Forthcoming in Journal for General Philosophy of Science 1 Disagreement about Scientific Ontology 1 Bruno Borge University of Buenos Aires - CONICET ABSTRACT: In this paper, I analyze some disagreements about scientific ontology as cases of disagreement between epistemic peers. I maintain that the particularities of these cases are better understood if epistemic peerhood is relativized to a perspective-like index of epistemic goals and values. Taking the debate on the metaphysics of laws of nature as a case study, I explore the limits and possibilities of a trans-perspective assessment of positions regarding scientific ontology. Keywords: peer disagreement, social epistemology, metaphysics of science, laws of nature. 1. Introduction Peer disagreement is a widely discussed issue in analytic philosophy. In philosophy of language, debates are mainly devoted to disagreement concerning evaluative matters, with particular attention to disputes about taste, which some authors regard as cases of faultless disagreement. However, this paper is focussed in factual disagreement (i.e. disagreement about matters of fact) as it is addressed in the context of social epistemology. 2 There are two main views regarding peer disagreement in social epistemology: the conciliatory view and the steadfast view. On the one hand, for conciliationists, the only (maximally) rational response when disagreeing with a peer is to change one’s original doxastic attitude (i.e. the initial doxastic attitude that one held previous learning of the disagreement). Defenders of the steadfast view, on the other hand, maintain that at least in some cases 1 I am very grateful to Rodolfo Gaeta, Nélida Gentile and Susana Lucero for inviting me to be part of this special issue. I thank Anjan Chakravartty and Nicolás Lo Guercio for their comments to this work, and for many illuminating conversations on related issues. Previous versions of this paper were presented at the WIP seminar of the BA-Logic Group (Argentinian Society for Philosophical Analysis, Buenos Aires), the V Workshop del Círculo de Buenos Aires (University of Buenos Aires, Argentina), the TeC seminar of the Department of Philosophy I (University of Granada, Spain), and the Workshop on Philosophy of Science: Current Debates (University of Chile, Chile). I thank each of the audiences for their helpful remarks, specially to Eduardo Barrio, Natalia Buacar, Otávio Bueno, Renato Cani, Manuel de Pinedo, María José García Encinas, Cristian Soto and Nerftalí Villanueva. 2 One of the main intended contributions of this work is to articulate the idea that features of disagreements about scientific ontology can be explained by relativizing epistemic peerhood to a perspective-like index. The strategy of relativizing information to indexes can be also tracked in philosophy of language; it stems from Lewis (1980), and has been developed by Recanati (2007). The contemporary debate discusses whether the information placed in the indexes belongs to what is said, and different answers have given rise to different proposals: indexical contextualism, non-indexical contextualism, and relativism.