If one doesn’t opt for conciliationism as a response to peer disagreement, then what is the alternative? We just noted that one core motivation for conciliationism is that it avoids the charge of dogmatism. Given the problem just noted with conciliationism, however, let’s look a bit more at this motivation. Remember that conciliationism is insisting that we should always be conciliatory in the face of peer disagreement, and hence that we should always treat peer disagreement as a defeater of our knowledge.
That it would be dogmatic to not be conciliatory certainly looks plausible in cases of peer disagreement like the split bill at the restaurant that we considered earlier. But if conciliationism is correct, then it should be dogmatic to not be conciliatory in all cases of peer disagreement. Is that plausible?
In order to see why it might not be, consider a different kind of peer disagreement where one has reflected on the matter in hand and come to a considered judge- ment about it. That’s very different from the restaurant case, where one has simply
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disagreement 161 formulated an answer to a new question for the first time. So, for example, imagine that one is an accountant, and one has carefully calculated a final tax figure for a client, a calculation that has been properly checked over. Now imagine that another accountant at your firm tells you that they have also been working on this client’s account, and have come up with a different final tax figure. Finally, since this is a case of peer disagreement, we need to stipulate that you regard the other account- ant as roughly equally as competent as you are at their job, and that you’ve no reason to believe that they have been any less diligent as you’ve been in reaching this figure.
How should one respond?
According to conciliationism, one is required to treat this case of peer disagreement as a defeater for one’s knowledge, just like in the restaurant scenario. Notice, how- ever, that this case is rather different. Whereas in the restaurant case one quickly came up with that result, in this scenario the result in question has been arrived at very carefully indeed. Would it really be dogmatic in this case to stick to one’s judgement?
A further point we need to make here is that sticking to one’s judgement needn’t mean that one is closed-minded, which is how dogmatism is usually understood.
That is, in sticking to one’s judgement, one could still be very interested in listening to how the other accountant arrived at their different figure, and in trying to work out how two equally competent and diligent accountants arrived at different results.
Relatedly, in engaging with the other accountant in this way, you might well become convinced that you’ve made a mistake and hence change your mind. Sticking to one’s judgement in the immediate aftermath of a peer disagreement doesn’t pre- clude any of this. All it means is that one is satisfied that one has gained one’s belief in this regard entirely properly, and hence that one is unwilling to simply abandon it just because there is now some dispute over its correctness.
This is a good juncture to return to the intellectual virtues that we encountered in Chapter 6 when we looked at virtue epistemology. Recall that we distinguished there between (mere) cognitive abilities and epistemic virtues, where the latter are also known as intellectual virtues. Cognitive abilities are simply skill-like traits that enable us to reliably form true beliefs. Some of these are innate, in the sense that they are naturally acquired as we biologically mature, in which case they are cogni- tive faculties. Think, for example, of how our innate memorial or perceptual skills enable us to regularly form true beliefs in the right kinds of environmental condi- tions. Some cognitive abilities, in contrast, are not innate but rather acquired via training. One might be trained to be able to differentiate between certain kinds of plants, for example, and in the process develop a more refined cognitive ability that draws on one’s innate perceptual and memorial faculties. Or think, for example, of how one acquired one’s arithmetical skills by learning them at school.
Intellectual virtues are also a kind of cognitive ability that one acquires through training, although they are of a particularly demanding type. Indeed, one needs to constantly cultivate one’s intellectual virtues if one is to retain them, since other- wise they are easily lost. Intellectual virtues also involve a distinctive motivational state, in that to genuinely manifest an intellectual virtue one must actually desire
the truth. In contrast, one doesn’t need to care about the truth in order to manifest most cognitive abilities. For example, when you open your eyes in the morning, you come to know lots of facts about your environment, whether you desire the truth or are indifferent to it. These features of the intellectual virtues are central to why they are thought to be particularly admirable character traits to have.
Consider the intellectual virtue of being intellectually conscientious. The intellectu- ally conscientious person is someone who appropriately attends to the evidence available to them in forming a judgement, often seeking out additional evidence when they realise that they have an insufficient evidential basis to form a view.
