Hidden Depths: Testimonial Injustice, Deep Disagreement, and Democratic Deliberation

ABSTRACT

Deep disagreements are those involving a disagreement about (relatively) fundamental epistemic principles. This paper considers the bearing of testimonial injustice, in Miranda Fricker’s sense, on the depth of disagreements, and what this can teach us about the nature and significance of deep disagreements. I start by re-evaluating T. J. Lagewaard’s recent argument that disagreements about the nature, scope, and impact of oppression will often be deepened by testimonial injustice, since the people best placed to offer relevant testimony will be subject to testimonial injustice, pushing the disagreement into one about the bearing of certain epistemic sources on the original debate. I take issue with this last step, but I build on the argument to bring attention to unappreciated and worrying ways in which prejudices can make a disagreement deep in ways that can be hidden from one or more of the participants and from observers. Finally, I revisit some of the ways that deep disagreement has been thought to be problematic for the proper functioning of a democracy, and I examine whether the kinds of hidden deep disagreements I argue for in the paper make these problems any worse, concluding that they likely do.

KEYWORDS:

• Deep disagreement
• epistemic injustice
• testimonial injustice
• democracy
• political polarisation

1. Introduction

Some disagreements are swiftly and easily resolved. If you and I disagree about how much each person owes for a restaurant bill that we’re splitting evenly between the diners in our party, having both done some mental arithmetic, or if we disagree about whether horse A or horse B crossed the finish line first, our difference of opinion is unlikely to be protracted. In the first case, more careful calculation or resorting to a calculator will soon tell us who was right and who was wrong, while in the second, slow-motion video replay or laser detectors can usually resolve things one way or the other.¹ In contrast, other disagreements are hopelessly stubborn, and may even impress as irresolvable, leaving no option but to ‘agree to disagree’. It’s worth noting that, however, these come in at least two different flavours. Disagreements over things like whether a particular joke was funny or whether stewed rhubarb is delicious often present as faultless, in the sense that it may seem to us that neither party is making a mistake, and perhaps even that both are getting things right from their own perspective. Here agreeing to disagree can involve the concession that the other party to the debate’s verdict seems just as valid as one’s own, despite the (apparent) conflict between them.² In contrast, we have other disagreements which are persistent, and which perhaps even seem irresolvable, but where we will agree to disagree only because we need to move on and do something else with our time, or because we want to try to keep the peace. That’s to say, in such cases we only agree to disagree in the sense that we may be willing to tolerate other views, out of practical necessity or respect for the demands of living in a pluralistic society, but without any temptation to think that opposing views are in any sense just as valid as our own. Longstanding moral and political disagreements tend to present as taking this form: philosophical disagreements often do too.

Let’s call this second category of persistent, perhaps irresolvable disagreements deep disagreements. Deep disagreements raise epistemological questions about the best framework for making sense of them, in particular for characterising and explaining their characteristic persistence and, relatedly, why the prospects for resolving them usually seem so dim; that is, epistemologists face the task of explaining what the nonmetaphorical content of describing such disagreements as ‘deep’ is. This task is part of my own agenda in this paper, and we’ll turn to it soon. Related to these theoretical and epistemological issues, deep disagreements are also widely thought to be of relevance to core concerns in political epistemology, and in particular, deep disagreements have been argued on a number of grounds to be a threat to genuinely democratic decision-making. For example, Michael Lynch writes:

It is not difficult to see why [deep] disagreements are problematic for democracies, especially in times of crisis. You cannot determine what to do in the face of the facts if you disagree over what the facts are. And you cannot agree on the facts if you do not agree on which epistemic and social-epistemic practices are reliable. (2021, 247)³

Lynch gives the example of trying to decide on policies on masks and vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic, given widespread disagreement over whether Dr. Anthony Fauci is a source of information or misinformation (2021, 244). Without some agreement on which people and institutions can be trusted when it comes to how (and even whether) to slow the spread of the virus and protect people against its worst effects, it will be difficult for any approach to command widespread support. In a similar vein, Jereon de Ridder writes that deep disagreements ‘undermine a crucial presupposition of epistemic democracy, to wit the availability of common ground for reasonable debate and deliberation’ (2021, 227).

Both de Ridder and Lynch also contend that deep disagreements can fan the flames of political polarisation. Polarisation can refer to a number of different troubling phenomena when it comes to political disagreement (Talisse 2021). It perhaps most often means the tendency of people on opposed sides of a disagreement to shift their views away from each other, thereby gradually adopting increasingly extreme stances relative to their original starting points. In the present context, a related but different phenomenon is intended: the tendency of people in longstanding political disputes to increasingly regard their opponents as having no epistemic or moral standing worth recognising, and so as not worth paying any attention to. The thought (to be elaborated on later) is that this kind of polarisation is encouraged by deep disagreement, and that this contributes to the deterioration of conditions in which democracy can properly flourish.⁴

So the phenomenon of deep disagreement is worth paying attention to, both for epistemological and for political reasons. My particular focus in this paper will be on the relationship between deep disagreement and what Miranda Fricker calls epistemic injustice. More specifically, I’ll examine the bearing of the dismissal of the testimony of members of certain social groups due to their audiences harbouring widely-held prejudices against those groups – what Fricker calls systematic cases of testimonial injustice – on disagreements and their depth.⁵

Having picked out our target phenomenon and said a little about what’s at stake, the rest of the paper will proceed as follows. In section 2, I offer a preliminary discussion of what makes a disagreement deep, in the relevant sense. I turn to an argument due to T. J. Lagewaard that testimonial injustice deepens disagreement in section 3, and I point out a lacuna in her reasoning. In section 4, I discuss the significance of this point, arguing that we should revise and broaden our conception of deep disagreements in a direction suggested by Lagewaard’s examples. I also consider the options available if we want to follow Robert Fogelin’s classic discussion in reserving the category of deep disagreements for a narrower set of cases, and I contend that adopting the more expansive conception is more motivated and illuminating. Finally, in section 5 I return to the political issues raised by deep disagreement, as sketched a few paragraphs ago, to see if the discussion of the earlier sections of this paper has altered how threatening those look in any significant respects.

