20170209RiessThesis.pdf (480.28 kB)
How Special is Disagreement?
Version 2 2019-12-13, 03:00
Version 1 2017-02-14, 03:41
thesis
posted on 2019-12-13, 03:00 authored by Maxwell RiessA few years ago
philosophers started discussing disagreement. The main question they were
seeking to answer was: when I find out someone disagrees with me, what should I
do? This discussion has since become the Epistemology of Disagreement. This
flurry of interest suggests that there is something philosophically interesting
or unique about instances of disagreement, something that the previous decades
of epistemology don’t quite address. In this thesis I start to examine this
idea, that there is something epistemologically unique about cases of
disagreement, by analysing some of the theories proposed by philosophers so
far. I find that as yet, we do not have reasons to consider disagreement unique
and that more could be gained from identifying what is common to the
Epistemology of Disagreement and other topics in epistemology.