Regardless of what the allegedly-arrogant person believes, I think what’s happening when someone is accused of arrogance for being “too” confident about a belief is generally that the accuser sees what they say about that belief as claiming higher status than they deserve.
In a (laughably unreal) ideal world, in these cases “status” would mean “reputation for accurate beliefs” and “deserve” would mean “deserve on the basis of known ability to form accurate beliefs in this area”. In practice, it often comes down to the same sort of ape-hierarchy status that applies everywhere else.
As you will have guessed, I share Qiaochu’s opinion that “arrogant” usually means approximately “trying to claim higher status than they have/deserve”. This probably means that those of us who don’t think highly of status as a guide to accuracy, trustworthiness, etc. should often prefer terms other than “arrogant” when describing others. casebash’s example suggests that “overconfident” and “rudely dismissive” would be good candidates.
Regardless of what the allegedly-arrogant person believes, I think what’s happening when someone is accused of arrogance for being “too” confident about a belief is generally that the accuser sees what they say about that belief as claiming higher status than they deserve.
In a (laughably unreal) ideal world, in these cases “status” would mean “reputation for accurate beliefs” and “deserve” would mean “deserve on the basis of known ability to form accurate beliefs in this area”. In practice, it often comes down to the same sort of ape-hierarchy status that applies everywhere else.
As you will have guessed, I share Qiaochu’s opinion that “arrogant” usually means approximately “trying to claim higher status than they have/deserve”. This probably means that those of us who don’t think highly of status as a guide to accuracy, trustworthiness, etc. should often prefer terms other than “arrogant” when describing others. casebash’s example suggests that “overconfident” and “rudely dismissive” would be good candidates.