2. What is Deep Disagreement?

In a helpful recent discussion, Ranalli (2021) offers an evaluation of the two main accounts of the nature of deep disagreements – of what makes them ‘deep’. The first of these accounts is the Wittgensteinian account, according to which deep disagreements are disagreements over hinge propositions: things that remain unquestioned and undoubted in order to provide a stable context in which inquiry can happen.⁶ These are the ‘hinges’ of Wittgenstein’s central metaphor in On Certainty (Wittgenstein 1969):

341. That is to say, the questions that we raise and our doubts depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt, are as it were like hinges on which those turn.

342. That is to say, it belongs to the logic of our scientific investigations that certain things are in deed not doubted.

343. But it isn’t that the situation is like this: We just can’t investigate everything, and for that reason we are forced to rest content with assumption. If I want the door to turn, the hinges must stay put.

344. My life consists in my being content to accept many things.

These remarks, particularly the final one, stand in need of some interpretation, which they have received in the vast secondary literature on On Certainty. What’s clear enough, though, is the idea that certain propositions must be kept fixed and exempted from doubt in order to provide a framework in which inquiry can take place, and that the reason these propositions aren’t themselves treated as part of what is being investigated is not merely a matter of human psychology or of the limits of what we can take on at once, but is rather build into the very activity of inquiry itself.

On the Wittgensteinian account, then, deep disagreement involves a clash over the propositions each party is treating as hinges, in this sense. Such disagreements will impress as persistent, perhaps irresolvable, since each of these hinges are being treated as unquestioned fixed points by one side, and as up for debate and perhaps subject to challenges by the other. Neither party is likely to get any traction on the other in such a dispute.⁷

The second account Ranalli discusses, and the one we’ll mostly focus on, holds that deep disagreement involves disagreement over fundamental epistemic principles.⁸ Epistemic principles, in general, are principles concerning how we ought to live our epistemic lives: how to form beliefs, make warranted assertions, engage in inquiry, and so on. In the present context, the focus is on principles concerning how we ought to form our beliefs. Fundamental epistemic principles are those that ‘can’t be shown to be true without employing the [epistemic] source that the relevant principle endorses as reliable’ (Ranalli 2021, 992). They are epistemically basic, permitting of no deeper, noncircular justification; one might naturally think here of a principle endorsing inductive reasoning, or reasoning with fundamental logical rules, or (more controversially) accepting the testimony of others in the absence of strong reasons not to. So the idea here is that deep disagreements are ones over epistemic principles that can only be justified with appeal to the very epistemic sources recommended by those principles. No wonder such disagreements are so hard to resolve – there doesn’t seem to be any straightforward way to persuade someone of any of these epistemic principles, if they don’t already accept them, since any attempt to justify them results in epistemic circularity.⁹

Ranalli raises several worries with this conception of deep disagreement, but the main objection is that it seems too narrow. There are disagreements that seem like they are deep, but which aren’t disagreements about fundamental epistemic principles; we might think here of persistent disagreements over fundamental moral and political principles, for example. Consider an argument over whether it is permissible and whether it should ever be legal to take another person’s life. Such a disagreement may have all the trappings of a deep one; in particular, it is likely to have the same characteristic persistence. But it is not about fundamental epistemic principles; it’s about the morality and legality of killing. Nor does this disagreement seem like a proxy for a disagreement about fundamental epistemic principles; it’s implausible that the clash is only superficially about the moral and legal status of killing, and that it’s really about epistemic matters.

In a recent paper, T. J. Lagewaard offers a version of this conception of deep disagreement that addresses this issue, suggesting that deep disagreements are, to a first approximation, those that ‘involve’ disagreements about epistemic principles, rather than only those that are ‘about’ such epistemic principles (2021, 1572). That’s only a slight difference on the page, but it seems to create just the room we want to resist the current charge of narrowness. It allows us to say that disagreement over fundamental moral matters isn’t about epistemic principles, and isn’t even going proxy for disagreement about epistemic principles; nonetheless, it may involve disagreement over epistemic principles, and it’s this lack of epistemological common ground on which to conduct the original disagreement that makes it deep. In such disagreements, each party is genuinely engaged in offering evidence, reasons, and arguments in favour of their preferred conclusion about morality, but they don’t agree on what kind of considerations or methods are relevant or decisive, so their attempts to convince the other don’t get much purchase. No wonder little, if any, progress is made. Lagewaard nicely sums this account of the depth of certain disagreements as follows:

What makes this kind of disagreement special? It is not just a disagreement about facts (the age of the earth) but also about the relevant methods, evidence, standards, and arguments to be used to obtain knowledge in the domain under discussion. (2021, 1573)

I think it’s clear that this shift improves on the original version of the fundamental epistemic principles account of deep disagreement. That said, in the next two sections I’m going to argue that it’s still too narrow, repurposing an argument of Lagewaard’s own.¹⁰ However, before turning to those issues properly, we need to note one other feature of Lagewaard’s account of deep disagreement that’s crucial for understanding her argument, as well as many of my own points later in this paper.

