Topics Rationality

Question What is the epistemic significance of our being unable to convince other people of our beliefs? Or: Does being unable to convince someone that P give me reason to doubt that P? Let's say that a philosopher deploys all the effort and rhetorical skill he can muster, but is unable to persuade his opponent. Why has he failed to convince? There are two principle reasons I can think of: (1) the philosopher and his opponent do not share the same premises, or (2) the philosopher's opponent is irrational (biased, stupid, crazy, etc.). The problem as I see it is that there seems no way to tell who is in the right. Presumably, neither the philosopher nor his opponent can justify their premises, nor can either one show that he is the rational one and the other irrational (the philosopher could just say that his opponent is crazy, but the opponent could say the same thing of him!). It's problems like this which move me closer to the uncomfortable possibility that to be in the right is often simply to be in the majority.

Accepted:
August 17, 2007

Comments

I don’t think that the moral of your story would be that being right is just being in the majority, but it might be that we can’t know whether or not we are right. But even this fortunately won’t always be the case. Even if I can’t convince you, I may have good reason to believe that I am in a better position to know, because I have better evidence, because I am more expert in the area of our disagreement, etc.

But the tough case is where we disagree and I have no reason to think that I am better placed to be right than you are. And this does seem a common plight when the disagreement is in philosophy, though it is by no means limited to that area. Suppose that Hilary Putnam and I could lay out all the arguments that either of us can think of on some philosophical issue – say the existence of numbers – and still we end up disagreeing. It seems to me on balance and after much reflection that (say) numbers don’t exist, and it seems to him likewise that they do. What am I to do? Not only do we disagree, but he is so much smarter than I am! Of course he is not infallible, so he might have made a slip somewhere; but same for goes for me, in spades.

Since in philosophy it seems one can always find someone smarter who holds the opposite view, it is unclear whether we really can ever claim philosophical knowledge; indeed perhaps it is unclear whether we should ever have philosophical beliefs on the contentious issues. But the situation is complicated. Maybe as a philosophical community we do better, epistemically speaking, by holding and defending conflicting beliefs than if we all were in a permanent state of agnosticism. And maybe there are situations where I should privilege my own view over Hilary’s, where say I can rationally convince myself that, smart as he is, I can identify a mistake in reasoning that he has made in this case, even if I can’t convince him that it is a mistake.