Begging the Question Against a Peer?

Abstract

A dialectical conception of justification helps conciliationists about peer disagreement establish the symmetry considerations on which their account is premised. On this conception, appeals to personal or hidden forms of evidence fail to provide a symmetry breaker that would allow one to dismiss a conflicting peer opinion. Furthermore, the act of citing the same evidence repetitively tends to illegitimately beg the question against the peer, no matter how accurate one’s own overall assessment of this evidence. However, the dialectical conception of justification does not automatically vindicate conciliationism. In many of the most interesting cases of peer disagreement there are vast bodies of dialectically sharable evidence that can ultimately provide enough non-question-begging epistemic resources to settle the dispute, even if appealing to those resources violates the independence requirement—a further premise of conciliationism. Absent modifications to the independence requirement, it would therefore be premature to embrace conciliationism.

From fragmentation to integration: on the role of explicit hypotheses and economic theory in Global Political Economy1

“…In fact, the most prominent American IPE journals that originally were relatively receptive to critical work have until recently largely failed to publish it (the situation has not much changed since Maliniak and Tierney, 2009, although there are manifold exceptions). In addition to their varying regional popularity, critical schools tend to display divergences in style and, most importantly, are riddled with both apparent and genuine disagreements at the level of substance (on the general prospects of overcoming peer disagreements, see Kotilainen, 2021a). Their challenge towards the mainstream hence comes in a number of forms and is not easily summarised into a few key points of contestation.…”