3. Convictional Pluralism

If standards themselves have to become convincing within particular orientations, disagreement need not stop with the convictions they are used to assess.

Different people may remain genuinely convinced by incompatible conclusions. That is already familiar.

But disagreement can extend further. People may also be convinced by incompatible criteria, find different kinds of evidence compelling, or regard different methods and interpretations as legitimate. Different standards may organize what they consider an adequate defense.

Part I already encountered this difficulty when examining defensibility.

A conviction can be strong while poorly defended, a defense can fare well under shared criteria and still fail to persuade. Two people may discover that their disagreement concerns not the original conclusion but the criteria under which it is being assessed.

We can call this, provisionally, convictional pluralism.

This is not primarily a pluralism of frameworks that agents freely select from a shelf.

Someone can decide to investigate intuitionistic logic, agree provisionally to work under certain rules, or choose to use a Bayesian model. What cannot simply be chosen is whether the central commitments of the framework will acquire convincing force.

The agent can enter the investigation. The outcome is not theirs to command.

Convictional pluralism describes a situation in which incompatible convictions, criteria, standards, or commitments concerning methods may retain convincing force across different orientations.

It should not be confused with relativism.

A conviction may be convincing for me and not for you, or for one group and not another. But that does not make it ours to choose. I cannot simply decide that a conviction is now convincing for me. The same is true of criteria and standards.

Convictional pluralism describes differences in what becomes convincing across orientations. It does not say that truth, justification, or correctness are themselves relative to those orientations.