Minor point: epistemic peer judgements are independent of whether you disagree with them or not. I’m happy to indict people who are epistemically unvirtuous even if they happen to agree with me.
I generally think one should not use object level disagreement to judge peerhood, given the risk of entrenchment (i.e. everyone else thinks I’m wrong, so I conclude everyone else is wrong and an idiot).
For ‘obvious truths’ like P, there’s usually a lot of tacit peer agreement in background knowledge. So the disagreement with you and these other people provides some evidence for demotion, rather than disagreeing with you alone. I find it hard to disentangle intuitions where one removes this rider, and in these cases I’m not so sure about whether steadfastness + demotion is the appropriate response. Demoting supervaluationaists as peers re. supervaluationism because they disagree with you about it, for example, seems a bad idea.
In any case, almost by definition it would be extraordinarily rare people we think prima facie are epistemic peers disagree on something sufficiently obvious. In real world cases where its some contentious topic where reasonable people disagree, one should not demote people based on their disagreement with you (or, perhaps, in these cases the evidence for demotion is sufficiently trivial that it is heuristically better ignored).
Modest accounts shouldn’t be surprised by expert error. Yet being able to determine these instances ex post gives little steer as to what to do ex ante. Random renegade schools of thought assuredly have an even poorer track record. If it was the case the EA/rationalist community had a good track record of out performing expert classes in their field, that would be a good reason for epistemic exceptionalism. Yet I don’t see it.
Minor point: epistemic peer judgements are independent of whether you disagree with them or not. I’m happy to indict people who are epistemically unvirtuous even if they happen to agree with me.
I generally think one should not use object level disagreement to judge peerhood, given the risk of entrenchment (i.e. everyone else thinks I’m wrong, so I conclude everyone else is wrong and an idiot).
For ‘obvious truths’ like P, there’s usually a lot of tacit peer agreement in background knowledge. So the disagreement with you and these other people provides some evidence for demotion, rather than disagreeing with you alone. I find it hard to disentangle intuitions where one removes this rider, and in these cases I’m not so sure about whether steadfastness + demotion is the appropriate response. Demoting supervaluationaists as peers re. supervaluationism because they disagree with you about it, for example, seems a bad idea.
In any case, almost by definition it would be extraordinarily rare people we think prima facie are epistemic peers disagree on something sufficiently obvious. In real world cases where its some contentious topic where reasonable people disagree, one should not demote people based on their disagreement with you (or, perhaps, in these cases the evidence for demotion is sufficiently trivial that it is heuristically better ignored).
Modest accounts shouldn’t be surprised by expert error. Yet being able to determine these instances ex post gives little steer as to what to do ex ante. Random renegade schools of thought assuredly have an even poorer track record. If it was the case the EA/rationalist community had a good track record of out performing expert classes in their field, that would be a good reason for epistemic exceptionalism. Yet I don’t see it.