The intellectually conscientious person doesn’t simply rush to judgement, or believe what they want to believe, but is rather guided by the evidence available to them.
This reflects the fact that they care about the truth, and so want to form the right judgement. Hence, it is important to them to attend to the evidence, since evidence is by its nature a guide to the truth. Notice too that no one is born intellectually con- scientious. One must rather have this trait instilled in one, perhaps by one’s parents or one’s teachers. Moreover, unless one cultivates this trait in oneself, then it is easily lost, as one will end up taking the easier path of succumbing to wishful thinking and making snap judgements.
Or consider another intellectual virtue, that of being observant. Being observant is not the same as merely having reliable perceptual abilities (where the latter could well be an innate cognitive faculty). To take an extreme case, consider the contrast between Sherlock Holmes and his sidekick Watson. They both might perceive the same mur- der scene – i.e. their perceptual faculties are both working equally well. But Holmes will observe so much more about this scene than Watson does, and this will enable him to draw conclusions that are simply unavailable to Watson. Like the intellectual virtue of intellectual conscientiousness, being observant is not something that you are born with, or else Watson would be just as observant as Holmes. Rather, Holmes had to train his observational capacities to make them function in this way, and he needs to cultivate them in order to be sure that he retains them. Moreover, this intellectual virtue arises out of his desire for the truth. Holmes cares about the truth, and this is manifested in his observant take on the perceptual scene before him.
The significance of this discussion for our purposes is that dogmatism is usually thought of as an intellectual vice – i.e. the very opposite of an intellectual virtue. That is, while the intellectual virtues are acquired (and admirable) cognitive abilities that involve a desire for the truth, intellectual vices are acquired (and disreputable, rather than admirable) traits that manifest a lack of cognitive ability and/or a failure to care for the truth. For example, instead of having the intellectual virtue of being observant, one might have the intellectual vice of being unobservant, where one is simply incu- rious about aspects of one’s environment that one ought to find significant. Similarly, dogmatism looks like a disreputable cognitive trait to have, the very opposite of intel- lectual virtue in this respect. In particular, dogmatism looks like the absence of the intellectual virtue of being intellectually humble. This is the admirable character trait of (amongst other things) being willing to listen to other people’s viewpoints (and change one’s mind if necessary) and generally being aware of one’s own fallibility.
disagreement 163 The key question for us is thus whether intellectual humility, as the intellectual virtue opposed to the intellectual vice of dogmatism, would insist that you should always adopt a conciliatory stance in response to peer disagreement. It’s actually not clear that it does. For while adopting that stance seems generally appropriate in such cases, it’s not obvious why it should be required in the specific kind of peer disa- greement where the dispute is over your considered judgement (i.e. where you have reflected on the matter in hand, as in the tax calculation scenario described above).
Since it is your considered judgement, it seems rather premature to downgrade your confidence in this regard at the first sign that an epistemic peer disagrees with you.
Imagine, for example, that you respond to the tax calculation disagreement not by treating yourself as lacking knowledge but rather by simply engaging with your adversary and trying to find out more about how they calculated their different figure. Why wouldn’t this suffice to show that you are not being dogmatic? You are willing to listen to another person’s viewpoint, after all, and if it turns out that they say something convincing in support of their viewpoint, then you will change your mind, so it is not as if you’re being closed-minded. The crux of the matter is that it seems that you can display the intellectual virtue of being intellectually humble without having to always take the conciliatory stance in response to peer disagreement.
This would thus be one way of motivating a response to peer disagreement that is importantly different to conciliationism. Whereas conciliationism claims that one should always treat peer disagreement as knowledge-undermining, this proposal maintains instead that this needn’t always be the case. In particular, so long as the matter concerns one’s considered judgement, and provided one goes about it in the right kind of way, then one can legitimately ‘stick to one’s guns’ without thereby being dogmatic. As we’ve seen, a person who has the intellectual virtue of being intellectually humble – and hence who lacks the corresponding intellectual vice of being dogmatic – might respond to an epistemic peer disagreement about a consid- ered judgement in just this fashion.