The keen-eyed reader might have noticed that when I described Lagewaard’s account in the previous paragraphs, I referred to ‘epistemic principles’, dropping the qualifier ‘fundamental’. This wasn’t an accident. Lagewaard suggests that we need to treat both the depth of a disagreement and the fundamentality of epistemic principles as gradable matters rather than as all or nothing, with deeper disagreements involving disagreement over relatively fundamental epistemic principles, and only the deepest of deep disagreements involving disagreement over absolutely fundamental epistemic principles, in the sense characterised above (where any attempt to establish their reliability involves epistemic circularity).¹¹

An example will help make this notion of relative fundamentality clearer. Consider a disagreement over the age of the Earth between a Young Earth Creationist who believes that that it is no more than 6000 years old, and someone who instead contends that it is millions of years old. The disagreement is meant to be deep since the parties to it will disagree on epistemic principles too, specifically those concerning whether the Bible or contemporary science are more trustworthy sources when it comes to the age of the Earth. However, Lagewaard points out that although this is a standard example of deep disagreement in the literature, it’s not clear it involves disagreement over absolutely fundamental epistemic principles (2021, 1573–4). She writes:

The epistemic principle ‘The Bible is a source of knowledge about the age of the earth’, does not seem fundamental in the way principles concerning perception or introspection do. In the case of the Bible as source of knowledge, there are other, more fundamental, epistemic principles that can be invoked to argue for and against this principle, such as principles concerning divine revelation, testimony, or induction. Similarly, the epistemic principle that tells that we can gain knowledge from evolutionary science seems derived and not fundamental. Its reliability could be shown by pointing to the reliability of science or scientific methods in general, which in turn could be defended by pointing to the reliability of, for example, sense perception, which can only [be shown] to be reliable with circular arguments. (2021, 1574)

Lagewaard doesn’t deny that we could offer other examples which really do involve fundamental epistemic principles, in the original sense, or that we could perhaps reconstruct this example to better fit the pattern prescribed by the fundamental epistemic principles account of deep disagreement. However, she thinks that would be to miss something important, namely that the reason this example has been so commonly discussed in the literature is that it is ‘as good an example as any of the kinds of real-life systematic, entrenched, deep disagreements one would want to include’ (2021, 1575). That is, as described, it’s precisely the kind of example that we want to make sense of, and so if it doesn’t quite fit the mould, that suggests we need to introduce more flexibility into our conception of deep disagreement.

Hence Lagewaard’s proposal that there can be deep disagreements over epistemic principles that are somewhat derivative rather than absolutely fundamental, in the way that the epistemic principles at issue in the disagreement over the age of the Earth are derivative. Moreover, epistemic principles can be more or less derivative. For example, an epistemic principle that recommends trusting Dr Fauci on matters relating to public health, as in Lynch’s example, is at further remove from absolutely fundamental principles than one recommending that we trust the deliverances of contemporary science and the medical establishment. Lagewaard sees these relative degrees of derivativeness as related to the prospects, in principle, of rationally resolving the disagreement.¹² A disagreement about, say, vaccines that involves an underlying disagreement about Dr Fauci’s trustworthiness might, in principle at least, be resolved if the parties share an underlying commitment to epistemic principles recommending believing the best-supported policies and theories produced by contemporary science and the medical establishment. A disagreement that involved an underlying disagreement about these epistemic principles could in principle be settled by an appeal to a shared commitment to scientific methodology, including a reliance on perception and inductive reasoning. But if even epistemic principles recommending these basic ways of acquiring information about the world and drawing conclusions from it are controversial, it’s hard to see how any progress can be possible. Lagewaard uses ‘deep’ to pick out disagreements that will be relatively difficult to resolve, as they involve underlying disagreement about relatively fundamental epistemic principles (2021, 1576). The deepest disagreements are those involving a dispute over absolutely fundamental epistemic principles, and these will tend to be the ones that impress as virtually intractable.¹³

With Lagewaard’s framework laid out, we can now understand the central claim of her paper. Epistemic injustice – and most relevantly here, testimonial injustice – deepens disagreement, by which Lagewaard means it can convert a shallow disagreement about certain topic into a disagreement that’s also about relatively fundamental epistemic principles. Let’s turn to her argument for this conclusion.

3. Testimonial Injustice and Deepened Disagreement

Recall from the introduction that testimonial injustice involves a speaker receiving a credibility deficit from their audience, due to prejudices held by that audience. In the most typical and central cases of testimonial injustice, these are systematic and widespread prejudices against the speaker’s social identity. How does testimonial injustice, so characterised, give rise to relatively deep disagreement?

Lagewaard invites us to consider an example: disagreement over whether racism is a significant problem in contemporary Dutch society, and the role of ‘Black Pete’ in both sustaining racism, and in masking and minimising it (by presenting racist practices as harmless traditions, for instance). This should, Lagewaard thinks, be a shallow disagreement. In addition to there being plenty of data to show about the impact of racism on black Dutch people, there are, more relevantly for our current concerns, plenty of people who could testify to the reality and impact of racism in contemporary Dutch life, and to ‘Black Pete’s’ role in that. However, Lagewaard argues that the very people best placed to speak to these issues are subject to testimonial injustices on this subject, forcing disagreement on it to be relatively deep; these testimonial injustices prevent any kind of straightforward resolution on the basis of evidence and testimony, and introduce disagreement about the status of the epistemic sources that are relevant to resolving the initial disagreement.¹⁴ Here is how Lagewaard puts her argument:

[A] disagreement is deep when it involves disagreement about relatively fundamental epistemic principles. This is exactly the effect of testimonial injustice: it adds to the original disagreement a higher-order disagreement about epistemic principles governing the evaluation and uptake of testimony. In addition to the original disagreement about whether racism is a significant problem, there is now a further disagreement about whose testimony counts as good […] evidence to settle this question or about how testimony by victims of racism ought to be weighed against other sources of evidence. More specifically: the majority who don’t experience racism themselves implicitly or explicitly reject an epistemic principle that stipulates how testimony ought to be treated – or, even more precisely, they reject the application of this principle to the case at hand – whereas the minority who does experience racism firsthand takes (this application of) such a principle to be correct. (2021, 1584)

It’s worth emphasising that Lagewaard’s argument, if it works, is general rather than turning on the specifics of this particular example. Whenever we have a disagreement which could be settled by the testimony of members of a group who are subject to systematic identity-prejudicial credibility deficits, her reasoning suggests that we’re going to find ourselves dealing with a relatively deep disagreement.¹⁵

