Suppose that you’re trying to decide if some bloke is guilty of something “beyond a reasonable doubt,” and you think that he is, but your fellows think that he isn’t. If you thought that they had arrived at their conclusion in a reasonable way, would you defer to them and change your mind? Or do you think that it makes sense for reasonable people to disagree when they’re responding to the same evidence, the same arguments about that evidence, and when they have the same interest in simply getting at the truth? We are in a similar situation in philosophy, and we tend to continue disagreeing. But then, there is no sense of urgency in philosophy (despite its claims to meaningfulness)
[This post originally contained a lot of links to Halloween posts, one of which had the following comment by PJ, but I have removed them because now they are all bad links]People in science disagree all the time about where the balance of evidence points, but happily regard their opponents in any given scientific debate as being quite rational, often because these are fairly open questions where it is difficult to articulate why one piece of evidence should or shouldn’t outweigh another - so you might say that while you recognise that X is suggested by experiment Y, you’re more inclined to believe that Y resulted from mistake Z, because you think X is so unlikely given A, even though Z is quite unlikely too.
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