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pragmatist comments on P/S/A - Sam Harris offering money for a little good philosophy - Less Wrong
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Well, there's a selection bias involved in published changes of mind that accounts for why the prominent examples involve philosophers being persuaded by their own arguments. If a philosopher is convinced into changing their mind by another philosopher's argument, they're unlikely to publish a paper announcing this.
Why do you think the issues involved here are different than those in other academic fields? Disagreement exists in every discipline, not just philosophy, although it is plausibly more pronounced in philosophy than in many other disciplines. In science, surely disagreement doesn't just boil down to one of the disputants being familiar with the empirical evidence and the other not being familiar with it, at least not in prominent cases. So what makes an argument persuasive to some scientists and not to others?
I don't. The same issues exist in, e.g., physics when experimental validation is not easily available. For a recent example, see John Preskill's account of the recent conference about the black hole firewall paradox. But in physics there is at least a hope of experimental phenomena being predicted eventually and settling the argument. In philosophy there no such hope, so it's a cleaner setup for studying the question