Conciliatory views, higher-order disagreements, and defeasible logic

Conciliatory views of disagreement say, roughly, that it’s rational for you to become
less confident in your take on an issue in case you find out that an epistemic peer’s
take on it is the opposite. Their intuitive appeal notwithstanding, there are well-known
worries about the behavior of conciliatory views in scenarios involving higher-order
disagreements, which include disagreements over these views themselves and disagreements over the peer status of alleged epistemic peers. This paper does two things.
First, it explains how the core idea behind conciliatory views can be expressed in a
defeasible logic framework. The result is a formal model that’s particularly useful
for thinking about the behavior of conciliatory views in cases involving higher-order
disagreements. And second, the paper uses this model to resolve three paradoxes
associated with disagreements over epistemic peerhood.