 William Alston represents an even more charitable response to exclusivism. His perspective is based on what he sees as a crucial distinction between two types of epistemic disputes: those in which “it is clear what would constitute non-circular grounds for supposing one of the contestants to be superior to the others” and those in which it is not. In the former case—in those cases in which there is a commonly accepted “procedure for settling disputes”—it isn’t clear, he acknowledges, that it is rational for individuals to continue to maintain that their position is superior (Alston 1988, 442–443).