Why We Need Skepticism in Argument: Skeptical Engagement as a Requirement for Epistemic Justice

Abstract

The Argumentative Adversariality debate is over the question of whether argument must be adversarial. A particular locus of this debate is on skeptical challenges in critical dialogue. The Default Skeptical Stance (DSS) in argument is a practical manifestation of argumentative adversariality. Views about the on-the-ground value of the DSS vary. On one hand, in “The Social & Political Limitations of Philosophy” (2012), Phyllis Rooney argues that the DSS leads to epistemic injustice. On the other, Allan Hazlett in his recent piece “Critical Injustice” (2020) argues for the virtues of the skeptical stance in terms of epistemic justice. Both Rooney and Hazlett are concerned with the role skeptical engagement plays in argument, but they assign opposite values to it. In this essay, I review Rooney and Hazlett’s examples and (i) show that the epistemic dysfunction in the two scholar’s going cases is one and the same, and (ii) argue that the cause of both is a lack of proper skeptical engagement. Skeptical engagement is a requirement for epistemic justice. Together (i) and (ii) constitute an initial defense of the Adversarialist position against objections regarding the social epistemic risk of the skeptical stance.