Question

Hello.
 
In one of the recent questions you referred to a column on peer disagreement. You wrote there an argument like this: the very fact that I formed a position and someone disagrees with it undermines the claim that he is a peer, because if he were as smart as I am, he would have reached my (true) conclusion.
 
I don’t understand. It’s not that the question of peer disagreement follows from the assumption that he is a peer and I can then challenge that assumption; rather, without prior knowledge I can’t assume that I am smarter than he is and thus trust in the correctness of my own position. Seemingly, the burden of proof is on me to show that he is not a peer. That is, without prior knowledge, why should I assume that I am smarter than he is, or than any other person in the world? Just as I do not assume that I am stupider than he is, and I have no idea at all about his wisdom relative to mine. Therefore, proofs that he is not a peer cannot be based on begging the question, but only on concrete information or on other assumptions. I would suggest challenging the peer-status in another way: the fact that he disagrees with my position proves that he is not a peer, but not because he is less intelligent than I am; rather, because he does not actually hold that view sincerely (a claim that cannot be turned back on me, since I know that I really and sincerely do hold my position), or because he has not examined the position he holds at all, but is merely repeating what others say (who themselves do not really hold it sincerely… unless the same problem comes back with them). To assume that he did examine it, but just not as much as I did, brings us back to the same problem. Admittedly, this is not enough in a debate where I know these are not the cases, but there indeed we are not supposed to rely on our own opinion.
 
(In parentheses: the problem of peer disagreement seemingly is a central problem in epistemology, and it calls into question every way a person makes decisions about truth and falsehood. Is there an entire body of literature on this? Maybe you could point me to something on it besides the articles you mentioned there. Because in the Hebrew Wikipedia there is no mention of it at all, and even in the English Wikipedia there is only a meager entry with very few references.)