Disagreement and a Functional Equal Weight View

Abstract If a colleague of mine, whose opinion I respect, disagrees with me about some claim, this might give pause regarding my position on the matter. The Equal Weight view proposes that in such cases peer disagreement ought to colleague’s as much weight own, and decrease certainty disputed claim. One prominent criticism is treating higher-order (indirect) evidence way invariably swamps first-order (direct) evidence. While opinions our peers matter deliberations, counter-intuitively requires mere more important than standard kinds offer proposal for how we should idealize epistemic agents identifies variable feature disagreements accounts shifting significance direct indirect different contexts. Specifically, by idealizing deriving functions characterize non-subjective relationship between body reasonableness believing various propositions supported evidence, can accommodate intuition compromise motivates view, without accepting counter-intuitive results.