Fundamental Disagreement

Fundamental Disagreement of Wave Mechanics with Relativity

(This work has been copyrighted with the Library of Congress) A number of well-known difficulties in physics resulted from merging the theory of relativity with the Compton-de Broglie wave mechanics. Two such problems were the failure of Dirac’s relativistic wave equation to predict the correct velocity of the electron, and the fact that the measured yield from nuclear fission was found to be s...

Beyond the Principles of Bioethics: Facing the Consequences of Fundamental Moral Disagreement

Given intractable secular moral pluralism, the force and significance of the four principles (autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice) of Tom Beauchamp and James Childress must be critically re-considered. This essay examines the history of the articulation of these four principles of bioethics, showing why initially there was an illusion of a common morality that led many to hold t...

Strategic information disclosure when there is fundamental disagreement: an empirical investigation

Public Disagreement∗

Members of different social groups often hold widely divergent public beliefs regarding the nature of the world in which they live. We develop a model that can accommodate such public disagreement, and use it to explore questions concerning the aggregation of distributed information and the consequences of social integration. The model involves heterogeneous priors, private information, and rep...

Bounded Disagreement

A well-known generalization of the consensus problem, namely, set agreement (SA), limits the number of distinct decision values that processes decide. In some settings, it may be more important to limit the number of “disagreers”. Thus, we introduce another natural generalization of the consensus problem, namely, bounded disagreement (BD), which limits the number of processes that decide differ...