With respect to the example of racism in the Netherlands and ‘Black Pete’, Lagewaard sums up her case that epistemic injustice has deepened this disagreement as follows:

Specifically, there is disagreement about (the application of) epistemic principles concerning (A) whether private first-personal experience of racism is a weighty source of evidence in this domain, (B) whether victims of racism count as important testifiers in this domain, and (C) how to assess testimony that is not (fully) intelligible to you because it employs concepts and terminology you are unfamiliar with. The dominant group can easily deny that there is anything new or relevant to be known about racism in the Netherlands by dismissing the relevant testimony and epistemic resources, which boils down to disagreement on the level of epistemic principles concerning (A), (B), and (C). (2021, 1584)¹⁶

This passage states very explicitly the step in Lagewaard’s argument I want to challenge, namely her claim that prejudicially dismissing the testimony of some social group ‘boils down to’ disagreement about epistemic principles concerning how much weight to give their testimony. I don’t think that’s the right way to think about what’s going on in examples like this one. One aspect of Fricker’s view is that we often perpetrate testimonial injustice without realising that we’ve done anything wrong. The credibility deficits involved in testimonial injustices are credibility judgments that have been influenced by prejudice, but such credibility judgments are not typically ones that we make consciously, but rather ‘in a lower-level, more automatic manner’ (Fricker 2007, 66). We’re often not aware of having made these judgments, let alone what they are based on. Even calling them ‘judgments’ may be misleading, since Fricker offers a perceptual model of what they involve; ones prejudices can be imagistic in form, influencing how one sees people from certain social groups, and in particular how credible one sees them as.¹⁷ Relatedly, Fricker is very clear that the prejudicial perceptions we have of people may conflict with our explicitly and sincerely held beliefs about them and about whether they are credible on a given subject (2007, 36–38). She writes:

I believe that the right vision of epistemic relations is such that testimonial injustice goes on much of the time, and while it may be hard enough to police one’s beliefs for prejudice, it is significantly harder reliably to filter out the prejudicial stereotypes that inform one’s social perceptions directly, without doxastic mediation. Many instances of testimonial injustice will be importantly unlike Tom Robinson’s case, for many cases will be owing not to prejudiced beliefs at all but only to stealthier, residual prejudices, whose content may even be flatly inconsistent with the beliefs actually held by the subject.¹⁸ Certainly we may sometimes perpetrate testimonial injustice because of our beliefs; but the more philosophically intriguing prospect is that we may very frequently do it in spite of them. (2007, 36)

It’s this aspect of Fricker’s view that makes me sceptical of Lagewaard’s claim that if someone prejudicially rejects the testimony of a particular social group on some topic, that means that they disagree about some epistemic principles with those who accept that testimony. They may instead be failing to live up to epistemic principles that they reflectively and sincerely endorse. Rather than indicating disagreement about epistemic principles concerning the weight that should be accorded to the testimony of a certain social group, the kind of example Lagewaard describes is compatible with all parties agreeing on all the relevant epistemic principles.

Perhaps with something like this kind of point in mind, in a passage quoted more fully above Lagewaard writes that ‘the majority who don’t experience racism themselves implicitly or explicitly reject an epistemic principle that stipulates how testimony ought to be treated – or, even more precisely, they reject the application of this principle to the case at hand’ (2021, 1584, emphasis added). The reference to ‘implicit’ rejection might seem to handle the objection raised in the previous paragraph, by allowing my point to be harmlessly recast as follows; the hearers who reject the testimony of black Dutch people on issues around racism and ‘Black Pete’ implicitly reject an epistemic principle, even if they don’t do so explicitly (and perhaps even if they explicitly endorse it). This doesn’t seem like the right description, though; failing to live up to a principle one explicitly accepts is not happily thought of as a way of implicitly rejecting that principle. One might also have noticed that in both this quote and in the other passage from Lagewaard’s paper I’ve been discussing, she indicates – sometimes parenthetically – that perhaps the disagreement in her example is deep because testimonial injustice pushes it into a disagreement about the application of particular epistemic principles, rather than the principles themselves. This too seems like it might have some potential to help accommodate the challenge I’ve raised, perhaps in tandem with the idea that the disagreement might be implicit rather than explicit. However, Lagewaard doesn’t develop this aspect of her discussion, and it’s not easy to see how to give it the substance it needs to avoid collapsing into the position that I’m arguing for. If testimonial injustice sometimes deepens disagreement only in the sense that it causes people to implicitly reject the application of certain epistemic principles to a specific case, that reads like precisely the kind of abandonment of the idea that deep disagreement always involves a ‘further’ or ‘higher-order’ disagreement about epistemic principles that I’ve been advocating for, rather than a way to save that idea from the challenge I have raised.

4. Reconceiving Deep Disagreement

One option we have at this stage is to give up on Lagewaard’s argument, rejecting her conclusion that testimonial injustice deepens disagreement, or at least regarding it as unsubstantiated. Such a reaction need not involve a commitment to denying that testimonial injustice can compound the difficulties already involved in disagreement over matters like racism. However, it will involve a denial that this dynamic has any interesting implications for the nature or scope of deep disagreement, properly understood. It’s worth noting that this kind of response is somewhat pre-empted in Robert Fogelin’s classic early and influential discussion of deep disagreement. Fogelin distinguishes between deep disagreements, which he takes to involve a ‘clash in underlying principles’, and disagreements which are similarly persistent, but for other reasons – and here he explicitly mentions disagreements in which one of the parties is prejudiced (Fogelin 2005, 5).¹⁹ Isn’t this a pretty clear sign that if we insist on classifying examples like Lagewaard’s as deep (or at least deepened) disagreements, despite my argument that they involve no disagreement (and may even involve agreement) about underlying principles, we’re on the wrong track?²⁰

I’ll return to this objection in a moment. First, I want to give a bit more substance to the alternative reaction, which takes Lagewaard’s argument and conclusion to be on the right track despite the lacuna pointed out in the previous section. In section 2 above we saw that Lagewaard takes deep disagreement to involve disagreement about epistemic principles, and that this marks an improvement over a narrower conception which insists that deep disagreements are about such principles. However, what I’ve argued is that testimonial injustice need not result in, as Lagewaard puts it, a ‘further’, ‘higher-order disagreement about epistemic principles governing the evaluation and uptake of testimony’ (2021, 1584). It can instead result in (at least) one party to the original disagreement failing to live up to epistemic principles that they agree on – principles that are shared commitments.

