Deep disagreement and hinge epistemology
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Deep disagreement and hinge epistemology Chris Ranalli1 Received: 9 April 2018 / Accepted: 21 September 2018 © The Author(s) 2018
Abstract This paper explores the application of hinge epistemology to deep disagreement. Hinge epistemology holds that there is a class of commitments—hinge commitments—which play a fundamental role in the structure of belief and rational evaluation: they are the most basic general ‘presuppositions’ of our world views which make it possible for us to evaluate certain beliefs or doubts as rational. Deep disagreements seem to crucially involve disagreements over such fundamental commitments. In this paper, I consider pessimism about deep disagreement, the thesis that such disagreements are rationally irresolvable, and ask whether the Wittgensteinian account of deep disagreement—according to which such disagreements are disagreements over hinge commitments—provides adequate support for pessimism. I argue that the answer to this question depends on what hinge commitments are and what our epistemic relation to them is supposed to be. I argue for two core claims. First, that non-epistemic theories of hinge commitments provide adequate support for pessimism. Nevertheless, such theories have highly implausible consequences in the context of deep disagreement. Secondly, at least one epistemic theory of hinge commitments, the entitlement theory, permits optimism about such disagreements. As such, while hinge epistemology is mainly pessimistic about deep disagreement, it doesn’t have to be. Keywords Deep disagreement · Hinge propositions · Rational resolutions · Epistemic entitlement · Belief · Epistemic reasons · Worldview · Wittgenstein · Hinge epistemology
1 Introduction Consider disagreements over whether the Earth was created by God less than 10,000 years ago (so-called young Earth creationism), or over the worldview expressed
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Chris Ranalli [email protected]; [email protected] Department of Philosophy, Faculty of the Humanities, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1105, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands
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by the Berkeleyean triad of theism, immaterialism, and idealism; or over the extreme variants of the so-called New World Order conspiracy theory, in which nefarious beings have been systematically and radically deceiving us with respect to not only major historical and political events, but also our general beliefs about the world, such as that we don’t live in a simulation.1 These are ordinarily taken to be deep disagreements because they seem to be systematic disagreements rooted in contrary worldviews.2 One influential way of thinking about deep disagreements has its roots in Wittgenstein’s (1969) On Certainty.3 A major theme of On Certainty is that rational evaluation generally presupposes a fixed set of commitments for any agent. These are the so-called general “hinge commitments” of rational evaluation: the fundamental presuppositions of one’s worldview which make one’s rational evaluations, such as the evaluation of a belief as justified, intelligible t
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