Peer Disagreement and the Independence Principle

This paper argues that the proper epistemic response to peer disagreement should depend, in part, on our grounds for judging the other person to be an epistemic peer. In particular, it argues that we can violate David Christensen’s Independence principle if (a) our judgment that another person is an epistemic peer can only be established by track record judgments from the ground level, or (b) we put less trust in the reasons we relied on in judging the other person to be an epistemic peer than the reasons we relied on in arriving at the judgment that is the subject of our disagreement.