A simulation model of peer disagreement
What is the appropriate response to peer disagreement? Much of the literature has focused on the debate between conciliationists and steadfasters. Roughly, conciliationists argue that one is required to revise one's attitude in the direction of one's peer. Steadfasters, by contrast, maintain that it is (sometimes) permissible to keep one's attitude towards the disputed proposition.
Conciliationism and steadfastness are relatively narrow views, focused on the appropriate attitude to take towards a disputed proposition. Other responses may be required. There is broad agreement in the literature that peer disagreement provides some kind of higher-order evidence. And as Steglich-Petersen (2019) has recently argued, higher-order defeat can induce rational pressure to become more responsive to further evidence. Along these lines, I take seriously a further candidate response: that peer disagreement requires agents to become more responsive to future evidence.
The proposed model builds on truth-approximation models developed by Hegselmann and Krause (2009), Douven (2010), and Douven and Kelp (2011), but departs from them in response to special concerns of the peer disagreement literature. In the proposed model, peers may conciliate or remain steadfast according to some weight ω. Second, they may adjust their responsiveness to future evidence, captured by a parameter α. Accordingly, the model represents possible responses to disagreement as points in the (ω, α)-space. Which points, or regions, in this space produce optimal results? The model suggests that there is no uniform answer. The suggested explanation: peer disagreements differ along epistemically relevant dimensions, and different disagreements demand different responses. The paper identifies some of these relevant dimensions and proposes some fine-tuned principles.
Use the interactive tool to explore how these factors affect the optimal response. For a full description of the model and a discussion of the results, see: