a knowledge-first approach to religious disagreement

When we think about paradigmatic examples of real when we think about paradigmatic examples of real-life disagreements, such as religious conflicts, we realize that the disagreeing parties are often not individuals but groups. however, the debate about religious disagreement has focused almost exclusively on disagreement between individuals, thereby overlooking the phenomenon of religious group disagreement. this paper purports to fill this lacuna, by offering a novel diagnosis of religious group disagreement and an original account of how to deal with such phenomenon. the question that drives this project is the following: what ought a religious group to do, from an epistemic point of view, before a case of disagreement with another religious group? to answer this question, we shall apply williamson (2000)’s knowledge-first approach to group epistemology. according to this view, knowledge is prior to other epistemic kinds, being the concept of knowing a theoretical primitive and the telos of our epistemic activity. so, if groups can have knowledge and if this is their telos, we can formulate, inspired by hawthorne and srinivasan (2013), the following knowledge group disagreement norm: (kgdn) in a case of group disagreement about whether p, where a group g_1 believes that p and a group g_2 believes that p: (i) g_1 ought to trust g_2 and believe that p iff were g_1 to trust g_2, this would result in g_1’s knowing p (ii) g_1 ought to dismiss g_2 and continue to believe that p iff were g_1 to stick to their guns this would result in g_1’s knowing p, and (iii) in all other cases, g_1 ought to suspend judgment about whether p. the central guideline for dealing with religious group disagreements is the telos of acquiring knowledge, such that a group ought to take the course of action (being steadfast, conciliatory, or suspending judgment) that would result in gaining knowledge. thus, clause (i) requires g_1 to be conciliatory as that would result in g_1 achieving knowledge that p, whereas clause (ii) requires g_1 to go steadfast as that would result in g_1 achieving knowledge that p. but, following clause (iii), if neither group in disagreement knows the proposition under dispute, they should both suspend judgment. in addition, the kgdn account has the advantage that it applies to cases of religious group disagreement irrespective of whether religious groups are epistemic peers or not, which is a more satisfying account than the ones proposed by carter (2014). one might want to object that the kgdn account does not provide an action-guide for dealing with religious group disagreement. this is because, given the general failure of luminosity (cf. williamson (2000)), a religious group might be blameless for violating kgdn norm. this paper shall rule out this objection as follows: even if knowledge is not luminous, we develop a blameless norm violation for kgdn (following brown (2019), kelp and simion (2017)) and we argue that kgdn doesn’t need to be perfectly operationalizable to provide us with a general action-guide to deal with cases of religious group disagreement.