The key point is that although Lagewaard’s example doesn’t involve a ‘clash in underlying principles’ in the sense Fogelin expects, or a further ‘higher-order’ disagreement about epistemic principles in Lagewaard’s sense, the example does feature something that has much the same effect. Even if the parties to the disagreement in fact agree to the same principles, it’s as if they don’t, due to one party failing to live up to those principles (where this in turn is due to their prejudices).

Let’s return at this point to the issues raised by Fogelin’s distinction between genuine deep disagreements and those that are persistent merely because one party is prejudiced. It’s crucial for my purposes here to get down to the root of what Fogelin is interested in. What’s driving his focus on deep disagreement is the idea (inspired by Wittgenstein) that some disagreements ‘cannot be resolved through the use of argument, for they undercut the conditions essential to arguing’ (2005, 5) – both of the two broad conceptions of deep disagreement we started with in section 2 are attempts to spell this idea out. This invites the question whether the dynamic involved in Lagewaard’s example involves an undercutting of ‘the conditions essential to arguing’, once we no longer think of it as involving a disagreement about epistemic principles, but rather one party failing to live up to principles they agree on.

The answer is, I think, ‘partially’. In Lagewaard’s example, at least one central source of evidence which might otherwise have served to resolve the original disagreement becomes unavailable. Indeed, for aspects of the original disagreement, as Lagewaard describes it, it may be difficult to imagine any other sources of evidence, independent of the testimony of the relevant group, that are all that relevant. With respect to the impact of racism on contemporary Dutch life, there may be data to appeal to, showing that race is a factor in determining outcomes across various measures of well-being and opportunity; we might look at outcomes concerning education, housing, health, employment, and so on, and demonstrate various worrying patterns of race-based discrimination and disadvantage. But there are aspects of the disagreement in Lagewaard’s example, and this may include the issues around the impact of ‘Black Pete’, that perhaps unavoidably turn on the testimony of black Dutch people about their own negative experiences: for example, people’s experiences of being made to feel like second-class citizens, and the psychological impact of racism on its targets. These aspects of the disagreement will become very difficult to resolve, in much the way that seems to worry Fogelin, since there doesn’t seem to be another source of evidence that’s independent of the prejudicially-rejected testimony. What Lagewaard’s cases suggest, if my point about them is taken on board, is that what Fogelin calls ‘the conditions essential to arguing’ involve not just agreement on epistemic principles, but must also include conditions under which both parties can live up to those principles; it’s no use if one party systematically falls short of the epistemic principles they agree on.

That said – and this explains why my answer is only ‘partially’ in the prior paragraph – Fogelin is clearly concerned about disagreements that are impossible to resolve through the usual persuasive means due to a lack of shared background, and the dynamic involved in Lagewaard’s example seems more limited in scope and less absolute than this. As we just noted, there may be other sources of evidence relevant to at least some aspects of the disagreement in her example that are not undermined by any identity prejudices, and Lagewaard sensibly doesn’t try to argue that testimonial injustice renders the disagreement totally irresolvable. However, these limitations to her conclusion should come as no surprise. Recall from section 2 above that Lagewaard conceives of depth as a spectrum, rather than as one half of a binary, and that her conclusion is that testimonial injustice deepens disagreement, rendering it relatively deep rather than absolutely deep. So to the extent I may have departed from some of Fogelin’s original concerns and assumptions, much of this is due to features of Lagewaard’s framework that I have adopted, rather to my specific contention that deep disagreement needn’t involve disagreement about underlying principles.

Still, I need to acknowledge that I’ve perhaps departed somewhat from the picture of the relative depths of different disagreements offered by Lagewaard. Recall that her account of this variability in depth, and so the prospects of resolution, links it to variability in the fundamentality of the epistemic principles under dispute; I gave an example to illustrate this aspect of Lagewaard’s account above in section 2. I think such considerations should be part of the story, but I’ve also argued with respect to Lagewaard’s example that we also need to pay attention to questions concerning the availability of other sources of evidence; specifically, the degree to which testimonial injustice renders a disagreement difficult to resolve depends on whether there are sources of evidence to potentially settle it other than the testimony of members of the social group targeted by the relevant prejudices. Strictly speaking, this is consistent with Lagewaard’s picture of the relative depth of disagreements as I understand it and as I presented it above, since I was careful to frame it in terms of the degree to which different disagreements were resolvable ‘in principle’, and one might hold that a disagreement can be resolvable in principle in the relevant sense even if it happens that the only form of evidence that would settle it is subject to the kind of dynamic pointed out by Lagewaard. Still, it’s hard not to suspect that even if this is consistent with the letter of Lagewaard’s picture of relative depth, it offends against its spirit. That’s a consequence I’m willing to live with.

