Contributors to the recent disagreement debate have sought to provide a uniform response to cases in which epistemic peers disagree about the epistemic import of a shared body of evidence, no matter what kind of evidence they are disagreeing about. The varied cases addressed in the literature have included examples of disagreement about restaurant bills, court verdicts, weather forecasting, chess, morality, religious beliefs, and even disagreements about philosophical disagreements. The equal treatment of these varied cases has motivated the search for (...) a uniform response to peer disagreement wherever it is encountered. In this article I challenge this prevalent approach in the literature. I grant the notion of epistemic peer and accept that being a peer may amount to the same thing in different domains; nonetheless I contend that different domains appear to call for different responses to disagreement. I argue that the appropriate response to finding out about a disagreement with a peer is different in different domains. (shrink)

Policy disputes arise at all scales of governance: in clubs, non-profits, firms, nations, and alliances of nations. Both the means and ends of policy are disputed. While many, perhaps most, policy disputes arise from conflicting ends, important disputes also arise from differing beliefs on how to achieve shared ends. In fact, according to many experts in economics and development, governments often choose policies that are “inefficient” in the sense that most everyone could expect to gain from other feasible policies. Many (...) other kinds of experts also see existing policies as often clearly inferior to known alternatives. (shrink)