David Christensen and Roy Sorensen

David Christensen (left) and Roy Sorensen (right) on the epistemology of disagreement.

Christensen is a prominent defender of conciliationism, the view that you ought to give the same weight to the opinions of your epistemic peers as to your own opinions. Accordingly, if you believe that p is true while your peer disagrees—and if your peer has been exposed to all the same evidence as you—then you ought to give up your belief that p. This position has a wide range of skeptical consequences. After all, we seem to have peer disagreements about all sorts of issues: politics, philosophy, religion, and even conciliationism itself. Sorensen and Christensen discuss whether the case for conciliationism is strong enough to justify its troubling implications.

Related works

by Christensen:

“Disagreement, Question-Begging and Epistemic Self-Criticism” (forthcoming)

“Higher Order Evidence” (2010)

“Disagreement as Evidence: The Epistemology of Controversy” (2009)

“Epistemology of Disagreement: The Good News” (2007)

by Sorensen:

SEP entry: “Epistemic Paradoxes” (2006)

Blindspots (1988)