This reminder that Lagewaard takes depth to be a spectrum, rather than there being a deep/shallow binary, also helps us respond to a natural worry one might have at this stage in my discussion. I have, in effect, proposed that prejudice that has in practice the same effect as rejecting an epistemic principle should be given the same significance as actually rejecting that principle, when it comes to thinking about how deep the disagreement is. But one might wonder whether this threatens to simply dissolve Fogelin’s distinction between deep disagreements and those based on mere prejudice entirely. We may even see a danger that any disagreement that’s overly persistent due to one party cognitively underperforming for any reason – prejudice, tiredness, dogmatism, drunkenness, grief, inherent stubbornness or arrogance, misplaced loyalty to others, sheer ignorance, and so on – will count as deep. After all, in each of these cases, the disagreement many involve one party behaving as if they reject an epistemic principle that they in fact would accept. Are we to say that these disagreements are all deep too, in virtue of this observation? We seem to have lost any purchase on the idea that there’s a special category of disagreements which are particularly persistent, and where this persistence is explained in a distinctive way, contrasting with more typical ways that people can get entrenched on different sides of an issue.

However, once we’re thinking of depth as a relative matter, and we connect this to the prospects of a relatively straightforward and evidence-based resolution in something like the manner proposed by Lagewaard, it seems harmless to say that some of these ways in which people can underperform can indeed make a disagreement a bit deeper. Importantly, though, there is also still something special about the kind of cases Lagewaard directs our attention to. Any disagreement can become harder to resolve due to one side underperforming in the ways described in the previous paragraph, whereas it’s in the nature of the question under dispute in Lagewaard’s example that the deepening dynamic arises. Crucial to the point of the example is that the very testimony systematically dismissed due to widespread prejudices is one of the best sources of evidence available to settle the disagreement. So there’s typically a difference of degree between Lagewaard’s example and the others when it comes to depth, but there is also a difference in kind that we need to appreciate.

Still, as I conceded above, something of Fogelin’s conception of deep disagreements surely has been lost; we no longer have a sharp distinction between disagreements that involve ‘a clash in underlying principles’ and those that don’t. I’m inclined to bite the bullet here, however, since I don’t see any reason why Lagewaard’s conclusion needs to be entirely conservative with respect to Fogelin’s conception of deep disagreement. After all, we can take her to be expanding our conception of what can cause the kind of depth – persistence—of certain kinds of disagreements beyond those acknowledged by Fogelin, and to be offering examples that suggest that such an expansion is a principled one.

5. Hidden Deep Disagreements and the Epistemic Conditions of Democracy

In the introduction, I noted that deep disagreements have been argued to be of political significance, in particular due to the way they seem to infer with informed and democratic decision-making, and the way that they may contribute to political polarisation (in the sense that people on opposing sides to a political disagreement increasing regard each other as not merely wrong, but in some sense epistemically and morally deficient for holding the view that they do). I haven’t argued here that these political consequences of deep disagreement are genuine, but I’m going to assume that they are, based on the kinds of arguments given by de Ridder, Lynch, and others, and focus my attention on the more specific question of how the conclusions of the last two sections of the present paper bear distinctively on these issues.

This proves to be a relatively subtle matter. Take the first point about the political consequences of deep disagreement, namely that it makes democratic decision making difficult, perhaps close to impossible, as illustrated by Lynch’s example of public health policy during the COVID-19 pandemic. On the face of it, such concerns are made even worse if we take seriously the idea that the kinds of disagreements that can scupper democratic decision-making in this fashion can take the form I’ve suggested. For one thing, as I’ve been stressing, it looks like even securing agreement on all relevant epistemic principles may not be enough to make a disagreement relatively shallow and so resolvable, if one party harbours prejudices that effectively strip that agreement of its capacity to act as a shared background. For another, I’m offering a conception on which the depth of a disagreement can be hidden even from – perhaps especially from – the opposing parties, but often also from others too; the depth of such disagreements can be as hidden as the prejudices causing one side to fail to live up to their epistemic principles. Given this, it will often be an uncertain and contested matter where these deep disagreements lie. This seems to exacerbate the problems for democratic decision-making raised by deep disagreements.²¹

It’s worth expanding a little on what precisely the issue raised by hidden deep disagreements of this sort is. Here’s the possibility that should, in my view, trouble us; what can have the appearance of robust but tractable disagreement over the facts and what to do, in light of shared commitments to relevant epistemic principles – something of a paradigmatic way to reach justified collective decisions in a liberal democracy – can in fact often be something of an illusion. I think it’s illuminating to think of this as in effect a scaled-up version of an insidious dynamic pointed out by Nora Berenstain in her work on epistemic exploitation (2016). Epistemic exploitation involves members of dominant social groups demanding that members of oppressed groups educate them concerning the nature and impact of their oppression. Berenstain argues that this imposes all kinds of costs on those thereby exploited, but that it can have the outward appearance of a virtuous practice, since it can appear both to the perpetrator and to others as a well-intentioned attempt to redress their ignorance (2016, 570–1). Indeed, Berenstain argues that it can in fact be entirely well-intentioned attempt to redress one’s own ignorance, and yet still be exploitative. Moreover, she thinks that the fact that the very people targeted by epistemic exploitation are those who most often face systematic testimonial injustices means that as a vehicle of education, this practice is doomed to failure; it’s not merely exploitative, but inherently ineffectual (2016, 584). I’m suggesting that hidden injustice-based deep disagreements similarly serve to disguise problem areas for collective decision-making as the kind of productive disagreement that is lifeblood of liberal democracies.²²

What about the second way in which deep disagreement has been thought to be democratically problematic? Here, recall, the issue was that deep disagreement seems to increase a certain kind of political polarisation, in the sense that it can lead to one’s regard for one’s opponents (and not merely their conflicting convictions) getting lower and lower, until one can entirely dismiss anything they have to say. As de Ridder puts it:

Not only will they see each other as having made a mistake about an issue, they will also see each other’s way of thinking or reasoning about the issue as mistaken. They will consider each other as less than fully rational or moral. (2021, 233)

One’s opponents cease to be people with alternative perspectives which one might learn from or test one’s own views with respect to, and become at best distractions, at worst obstacles to the spread of truth. de Ridder argues that this attitude is encouraged by deep disagreements, since those involve taking one’s opponents to be misguided not just about the facts, but on how to even begin to get at the facts.²³ An initial thought one might have is that hidden deep disagreements, of the sort I’ve argued for, will lack these effects. After all, these effects seem to be the result of at least one party to a disagreement recognising that the other fails to share their epistemic principles; it’s this recognition that triggers the epistemic and moral disapproval towards the other party to the disagreement, as de Ridder spells out his argument. Since I’ve argued that this kind of disagreement on principles isn’t an aspect of the examples I’ve focused on, one might think we avoid this particular polarising dynamic. However, even if that’s right as far as it goes, it doesn’t go very far. The reason is that there’s an obvious modification of de Ridder’s point that still bites in the cases we’ve been discussing, since in such cases at least one side (and possibly both) will regard the other as failing to live up to those shared principles, and this is likely to encourage them to consider their opponent as intellectually and morally deficit.

