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Record W4409776382 · doi:10.1017/apa.2025.12

Disagreement, Public Reason, and Epistemic Abstinence

2025· article· en· W4409776382 on OpenAlexfundno aff
Elizabeth Edenberg

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of the American Philosophical Association · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicEpistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics
Canadian institutionsnot available
FundersUniversity of CambridgeMcGill UniversityUniversity of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
KeywordsLegitimacyPublic reasonPoliticsClassical liberalismLiberalismEpistemologyEconomic JusticePolitical philosophyPositive economicsSociologyPolitical scienceLaw and economicsLawPhilosophyEconomicsDemocracy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

ABSTRACT Political disagreements pose a range of philosophical challenges for citizens seeking to navigate politics. Epistemologists ask about the impact of peer disagreement on the justification of individual’s beliefs. Rawls’s Political Liberalism (2005) tackles the impact of reasonable disagreement on questions of justice and legitimacy in a political community, arguing for a turn to public reason when justifying political principles. Recently these two literatures have been brought together to develop epistemic foundations of and challenges to Rawlsian political liberalism. Against these recent trends, I will argue that there are good reasons for political liberals to remain epistemically abstinent about the impact of peer disagreement on citizens’ beliefs. I also extend the lessons from analyzing public reason and peer disagreement to suggest there are more general reasons for caution in applying the epistemology of disagreement literature to cases of political disagreement.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.026
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.066
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.026
Threshold uncertainty score0.139

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0260.066
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0030.002
Science and technology studies0.0080.051
Scholarly communication0.0100.016
Open science0.0020.013
Research integrity0.0080.010
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0100.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.031
GPT teacher head0.269
Teacher spread0.238 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations1
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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