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Abstract
Arguments from disagreement often take centre stage in debates between competing semantic theories. This paper explores the theoretical basis for arguments from disagreement and, in so doing, proposes methodological principles which allow us to distinguish between legitimate arguments from disagreement and dialectically ineffective arguments from disagreement. In the light of these principles, I evaluate Cappelen and Hawthorne's [2009] argument from disagreement against relativism, and show that it fails to undermine relativism since it is dialectically ineffective. Nevertheless, I argue that an alternative challenge to relativism based on disagreement is available. More generally, I argue that semantic theory is not answerable to data stemming from ‘loaded’ philosophical principles regarding the nature of disagreement. Rather, semantic theorists will exhaust their dialectical responsibilities regarding disagreement if they can demonstrate consistency with a minimal account of the concept.
Keywords:
Notes
1 I focus solely on the notion of disagreement as a state, rather than as an activity (Cappelen and CitationHawthorne [2009: 60f]). A state of disagreement is most naturally understood as a passive concept, arising out of some conflict between subjects’ attitudes, and not necessarily involving any active behavioural features such as the presence of a dispute. In the stative sense, two subjects might disagree (e.g. in virtue of inconsistency between their beliefs) even though neither subject is aware of the existence of the state.
2 This argument has also been formulated with respect to other areas of discourse. See CitationKölbel [2004] for a similar argument regarding moral judgments, and CitationSchaffer [2011] for discussion pertaining to epistemic modals such as ‘might’.
3 See (e.g.) CitationLasersohn [2005] and CitationMacFarlane [2007] for discussion of this move.
4 Other responses to the argument are also available. One might deny that cases like (1) are instances of disagreement at all (see Cappelen and CitationHawthorne [2009: ch. 4]). Alternatively, one might, with López de Sa [2008], argue that presuppositions of commonality can generate the relevant kind of conflict even in the absence of semantic conflict. See CitationBaker [2012] for discussion of this and other responses to the argument against contextualism.
5 There are, of course, other interesting kinds of argument from disagreement. For instance, arguments from disagreement in ethics often charge theories to account for the prevalence of disagreement and inter-cultural divergence rather than to demonstrate consistency with assumptions about disagreement's nature.
6 See e.g. CitationHigginbotham [2006]. For our purposes we should understand sententialism as entailing that propositions play no part in the objects of attitudes.
7 If propositionalists can provide some independent argument for D1 which does not rest on propositionalism, this will count against sententialist attempts to provide their own account of disagreement. A parallel version of this point will be relevant in §4.
8 As such, the argument against contextualism should be understood as assuming that disagreements like (1) are doxastic disagreements—that they exhibit conflict arising from the subjects’ beliefs. Huvenes's [2012] strategy should, therefore, be thought of as denying this assumption and instead claiming that such cases are instances of a different kind of disagreement: namely, disagreement in attitude. Understood this way, his response is consistent with endorsing the minimal theory of doxastic disagreement outlined here.
9 This idea has affinities with the work of CitationGreenough [2003: 235], whose minimal theory of vagueness aims to ‘give a rigorous characterization of vagueness from a perspective which is as neutral as possible on matters logical and philosophical’.
10 Furthermore, this minimal view of doxastic disagreement must also be broad enough to avoid falling foul of Sundell's [2011: 280 n. 20] concerns about MacFarlane's [2007] ‘preclusion of joint accuracy’ account of disagreement. To take just one of Sundell's examples, conflicts arising from metalinguistic expression rather than literal expression will be sufficient to count as incompatibilities in this sense.
11 To reiterate, we should also understand these arguments as appealing to the premise that disagreements in the relevant domain are doxastic disagreements—an assumption which will, in some domains, be up for debate.
12 Appealing to an aspect of the minimal theory will not, strictly, be a necessary condition on legitimacy for such arguments. Assuming a principle which is broad enough to be binding upon a certain theory—even if that principle is not also general enough to be part of the minimal account of disagreement—will be sufficient for a legitimate challenge. If a theory is bound by a certain principle then adherence to that principle is a necessary condition for the theory to give any adequate positive account of disagreement. In this sense, a theory's being bound by a principle does not entail that the principle will be part of the minimal theory of disagreement. However, since it may not always be easy to determine which principles a theory is bound by, the ‘safest’ arguments from disagreement will be those which appeal only to aspects of the minimal theory.
13 CitationCappelen and Hawthorne [2011b] advert to this view in a related discussion.
14 Note that this view is not sufficient for relativism in MacFarlane's sense of assessment-sensitivity. Rather, for MacFarlane, weather-report relativism is naturally understood as a species of ‘non-indexical contextualism’. See CitationMacFarlane [2009].
15 This discussion abstracts away from the further question of temporal relativity in weather-reports.
16 C&H themselves endorse this principle in a later discussion [2011a: 452].
17 Note that (ABD) is itself the consequent of another conditional whose antecedent is ‘A utters S in one context and B utters not-S in another context’. This will be important below.
18 CitationMacFarlane [2011: 448 n. 8] briefly makes a similar point against C&H. Here I aim to give a fuller explication of the argument's failure. CitationCaponigro and Cohen [2011] offer a different critique of C&H's argument.
19 Below I will consider what follows if we reject the assumption that D3 (or an alternative principle) can successfully explain the relevant cases in relativist terms.
20 Theorists who think that dialectically ineffective arguments are not fatally flawed should, as argued above, nevertheless prefer to endorse the alternative (dialectically legitimate) challenge to relativism arising from this dilemma—a challenge which is described below.
21 There is a parallel here to problematic examples for temporalism discussed by CitationRichard [1981]. Richard's examples appeal to intuitions about the contents of beliefs across times, and wields them against views which postulate temporally neutral contents—while the putative objection to BF1 here appeals to intuitions about the contents of beliefs across locations and wields them against views which postulate locationally-neutral contents.
22 Furthermore, even if C&H can show that denying D2 and accepting BF2 represents a dialectical cost, it does not follow that such strategies can be ruled out altogether. Dialectical costs can be traded against dialectical benefits elsewhere, and the existence of a particular dialectical cost does not entail that all strategies which deny D2 are unacceptable ways of detailing the minimal theory of disagreement in ‘loaded’ relativist terms.
23 I thank an anonymous referee for drawing my attention to this objection.
24 See e.g. CitationStojanovic [2007] for more discussion of relativism's troubles with disagreement.
25 While the weather-report relativist may accept D3, we should note that a similar principle applied to relativism about taste seems to deliver the same problematic result which supposedly follows from contextualism: namely, that where subjects have differing standards of taste, they do not disagree.
26 Recall, for instance, the argument against sententialism. A key point in the evaluation of this argument is that we may not be in a position to rule out the key premise, D1, as false—and so we may not be in a position to prove that the argument is unsound—but we can nevertheless show that the argument is illicit since it rests on a loaded principle regarding disagreement. The same is true of D2's role in C&H's argument against relativism.
27 Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the University of Leeds, the Northern Institute of Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen, and the 3rd Workshop on Semantic Content and Context Dependence at the University of Barcelona. I am grateful for feedback received on these occasions. For helpful comments and suggestions, thanks are also due to Jon Robson, Aaron Meskin, Matthew Kieran, two anonymous referees for this journal, and one anonymous member of its editorial board.