This article consists of a critical response from a scholar to a journal article and reply from the paper's authors.

Response from Mayank Bora

(Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of North Bengal)

Fabienne Peter thinks cases of peer disagreement demonstrate irreducibly second-personal imperfect procedural epistemic value rooted in relations of mutual accountability. Chaturvedi and Kashyap (C&K) argue instead that a purely first/third-personal model of the nature of reasons to revise in such cases is explanatory superior to the second-personal model.

I find a few things problematic with their critique:

1. Firstly, C&K assume that the first/third-personal model being explanatorily superior only first/third-personal reasons to revise obtain in peer disagreement. But, as it goes for reasons, we can have different kinds of reasons for something and first/third-personal reasons and second-personal reasons can coexist.
   

2. Secondly, C&K are against any second-personal and/or procedural value in peer disagreement cases. But, if heeding a peer's claims purely out of respect for their epistemic authority leads to a greater accrual of truth, than not following it, as aggregated over multiple instances in the long run, then this just is imperfect procedural epistemic value rooted in a second-personal procedure. However, Peter is still wrong because such value is not irreducibly second-personal but a matter of the instrumentality of the procedure in leading to more truth, just not in each instance, but in the long run.
   

3. Thirdly, C&K think that irreducibly second-personal epistemic value may obtain with the right conception of epistemic peerhood. With the accuracy conception Peter employs the second-personalist case fails, but if being an epistemic peer is a matter of entering into a collaborative epistemic practice then irreducibly second-personal epistemic obligations and values may indeed obtain. However, notions of peerhood do not seem to offer much help in understanding how second-personal procedures may derive value from truth without it being reducible to the value of truth. The irreducibly second-personal obligations that obtain with the enhanced notion of peerhood are best seen as promissory/contractual, and therefore moral, obligations.

Reply from Tushar Chaturvedi and Abhishek Kashyap

(PhD Scholar, Department of HSS, IIT Guwahati; Assistant Professor, Department of HSS, IIT Guwahati)

We sincerely thank Mayank (Bora henceforth) for these probing responses. Here is our reply to the points raised by Bora:

1. On the first, we grant that reasons can coexist and explanatory sufficiency does not entail non-existence. Our claim was only the weaker parsimony one that a second-personal reason is idle wherever the same evidential fact already explains the requirement. If two descriptions track identical procedural value via identical reliability facts then it leaves not two grounded reasons but one reason and a redundant relational redescription.
   

2. On the second, we agree and the concession helps us. If imperfect procedural value is long-run instrumental value defeated the moment the procedure becomes unreliable then it reduces to truth-conduciveness. That is the swamping result we defend that procedural value is superfluous because it bottoms out in reliability. We never denied that the value exists only that it is irreducible and on this Bora is our ally against Peter.
   

3. On the third, we accept that the obligations are not merely moral but neither are they irreducibly second-personal. On Fleisher's demarcation a norm is epistemic if it is the internal rule of a practice that reliably promotes truth (amongst others), so the norms of uptake and answerability qualify as epistemic. Yet their ground is instrumental. What a practice institutes is a reducibly grounded but operatively second-personal register (or so we would argue), that is, a rule to treat a peer's objection as a claim owed an answer, grounded in the practice's truth-promotion. Since truth being the sole fundamental epistemic value is third-personal, no enrichment of peerhood can manufacture irreducibility. We are developing this practice-based conception of peerhood (and to signal the departure, we might label it cognitive or social epistemic or scientific peerhood).