Entitlement, Disagreement and Cognitive Disaster

ABSTRACT Epistemologists debate whether it is rationally permissible for people to disagree, for example in politics or religion, while nevertheless regarding each other's opinions as reasonable. I consider this question in relation to Crispin Wright's Wittgensteinian notion of entitlement , that is, rational warrant without evidence. I criticise Allan Hazlett's defence of the rationality of mutually recognised reasonable disagreement, which is based on the idea that one is entitled to trust a source of information if not trusting it would result in a ‘cognitive disaster’. I argue that this argument involves an equivocation in its use of the concept of a cognitive disaster.