Abstract:

Recent debates have centred on the normative influence epistemic peerage should have on the regulation of beliefs in cases of disagreement. A dominant position in this debate is that acknowledging an epistemic peer's possession of a belief contrary to one's own ought, in itself, to lead to the revision of one's doxastic commitments. In what follows I aim to challenge and rethink the notion of peerage underlying the disagreement debate and thus reveal that the traditional view of peerage rests upon an idealized conception of similarly between disagreeing parities, and thus to show that the normative constraints derived from it are equally idealized. Constructively, I will suggest a commonsensical solution to the disagreement problem based on what I propose as a soft, more moderate conception of peerage.

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