Dependent philosophical majorities and the skeptical argument from disagreement

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

Documents

  • Fulltext

    Final published version, 692 KB, PDF document

According to the skeptical argument from disagreement, we are mandated to suspend judgement about a question if we discover that others disagree with us. Critics, however, have proposed that this skeptical argument fails if there are not equally many people on either side of the debate: numbers matter. The present paper explicates this as the argument that a group can be more likely to arrive at the correct view by majority rule than the members are on their own. Defenders of the skeptical argument have resisted that numbers matter by observing that if group members depend on each other when forming their beliefs, then the group can be less competent than its members. However, neither side of the debate has accompanied their views with quantitative estimates of how detrimental dependence is for group competence. This paper tries to improve this situation by drawing on jury theorems from social choice theory. The paper cannot settle the debate, but it shows that even the lower limit on group competence will exceed the average individual competence when dependence among voters remains moderate. This should give confidence to those who propose that asymmetry between the disputing parties can counter the skeptical argument from disagreement since being in the majority can thus be higher-order evidence for the disputed proposition.

Original languageEnglish
Article number45
JournalSynthese
Volume200
Number of pages24
ISSN0039-7857
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2022
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022, The Author(s).

    Research areas

  • Dependent votes, Jury theorems, Peer disagreement, Philosophical belief, Skeptical argument

ID: 339998140