Epistemic Disagreement and ’Elu We’Elu

Epistemic Relativism and Reasonable Disagreement [version of June, 2007]

I begin with some familiar conceptions of epistemic relativism. One kind of epistemic relativism is descriptive pluralism. This is the simple, non-normative thesis that many different communities, cultures, social networks, etc. endorse different epistemic systems (E-systems), i.e., different sets of norms, standards, or principles for forming beliefs and other doxastic states. Communities try ...

Dealing With Disagreement: Distinguishing Two Types of Epistemic Peers

Cold acid elution (ELU Kit II).

Elution is a procedure for recovery of antibody attached to intact,immunoglobulin-coated red blood cells (RBCs) by disrupting the antigen-antibody bonds. The recovered antibody is collected in an inert diluent and is referred to as an eluate. Testing of an eluate may be desired to identify antibody(ies) coating the RBCs of patients with a positive direct antiglobulin test. Many types of elution...

Sufficient Conditions for First-Order and Datalog Rewritability in ELU

We study the problem of answering instance queries over non-Horn ontologies by rewriting them into Datalog programs or FirstOrder queries (FOQs). We consider the basic non-Horn language ELU , which extends EL with disjunctions. Both Datalog-rewritability and FOrewritability of instance queries have been recently shown to be decidable for ALC ontologies (and hence also for ELU); however, existin...

Epistemic Circularity and Epistemic Incommensurability

If I were to believe you are trustworthy just on your say-so, my reasoning would be infected with what is called epistemic circularity. I would be supposing a source is trustworthy by relying on that very source. Generally speaking, we tend to think this is a very bad idea. It is why we don’t bother asking politicians or salesmen whether they are honest. A well-known line of reasoning stemming ...