describes the appropriate response to disagreement as prompting philosophers to engage further with one another. She seems to think that this is what philosophers in fact do, and what they ought to be doing. In this later piece Elgin does maintain her earlier stated position that there are epistemic benefits to be gained from disagreement, but here she explicitly disavows conciliationism and non-conciliationism. This is because neither requires a serious engagement with their opponent. For instance, the conciliationist thinks one needs to conciliate in the face of disagreement, but this doesn’t necessarily demand that peers directly engage with each other’s ideas. Still, nothing she says in this recent piece contradicts what she says in her earlier work on disagreement.
- 5.
Again, Elgin’s argument is about acceptance rather than beliefs. But the point I make here about revision and change of view remains the same. I will discuss the doxastic attitude of acceptance in Chap. 5. For a book-length discussion of acceptance see Elgin (2017), where she uses this idea to justify the rationality of scientific inquiry.
- 6.
Of course, the short-term benefits outweighing the short-term and long-term costs is advantageous too. I will say more about epistemic consequentialism in Chap. 5.
- 7.
De Cruz and De Smedt (2013) discuss a case study of disagreement in paleoanthropology and appear to endorse something similar to the Benefits to Inquiry Argument, at least with respect to scientific research.
- 8.
Some parts in this example are taken directly from Lougheed (2018, 266–267). I also discuss this in Lougheed (forthcoming).
- 9.
It is an open question whether Galileo intentionally provoked the church, but such details are not relevant to the example.
- 10.
Some parts in this example are also found in Lougheed (forthcoming).
- 11.
I discovered this story in a news article. Much of the information is from the article: https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/longform/human-footprints-greece?cnis=01d7e7d5-8294-4320-bd25-1463e0aa309b*C*1195*0*0*A. See Gierlinski et al. (2017) for the published results.
- 12.
Some of this section is taken directly from Lougheed (2018).
- 13.
- 14.
It is an open question whether this is necessarily the case. That is, it is an open question whether this is true in every possible world.
- 15.
See also Molden and Higgins (2005).
- 16.
- 17.
Thanks to Nick Griffin for bringing this point to my attention.
- 18.
This is not to imply that because x is adaptive that x is necessarily rational. I am not claiming that one should remain steadfast because it is adaptive. Rather, given that it is adaptive, it comes as no surprise that there are epistemic benefits to disagreement. The argumentative theory of reasoning confirms my hypothesis.
- 19.
Mill also writes: “Not the violent conflict between parts of the truth, but the quiet suppression of half of it, is the formidable evil: there is always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides; it is when they attend only to one that errors harden into prejudices, and truth itself ceases to have the effect of truth, by being exaggerated into falsehood. And since there are few mental attributes more rare than that judicial faculty which can sit in intelligent judgment between two sides of a question, of which only one is represented by an advocate before it, truth has no chance but in proportion as every side of it, every opinion which embodies any fraction of the truth, not only finds advocates, but is so advocated as to be listened to” (Mill 1859, 117).
- 20.
It’s an open historical question whether Mill was the first person to make note of this fact. Either way, he probably is the most prominent philosopher to do so.
- 21.
Thanks to Nick Griffin for bringing this to my attention.
- 22.
This argument is also found in Lougheed (2018, 265–266).
Bibliography
Blinder, A.S., and J. Morgan. 2000. Are Two Heads Better than One? An Experimental Analysis of Group vs. Individual Decision Making. Working Paper 2909, National Bureau of Economic Research, Princeton, N.J.
Cannella, A.A., J.H. Park, and H.U. Lee. 2008. Top management team functional background diversity and firm performance: Examining the roles of team member collocation and environmental uncertainity. Academy of Management Journal 51 (2): 142–148.
Crano, W.D. 2012. The Rules of Influence: Winning When You Are in the Minority. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Crisp, R.J., and R.N. Turner. 2011. Cognitive Adaptation to the Experience of Social and Cultural Diversity. Psychological Bulletin 137 (2): 242–266.
Darwin, Charles. 2006. The Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection. New York: Dover Publications.
Darwin, Charles. 2009. The Descent of Man, and the Selection in Relation to Sex. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Darwin, Charles. 2011. The Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilised by Insects. New York: Cambridge University Press.
De Cruz, Helen, and Johan De Smedt. 2013. The Value of Epistemic Disagreement in Scientific Practice: The Case of Homo floresiensis. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 44 (2): 169–177.
Desmond, Adrian J. 2019. Charles Darwin, Encyclopaedia Britannica Online Academic Edition.
Downs, Robert B. 1982. Landmarks in Science: Hippocrates to Carson. Colo: Littleton.
Duarte, Jose L., Jarret T. Crawford, Charlotta Stern, Jonathan Haidt, Lee Jussim, and Philip E. Tetlock. 2015. Political Diversity Will Improve Social Psychological Science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences e130: 1–58.
Elgin, Catherine. 2010. Persistent Disagreement. In Disagreement, ed. Richard Feldman and Ted A. Warfield, 53–68. Oxford University Press.
Eglin, Catherine. 2017. True Enough. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.
