Talk:Disagreement (epistemology)

Review by Chenzw

Context: [1]

I see that several edits have been made since the draft was first declined, here are a few more suggestions to consider:

• First, any instances of questions in this article should be rewritten to use reported (indirect) speech. In particular, "Should he revise his belief or should he stick to his own original belief." in the lede gives the strange impression that the article is advocating for a certain point of view (I know you aren't). Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Philosophy helpfully explains the problem: Philosophy articles should not generally be written in a conversational style, as if a lecture is being presented to the reader, and the article is taking the place of the lecturer's chalkboard. An article that "speaks' to the reader runs counter to the ideal encyclopedic tone of most Wikipedia articles. I would probably modify the first paragraph to something like this, in an attempt to emulate the style of Philosophy of mind, a featured article:
  • The issue of peer disagreement in social epistemology discusses the question of how a person should respond when he learns that somebody else with the same body of knowledge disagrees with him. There are two central schools of thought on the problem of peer disagreement - The Conciliatory School and The Steadfast School...
• The other type of disagreement is about an action. For instance, should we travel to Italy or Greece. - please see the above about using reported speech instead. The statement could be modified to read:
  • The other type of disagreement is about a proposed course of action, for example, whether one should travel to Italy or Greece.
• ...have roughly the same capabilities in terms of information and intelligence - I personally don't like the ambiguity implied by "roughly"; a number of papers I remember reading used the term "a given body of evidence", "a single body of knowledge", "epistemic peers... shared their evidence". The term "epistemic peer" will probably need further explanation in plain language if used in the article.
• If I am not wrong, Feldman rejected relativism but accepted both (1) suspension of belief and (2) the uniqueness thesis.
• It might be good to explicitly mention permissivism in relation to the uniqueness thesis (e.g. Schoenfield 2014).

Finally, while I have yet to perform an extensive search, it is worth noting that there is at least one other article on this wiki which addresses the issue of disagreement: Faultless disagreement. Faultless disagreement may be a candidate for merger into this article, because it seems to be a subset of the larger issue of (peer) disagreement.

Please feel free to reach out to me on my home wiki if I do not manage to respond here in a timely manner. Chenzw  Talk  16:53, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

Response by Motizin

Thank you for your very helpful suggestions and explanations. It is the first time I understand what a reviewer is telling me. I am in the process of editing the item and I'll appreciate more comments when I'm done. By the way, I noticed that you attribute this issue to social epistemology. Although this sounds reasonable, I have read quite a few articles about this issue and none has made this relation. Do you know of any attribution of this issue to "social epistemology"?

Frankly, that was the first time I heard of the specific attribution too, though I am not exactly a top expert in the field. However, the current version of the article social epistemology mentions the relation explicitly, and cites the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for that. Chenzw  Talk  10:20, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

Chenzw, I am done with the changes. Please review and comment before I resubmit. Thanks.

Additional Responses to User:Chenzw

"Peer disagreement" is indeed mentioned in Social Epistemology. Although it does, I'm not sure if this relates to the very same issue. Social Epistemology relates to human knowledge as a collective achievement. I'm not familiar with Social Epistemology but only with Epistemology which relates to personal knowledge. It seems to me that the perspectives of "peer disagreement" in the two issues may be different. Faultless disagreement also relates to disagreement (very shortly). I agree that it can be incorporated into Disagreements, of course, after Disagreement is approved. Motizin (talk) 11:51, 30 August 2020 (UTC)