Disagreement in philosophy

Recent philosophical discussions construe disagreement as epistemically unsettling. On learning that a peer disagrees, it is said, you should suspend judgment, lower your credence, or dismiss your peer's conviction as somehowflawed, even if you can neither identify the flaw nor explain why you think she is the party in error. Philosophers do none of these things. A distinctive feature of philosophy as currently practiced is that, although we marshal the strongest argumentswe can devise, we do not expect others to agree. Nor are we dismayed then they do not. Through a survey of familiar professional practices, I argue that philosophy rightly revels in responsible disagreement. This discloses important and perhaps surprising facets of the epistemology of philosophy.