Epistemic trespassing and disagreement

Communication in face-to-face human interaction entails complying with social and moral norms about knowledge possession and transfer, and violations of these norms are sanctionable offenses. Underestimating an addressee's knowledge can be tantamount to an insult, especially in domains over which they have superior epistemic authority. This paper examines cases where parties are in explicit disagreement about both the content of an utterance and relative authority over the knowledge in that domain. In three studies, participants judged the relative acceptability of disagreement across different knowledge domains and across conditions in which the disagreeing parties had various social relationships and/or differing levels of expertise. The acceptability of disagreement systematically differed across knowledge domains, suggesting there is gradient texture to 'epistemic territory'. The results also suggest that social distance and relative epistemic authority independently modulate the perceived acceptability of disagreement, as do the relative time and effort spent on knowledge acquisition.