With respect to the first way in which deep disagreement has been thought to interfere with a society functioning democratically, I have argued that the kinds of hidden deep disagreements engendered by testimonial injustice make things worse than previously thought. With respect to the second, so far my conclusion is that the cases I’ve been discussing raise very similar issues to more typical examples of deep disagreement, if we accept de Ridder’s argument about the latter. In fact, though, I think things are messier than this. To bring this out, let me consider an objection to what I’ve argued in this section so far. One might make the following charge; my discussion of the first point leaned heavily on the idea that the depth of some of Lagewaard’s examples of injustice-based deep disagreement will be hidden, particularly to some of those involved in the disagreement, while my discussion of the second point focused on the consequences of one side to such a disagreement recognising that the other isn’t living up to the epistemic principles they both espouse. There’s something of a tension in my treatment of these two points, taken together, or so one might think.

Any tension is merely apparent. The position I argued for in sections 3 and 4 of this paper wasn’t that Lagewaard’s examples of testimonial injustice-based deep disagreement will all be hidden to all parties, but only that’ll they will be hidden to the degree that the prejudices involved in the testimonial injustices are hidden. This may vary along a number of dimensions. Most obviously, the unprejudiced party to the disagreement may be much better placed to recognise the role being played by prejudice in the other party’s judgments. Then again, they may not; it may require the perspective of a third-party to spot the distorting role being played by prejudices. Or it may be that no one is well-placed to spot this role – there may simply be too many other possible explanations for why one party to the disagreement might be failing to live up to the epistemic principles that they agree to for anyone to be sure that systematic identity prejudice is the right culprit.²⁴ The details of specific examples will matter, but however those details go, the overall effect, as I put it above, will be to make issues about which disagreements are deep an uncertain and contested matter. That was the basis of my first claim about the political bearing of the conclusions of sections 3 and 4. It’s totally compatible with all of this that in some cases, one party to a disagreement recognises that their opponent’s judgments fail to live up to the epistemic principles that they claim to share, and that’s what I’ve suggested triggers the kind of polarisation that worried de Ridder. Actual cases of deep disagreement driven by testimonial injustice, of the sort Lagewaard gives us, may involve aspects of both of these troubling dynamics. That’s why there’s no tension between the points I’ve been making in this final section; when it comes to the ways that the examples I’ve discussed in this paper might be threatening to a society functioning effectively as a democracy, we can – unfortunately – have our cake and eat it too.

6. Conclusion

In this paper, I’ve distinguished deep disagreements from other philosophically and epistemologically interesting kinds of disagreement, and engaged with questions about the nature of deep disagreements – what makes them deep, in the relevant sense – and about their political significance. I’ve endorsed Lagewaard’s argument that systematic testimonial injustice can play a role in making what should be a shallow disagreement into a (relatively) deep one, but I’ve argued that this argument only goes through if we’re willing to broaden our conception of deep disagreement to include cases in which there’s agreement on epistemic principles, but prejudice prevents at least one party to the disagreement from living up to those principles. I’ve discussed how well this expanded conception of deep disagreement fits with Fogelin’s original discussion of the phenomenon, and lastly, I’ve argued that if we accept my conclusion, the examples I’ve focused on in the paper suggest deep disagreements can be even more troubling for attempts to put democratic decision-making on a solid epistemic footing than has previously been thought.

Acknowledgments

This publication was made possible through funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 870883.

My thanks to audience members at the 2022 European Epistemology Network meeting, hosted by the Cogito Epistemology Research Centre at the University of Glasgow, particularly to Thirza Lagewaard, Guido Melchior, Chris Ranalli and Mona Simion, as well as to anonymous readers for this journal.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Though if I regard you as an epistemic peer with respect to the issues under contention, there are tricky and widely discussed questions about whether and how I need to change my confidence in my original verdict while we wait for this further evidence. The restaurant example comes from Christensen (2007, 193), and the horse race from Elga (2007, 486–487).

2. Such ‘faultless’ disagreements have often been thought to call into question the objectivity of the domain under dispute (for example, matters of taste), and to call for some kind of relativistic treatment, though it’s contested what exactly this involves. See, for example, Wright (1992) and the papers in Wright (2023), and MacFarlane (2014, chapter 7).

3. Lynch calls the kinds of cases we’re interested in ‘epistemic disagreements’ instead of the more standard ‘deep disagreements’.

4. Reflecting my primary focus in section 5 below, this sketches de Ridder’s point rather than Lynch’s, though I do say a little about the latter below too.

5. For Fricker, epistemic injustice involves a person being wronged distinctively in their capacity as a knower, or more generally, an epistemic agent. Testimonial injustice need not be systematic, but can result from more idiosyncratic or local prejudices (Fricker 2007, 27), but I will focus exclusively on systematic cases here, and so I mostly drop the qualification. Fricker also identifies a second variety of epistemic injustice, hermeneutical injustice, which involves people facing obstacles to making some of their significant social experiences intelligible, to themselves or to others, where those obstacles are due to their belonging to a social group that has been largely excluded from the practices and institutions that play the largest role in shaping a society’s shared hermeneutical resources. For more detailed discussion of how best to understand testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, see McGlynn (forthcoming). I won’t discuss hermeneutical injustice and its relationship to deep disagreement here, but see Lagewaard (2021).

