(Dis)agreement and Echo Chambers

Suppose you are really confident that p. You encounter a person - whom you consider as smart and well-informed as yourself - who is as confident as you that p. Question: How should this fact of agreement bear evidentially on some of your existing beliefs? Let's consider two of them: 

B1 - high confidence that p

B2 - high confidence that the person I just met is as smart and well-informed as I am (call it q).

To the extent disagreement over a proposition puts us in a position of reducing our confidence in the proposition, for the sake of parity,  agreements should move us to increase our confidence in the proposition. Thus, you should become even more confident in p compared to your earlier confidence-level.

How should (dis)agreements bear on B2? This is an extremely controversial question. However, there is a plausible suggestion which is consistent across cases of agreements and disagreements  relevant to judgements about peerhood (i.e. q) - To the extent your peer agrees with you, you should become even more confident in q compared to your earlier confidence level. And for the sake of parity, you should become less confident in q in situations of disagreement. 

<This is neither question-begging nor a recipe for pernicious bootstrapping; this is just good inductive score-keeping. I am keeping these discussions aside for the purposes of this brief write-up.>

Great. Now we have our toolkit ready for epistemic surgery of Echo Chambers. <I prefer 'Surgery' over 'Engineering' here>. The usual epistemic suspect in Echo Chambers is B1 : In Echo Chambers, believers -call them EC- keep on appreciating their confidence on some p. How do they do it? By pre-empting contrary first-order evidence- the evidence which directly bears on whether or not p is true. Let's call this confidence-updating mechanism First-Order Echoing. 

However, ECs don't just pre-empt contrary first-order evidence. They also pre-empt contrary second-order evidence - the evidence which indirectly bears on whether or not p is true; the pre-empted second-order evidence in case of Echo Chambers is just any disagreement over p. Let's call this confidence-updating mechanism Second-Order Echoing. As a result, they don't only appreciate their existing confidence in p (via First-order Echoing), they also appreciate their confidence in q as well as p (via Second-order Echoing). These two Echoes are not segregated in discussions around Echo Chambers. 

We need to shed more conceptual light on these distinct (though related) confidence-updating mechanisms prevalent in Echo Chambers. The analysis could help us in gaining insights into epistemically and/or morally acceptable and not-so-acceptable instantiations of Echo Chambers. 

Few questions to ponder: How and to what extents the problems with First-Order and Second-Order Echoing are related to Logical, Empirical, Methodological and Charachterological elements persisting in Echo Chanbers? Christopher Ranalli & Finlay Malcom (2023) find the Charachterological defects with ECs even if Echo Chambers yield true beliefs in a epistemically hostile environments. Their argument can be retrofitted in Second-Order Echoing framework. However, Second-Order Echoing can go beyond just dismissal of disagreements- Disagreement is just one special bit of higher-order evidence and it is worthwhile to look at how Echo Chambers account or discount other non-(dis)agreement higher-order evidence.

The analysis may also yield heuristical (possibly conceptual) tests for detecting ECs e.g. The Second-Order Echoing would result in almost categorical judgements about someone's peerhood i.e. EC's peerhood estimations would be more discrete than continuous, and this gives some heuristical information to diagnose an epistemic patient as an EC.

<Second-Order Echoing is plausibly endorsed through avowals of others intelligence or epistemic virtues and width and depth of knowledge, and the same is Echoed back by recipients.> 

As I said earlier, good judgement on the well-informedness and intelligence of the interlocutors in the wake of (dis)agreements is just good inductive score-keeping. Thus, another question to consider is : what constitutes good inductive score-keeping in the wake of contrary higher-order evidence?

Many more questions would turn on existing debates within epistemology of disagreement and outside: How should one establish and maintain other's epistemic credentials in general and in the situations of disagreement in particular? 

While we are at it, let's be sensitive to the many octaves of Echoes we might encode in our own analysis; we are, in all likelihood, not immune to overtones of Echo Chambers. As Neitzsche warned: 

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you."

~

Tushar