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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - DISAGROUP (The Role of Groups in Complex Disagreement)

Teaser

Summary

The DISAGROUP project has investigated the phenomenon of complex disagreement in society from a philosophical perspective. Social epistemology has been mainly devoted to the study of peer disagreement (the kind of disagreement among individuals who share the same evidence and intellectual capacities). However, real-life disagreements such as long-standing religious, political or economic disagreements have a much more complex structure: the involved parties are not normally individual epistemic peers but groups that do not possess the same evidence or intellectual resources, they involve a lot of claims and are usually sustained not for the sake of knowledge but by elements such as faith, hate, intolerance or distrust. DISAGROUP has filled a gap in the philosophical literature by giving a general account of the structural elements that make most real-life disagreements so complex and difficult to understand, with a particular focus on the role played by groups in sustaining complex disagreements.

Work performed

DISAGROUP has produced a novel approach to the epistemology of disagreement: the so-called epistemic improvement view, which offers an account of the epistemology of disagreement in terms of a fundamental epistemic norm that prescribes that in a disagreement (i) one should improve oneâ€™s epistemic state as much as one can by conciliating if the other party is in a better epistemic state and (ii) one should stick to oneâ€™s guns and thus not allow oneâ€™s epistemic state be downgraded by conciliating if the other party is in a worse epistemic state. This norm has proved to be applicable to all cases disagreements independently of its complexity and irrespectively of whether the disagreeing parties are in the same epistemic position or in different epistemic positions, thus sidestepping the kind of idealizations commonly presupposed in the current literature on the epistemology of disagreement. Importantly, this account has served to shed light both on idealized cases of peer disagreement and cases of complex disagreement, such as most public controversies, and especially on the role played by groups in such complex disagreements. In this regard, DISAGROUP has investigated the differences between inter-group and intra-group disagreements and the importance of certain group phenomena associated to deliberation such as group polarization in the development and resolution of those disagreements.

Final results

The main progress of DISAGROUP beyond the state of the art has been to develop a novel view of the epistemology of disagreement that applies both to individual and group disagreement. In addition, it has produced the first programmatic paper on the epistemology and metaphysics of group polarization (the tendency of groups to lean towards more extremist positions after deliberation), a crucial group phenomenon that shapes inter-group disagreement.