Predicates of personal taste have attracted a great deal of attention from philosophers of language and linguists. In the intricate debates over PPT, arguably the most central consideration has been which analysis of PPT can best account for the possibility of faultless disagreement about matters of personal taste. I argue that two models of such disagreement—the relativist and absolutist models—are empirically inadequate. In their stead, I develop a model of faultless taste disagreement which represents it as involving a novel incompatibility (...) relation between preferences that I call type-noncotenability. This model is available to all parties in the ongoing debates about PPT, but it points up an advantage enjoyed by expressivist accounts of PPT. In closing, I consider four objections against the model that, while failing to fully undermine it, open up promising avenues of inquiry about the nature of disagreement. (shrink)

Many scholars are ready to accept that first person thought involves a special way w such that, for any thinker x, only x can access the first person way w of thinking about x. Standard articulations of this Frege-inspired view involve a rejection of the strict shareability of first person thought. I argue that this rejection eventually forces us to renounce an intuitively plausible characterisation of communication, and specifically, disagreement. This result invites us to explore alternative articulations which, still within (...) an overall Fregean framework, may better explain how first person thoughts reach out into a public, shareable dimension. Here I shape this possibility in terms of perspectives, i.e. ways of thinking that do not individuate concepts or thoughts. Perspectives, I submit, can serve to unproblematically accommodate basic disagreement in indexical cases and to outline the dynamic character of first person thought. (shrink)

In this paper, we bring into focus the level of thought or content in the elucidation of disagreement. We set out the view that disagreement at this level involves a specific form of noncotenability, namely, noncotenability as captured by sense or intension as opposed to reference. We present the challenge that nourishes the alternative referential view and suggest, through examples, that (i) only intensional disagreement is apt to adequately accommodate basic rationality constraints on disagreement, and (ii) it can meet the (...) aforementioned challenge insofar as we discriminate between noncotenability affecting one's concepts, intensionally conceived, and noncotenability affecting merely one's particular understanding of those concepts. We conclude that intensional disagreement is our best choice for an account of disagreement at the level of thought. (shrink)

It is common to distinguish between disagreement in the state sense (being in disagreement) and disagreement in the activity sense (having a disagreement). This paper deals with the question of what it is for two people to have a disagreement. First, I present and reject the thesis according to which having a disagreement is a matter of expressing conflicting attitudes. I argue that this is not sufficient for having a disagreement: two people can express conflicting attitudes without having a disagreement. (...) Second, I present and reject the thesis according to which having a disagreement involves not only the expression of conflicting attitudes, but also the persuasive attempt to bring the other around to one’s view. I argue that this is not necessary for having a disagreement: two people can have a disagreement without trying to change each other’s minds. Finally, I put forward an alternative account that goes beyond the mere expression of conflicting attitudes, but that does not go as far as to posit the attempt to change someone’s mind. Having a disagreement, I submit, is a matter of expressing conflicting attitudes and demanding agreement, that is, advancing the normative claim that the other should share one’s attitude. (shrink)

The article investigates the significance of the so-called phenomenon of apparent faultless disagreement for debates about the semantics of taste discourse. Two kinds of description of the phenomenon are proposed. The first ensures that faultless disagreement raises a distinctive philosophical challenge; yet, it is argued that Contextualist, Realist and Relativist semantic theories do not account for this description. The second, by contrast, makes the phenomenon irrelevant for the problem of what the right semantics of taste discourse should be. Lastly, the (...) following dilemma is assessed: either faultless disagreement provides strong evidence against semantic theories; or its significance should be considerably downplayed. (shrink)

Helen Beebee (2018) defends a view of the aims of philosophy she calls ‘equilibrism’. Equilibrism denies that philosophy aims at knowledge and maintains that the collective aim of philosophy is ‘to find what equilibria there are that can withstand examination’ (Beebee 2018, p. 3). In this note, I probe equilibrism by focusing on how disagreement challenges our doxastic commitment to our own philosophical theories. Call this the Commitment Challenge. I argue that the Commitment Challenge comes in three varieties and that (...) endorsing equilibrism provides us with an answer to one of them only. (shrink)