The Role of Groups in Complex Disagreement

Informations projet

DISAGROUP

N° de convention de subvention: 656082

DOI

10.3030/656082

Projet clôturé le 31 Mars 2018

Date de signature de la CE 7 Avril 2015

Date de début 1 Avril 2016

Date de fin 6 Août 2018

Financé au titre de

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Coût total

€ 200 194,80

Contribution de l’UE

€ 200 194,80

Coordonné par

KOBENHAVNS UNIVERSITET
Denmark

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - DISAGROUP (The Role of Groups in Complex Disagreement)

Période du rapport: 2016-04-01 au 2018-03-31

Résumé du contexte et des objectifs généraux du projet

The DISAGROUP project has investigated the phenomenon of complex disagreement in society from a philosophical perspective. Social epistemology has been mainly devoted to the study of peer disagreement (the kind of disagreement among individuals who share the same evidence and intellectual capacities). However, real-life disagreements such as long-standing religious, political or economic disagreements have a much more complex structure: the involved parties are not normally individual epistemic peers but groups that do not possess the same evidence or intellectual resources, they involve a lot of claims and are usually sustained not for the sake of knowledge but by elements such as faith, hate, intolerance or distrust. DISAGROUP has filled a gap in the philosophical literature by giving a general account of the structural elements that make most real-life disagreements so complex and difficult to understand, with a particular focus on the role played by groups in sustaining complex disagreements.

Travail effectué depuis le début du projet jusqu’à la fin de la période considérée dans le rapport et principaux résultats atteints jusqu’à présent

DISAGROUP has produced a novel approach to the epistemology of disagreement: the so-called epistemic improvement view, which offers an account of the epistemology of disagreement in terms of a fundamental epistemic norm that prescribes that in a disagreement (i) one should improve one’s epistemic state as much as one can by conciliating if the other party is in a better epistemic state and (ii) one should stick to one’s guns and thus not allow one’s epistemic state be downgraded by conciliating if the other party is in a worse epistemic state. This norm has proved to be applicable to all cases disagreements independently of its complexity and irrespectively of whether the disagreeing parties are in the same epistemic position or in different epistemic positions, thus sidestepping the kind of idealizations commonly presupposed in the current literature on the epistemology of disagreement. Importantly, this account has served to shed light both on idealized cases of peer disagreement and cases of complex disagreement, such as most public controversies, and especially on the role played by groups in such complex disagreements. In this regard, DISAGROUP has investigated the differences between inter-group and intra-group disagreements and the importance of certain group phenomena associated to deliberation such as group polarization in the development and resolution of those disagreements.

Progrès au-delà de l’état des connaissances et impact potentiel prévu (y compris l’impact socio-économique et les conséquences sociétales plus larges du projet jusqu’à présent)

The main progress of DISAGROUP beyond the state of the art has been to develop a novel view of the epistemology of disagreement that applies both to individual and group disagreement. In addition, it has produced the first programmatic paper on the epistemology and metaphysics of group polarization (the tendency of groups to lean towards more extremist positions after deliberation), a crucial group phenomenon that shapes inter-group disagreement.

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