Conciliationism and Uniqueness

Two theses are central to recent work on the epistemology of disagreement: Conciliationism: In a revealed peer disagreement over P, each thinker should give at least some weight to her peer's attitude. Uniqueness: For any given proposition and total body of evidence, the evidence fully justifies exactly one level of confidence in the proposition. Does Conciliationism commit one to Uniqueness? Thomas Kelly has argued that it does. After some scene-setting (1), in 2 we explain and criticize Kelly's argument, thereby defeating his larger argument that Conciliationism deserves no dialectical special treatment. But we argue further that Conciliationists are committed to a disjunction, one of whose disjuncts is Uniqueness, that amounts to an extremely strong and unobvious position ( 34). If we are correct, theorists should not treat Conciliationism as a default position in debates about the epistemic significance of disagreement.