Elgin, Catherine. 2018. Reasonable Disagreement. In Voicing Dissent: The Ethics and Epistemology of Making Disagreement Public, ed. Casey Rebecca Johnson, 10–21. New York: Routledge.
Fiske, S.T., L.T. Harris, and A.J.C. Cuddy. 2004. Why Ordinary People Torture Enemy Prisoners. Science 306 (5701): 1482–1483.
Gierlinski, Gerard D., Grzegorz Niedzwiedzki, Martin G. Lockley, Athanassios Athanassiou, Charalampos Fassoulas, Zofia Dubicka, Andrzej Boczarowski, Matthew R. Bennett, and Per Erik Ahlberg. 2017. Possible Hominin Footprints from the Late Miocene (c. 5.7 Ma) of Crete?. Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association 128 (5–6): 697–710.
Kahneman, Daniel. 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Laughlin, P.R., B.L. Bonner, and A.G. Minder. 2002. Groups Perform Better than the Best Individuals on Letters-to-Numbers Problems. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 88 (2): 605–620.
Laughlin, P.R., M.L. Zander, E.M. Knievel, and T.S. Tan. 2003. Groups Perform Better than the Best Individuals on Letter-to-Numbers Problems: Informative Equations and Effective Reasoning. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 85 (4): 684–694.
Laughlin, P.R., E.C. Hatch, J.S. Silver, and L. Boh. 2006. Groups Perform Better than the Best Individuals on Letter-to-Numbers Problems: Effects of Group Size. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 90 (4): 644–651.
Lombardelli, C., J. Proudman, and J. Talbot. 2005. Committees versus individuals: An experimental analysis of monetary policy decision-making. International Journal of Central Banking 1 (1): 181–205.
Lougheed, Kirk. 2018. The Epistemic Value of Deep Disagreements. Informal Logic 38 (2): 263–292.
Lougheed, Kirk. forthcoming. Catherine Elgin on Peerhood and the Epistemic Benefits of Disagreement. Synthese.
Menz, M. 2012. Functional Top Management Team Members: A Review, Synthesis, and Research Agenda. Journal of Management 38 (1): 45–80.
Mercier, Hugo, and Dan Sperber. 2011. Why Do Humans Reason? Arguments for an Argumentative Theory. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 34 (2): 57–74.
Mercier, Hugo, and Dan Sperber. 2017. The Enigma of Reason. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Michaelsen, L.K., W.E. Watson, and R.H. Black. 1989. A Realistic Test of Individual Versus Group Consensus Decision Making. Journal of Applied Psychology 74 (5): 834–839.
Mill, John Stuart. 1859 [2003]. On Liberty. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Molden, D.C., and E.T. Higgins. 2005. Motivated thinking. In The Cambridge Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning, ed. K. Holyoak and R. Morrison. Cambridge University Press.
Moscovici, C., and B. Personnaz. 1980. Studies in Social Influence: V. Minority Influence and Conversion Behavior in a Perceptual Task. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 16 (3): 270–282.
Moshman, David, and Molly Geil. 1998. Collaborative Reasoning: Evidence for Collective Rationality. Educational Psychology Papers and Publications 4 (3): 231–248.
Nemeth, C.M. 1995. Dissent as Driving Cognition, Attitudes, and Judgments. Social Cognition 13 (3): 273–291.
Nemeth, C., K. Brown, and J. Rogers. 2001. Devil’s Advocate Versus Authentic Dissent: Stimulating Quantity and Quality. European Journal of Social Psychology 31 (6): 707–720.
Page, Scott. 2007. The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, and Societies. USA: Princeton University Press.
Semmelweis, I. 1861. The Etiology, Concept, and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever K. Codell Carter (trans). USA: University of Wisconsin Press.
Sniezek, J.A., and R.A. Henry. 1989. Accuracy and Confidence in Group Judgment. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 43 (1): 1–28.
Sperber, C., F. Clement, C. Heintz, O. Mascaro, H. Mercier, G. Origgi, and D. Wilson. 2010. Epistemic Vigilance. Mind and Language 25 (4): 359–393.
Stasson, M.F., T. Kameda, C.D. Parks, S.K. Zimmerman, and J.H. Davis. 1991. Effects of Assigned Group Consensus Requirement on Group Problem Solving and Group Members’ Learning. Social Psychology Quarterly 54 (1): 25–35.
Surowiecki, James. 2004. The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations. USA: Random House Inc.
Tindale, R.S., and S. Sheffey. 2002. Shared Information, Cognitive Load, and Group Memory. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations 5 (1): 5–18.
Van Helden, Albert. 2019. Galileo. Encyclopedia Britannica Online Academic Edition.
Williams, K.Y., and C.A. O’Reilly. 1998. Demography and diversity in organizations: A review of 40 years of research. Research in Organizational Behavior 20: 77–140.
Zoltán, Imre. 2019. Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis. In Encyclopedia Britannica Online Academic Edition.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Lougheed, K. (2020). The Benefits to Inquiry Argument. In: The Epistemic Benefits of Disagreement. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 51. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34503-7_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34503-7_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-34502-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-34503-7
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)