In a recent post on "Testimony and Defeat" at Certain Doubts, Jon Kvanvig has suggested difficulties with a thesis that he attributes to Gary Gutting, namely,
(GT) One's judgment that one disagrees with an intellectual peer is a defeater for one's justification.
As an alternative, Kvanvig proposes what he terms the "irrelevance of competence" position. In the post, he suggests that this position amounts to the claim that "information about the intellectual competence of a disagree-er is never an underminer of present opinion." The example he gives to support this involves a case where I think someone is smarter than I am and has thought more about the matter in question, and thereby come to doubt my own belief. According to Kvanvig, "what is doing the defeating here is my view that you know more about this issue."
I'm confused -- I would've thought that knowing more about the issue just is competence. I take it that part of what is bothering Kvanvig is the distinction between general and specific competence. If I merely believe you to be an intellectual peer -- I have had conversations with you in which you picked up on all of my allusions to books and journals that I've read, and in which you've responded with interesting and thought-provoking allusions of your own, you've presented interesting arguments and picked up on potential weaknesses in arguments of mine, etc. -- without having any reason to suppose that you possess competence regarding a particular subject matter of interest, then that's general competence. If you have evidenced great interest and sustained thought about a particular subject matter, then that's specific competence. Perhaps we can then reformulate what Kvanvig means using something he writes in a comment to the initial post:
(IC) Knowledge that someone equally competent disagrees is not by itself a defeater.
My difficulty now in weighing (GT) against (IC) is that, as Kvanvig notes, (GT), the view that disagreement with an intellectual peer provides one with a defeater, is only plausible if the defeater in question is easily overridden. Let us so understand (GT). Given this understanding, however, Kvanvig's own examples in support of his position are not terribly helpful, as they all involve cases in which we are assuming that one has greater experience in the specific are than one's supposed intellectual peer -- and thus would presumably have grounds to override the defeater.
Couple this fact with the fact that specificity and generality come in a wide variety of flavors -- I could consider someone who also has a Ph.D., regardless of discipline, to be my intellectual peer, or only philosophy Ph.D.'s, or only philosophy Ph.D.'s from certain schools, or in certain subdisciplines, etc. This would also mean that whether one ought to embrace (GT) or (IC) will depend on the level of specificity of intellectual peerage involved in the case under consideration. My sense is that the more specific the intellectual peerage, the more plausible (GT) appears.
Philosophy's a tough field to figure out how disagreement with one's peers leads to defeaters. For the sake of the advancement of knowledge, I'm hoping it's something of an outlier in that respect. Let's use a different example. Suppose two scholars in 17th century German history have a dispute about whether Otto von Guericke performed his famous experiment in which a team of horses attempt to pull apart two metal half-spheres held together by a vacuum. Let's assume neither one is an expert on Saxony-Anhalt, Magdeburg, von Guericke, or the history of science in that period. One believes the experiment was performed with 6 horses, the other with 16. Let's suppose that, prior to their disagreement, each of the scholars would've confidently held their respective beliefs on the basis of what they would've picked up in the course of their extensive readings and conference experiences regarding that period in Germany. What should each do regarding their own belief?
I take it that (IC) would dictate that they may each still hold onto their respective beliefs, while (GT) would require them to suspend judgment until they receive further corroboration for their positions. Ignoring additional difficulties posed by the fact that we aren't taking into consideration what's riding on the accuracy of their beliefs, I have some preference for the outcome required by (GT).
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