6. Ranalli in fact works with a more general notion of a hinge ‘commitment’; such commitments may take the form of propositions, but he wants to allow that what plays this Wittgensteinian hinge-role can take different forms (Ranalli 2021, 986 fn8). I am going to stick to the usual label here for reasons of simplicity and familiarity.

7. Ranalli suggests that proponents of the Wittgensteinian account will likely accept that it’s too narrow, and will allow that a deep disagreement can be about claims acting as proxies for hinge propositions (Ranalli 2021, 988); for example, a disagreement over the permissibility of abortion may be a proxy for a number of deeper disagreements about claims concerning bodily autonomy, feminism, certain religious teachings, and so on, and these claims (or their negations) may be hinges for the participants.

8. Ranalli presents the Wittgensteinian account and the fundamental epistemic principles account as two rival conceptions of deep disagreements. It’s worth noting that if one holds a view on which epistemic principles are to play the role of hinges, these won’t be genuine alternatives.

9. Again, Ranalli thinks that on this conception deep disagreements can be over ‘proxies’ for fundamental epistemic principles of this kind, as when a disagreement over a particular theological claim is a proxy for an underlying disagreement concerning the epistemic status of religious experiences.

10. As I note in the final section of this paper, de Ridder holds that this kind of conception of deep disagreement is too narrow for a different reason. He is motivated by cases of deep disagreement about moral matters to propose that sometimes a disagreement can be deep because it involves disagreement over fundamental moral principles. I’ll follow Lagewaard here in taking epistemic principles to have a special relationship to deep disagreements, but nothing turns crucially on this choice in this paper.

11. Compare also de Ridder (2021, 229) and Lynch (2021, 247–248).

12. Compare de Ridder (2021, 229).

13. Note that the idea of a derived epistemic principle isn’t the same as Ranalli’s notion of a proxy disagreement, even if there are some superficial points of similarity and overlap. Ranalli’s notion concerns what a disagreement is really, at heart, about, and that’s not what Lagewaard is getting at all; as we’ve already noted, a deep disagreement about morals is about those moral issues, even if it also involves disagreement about epistemic principles. Relatedly, the propositions acting as proxies needn’t themselves be epistemic principles; in the example I offered above, a disagreement about a particular theological claim can be proxy for a disagreement about epistemic principles concerning religious experience, but the theological claim isn’t thereby a derived epistemic principle.

14. Lagewaard supports this claim in part by appealing to standpoint epistemology, according to which there can be a position of epistemic advantage associated with disadvantaged social groups. Whether this appeal is crucial for Lagewaard’s argument is a good question; I’m inclined to think it’s not, but I lack space to pursue the point here.

15. I lack space to go into details, but perhaps another example is offered by Elizabeth Barnes’s discussion of the way that testimony by disabled people about their own well-being is prejudicially dismissed (2016, chapter 4).

16. The third kind of disagreement about epistemic principles Lagewaard mentions here, (C), concerns hermeneutical injustice, and so it’s not relevant for the present paper.

17. In more recent work, Fricker has expressly described the kinds of prejudices involved in testimonial injustice as implicit biases (2016, 162).

18. Tom Robinson’s inability to get the jury to take his testimony seriously due to their prejudices against disabled black men during his trial in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is one of Fricker’s two main examples of systematic testimonial injustice.

19. Fogelin’s discussion makes it clear that he holds a version of what in section 2 we called the Wittgensteinian account of deep disagreement. I briefly suggested there that this need not be taken as a rival to a version which focuses on epistemic principles; but in any case, the difference between these conceptions of deep disagreement doesn’t matter for my discussion of Fogelin in this section.

20. Thanks to Guido Melchior and Mona Simion for pushing me to address this worry more fully.

21. That a disagreement is deep can be hidden in an uninteresting sense, when the relevant epistemic principles each accepts remains private to each participant; a disagreement over epistemic principles may simply not yet have come to light. What makes the cases I’m considering more interesting is that the depth of these disagreements can remain hidden even when the epistemic principles accepted by both parties are a matter of mutual or public knowledge.

22. de Ridder also argues that deep disagreements put pressure on the idea that disagreement is good for democracy (see especially 2021, 226–7), though this is due to the worries about polarisation that I’ll turn to next in the main text. My distinctive claim here is that testimonial injustice gives rise to deep disagreements that can appear shallow (and so potentially democratically beneficial), even to those involved in them. The point is something of a converse of one made in Lynch 2021; Lynch argues that sometimes shallow disagreements can be mistaken for relatively deep ones, and that these misperceived shallow disagreements lead to polarisation in way that’s damaging to democracy.

23. A complication I’ve ignored in the main text is that de Ridder has a slightly broader conception of deep disagreement that the one I’ve been working with in this paper since section 2, since he takes deep disagreements to involve disagreements about fundamental epistemic principles or fundamental moral principles, rather than just the former (2021, 228–231). I’m disinclined to follow de Ridder here, but I don’t think it matters for any of my arguments. One might think that I should remove the references to moral disapproval in my discussion of de Ridder’s argument that deep disagreement leads to increased polarisation in the text, if I’ve dropped his suggestion that disagreements can be deep through involving further disagreements over fundamental moral principles. This would be to assume that intellectual disapproval results from finding out that one’s opponents don’t share one’s epistemic principles and that moral disapproval results from finding out that they don’t share one’s moral principles. That’s a neat but implausibly oversimplified picture, and I don’t think we should accept it (or attribute it to de Ridder).

24. Arcila-Valenzuela and Páez (2022) argue that it’s not possible to detect testimonial injustice in a particular instance (though they do not deny that it is a real phenomenon that can be detected on a larger scale and which requires mitigating strategies). I don’t mean to endorse anything nearly so strong here.