Would Disagreement Undermine Progress?

Would You Believe That? The Prerogative of Assent and Utility of Disagreement

By basing interpretation on belief, Davidson incurs heavy constraints regarding similarly of belief across speakers. Among these constraints is taking variance of belief to entail error. It is demonstrated that enriching the structure of belief allows a relaxation of normative criteria adopted to ensure similarity. (This enrichment takes the form of assent as defined by de Sousa, with the compl...

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...

Microbe interactions undermine predictions.

C R E D IT : C H R IS S C H M ID T /I S T O C K P H O T O .C O M Response ZAITSEV RAISES A VALID ARGUMENT FOR increasing student support services. It is good to see faculty understanding of the obstacles that community college students face. I certainly agree that more resources should be devoted to student guidance, tutoring services, and fi nancial aid, and I strongly advocate for the importa...

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...

Intuitional Disagreement