Freedom Center Colloquium: Guido Melchior

Deep disagreement gained increasing attention in epistemology in the last years. Intuitively, deep disagreement arises if two parties fail to reach agreement about certain target propositions due to disagreement about fundamental “hinge” propositions and/or framework propositions about rules or conditions of rational argumentation. This paper will clarify two central questions concerning deep disagreement. First, it will elucidate the nature of deep disagreement by providing a taxonomy of various versions of deep disagreement, including deep disagreement relying on disagreement about the reliability of sources, on disagreement about premises of arguments and on disagreement about the rationality (or cogency) of arguments. Second, it provides arguments for why these versions of deep disagreement cannot be resolved via argumentation, which are based on reinterpretations of skeptical arguments.