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)

Contextualism is the view that the extension of perspectival claims (involving e.g. predicates of personal taste or epistemic modals) depends on the context of utterance. Relativism is the view that the extension of perspectival claims depends on the context of assessment. Both views make concrete, empirically testable predictions about how such claims are used by ordinary English language speakers. This chapter surveys some of the recent empirical literature on the topic and presents four new experiments (total N=724). Consistent with contextualism (...) and inconsistent with relativism, the results suggest that the extension of perspectival claims depends on the context of utterance, not the context of assessment. (shrink)

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)

It is common to explain agreement and disagreement in terms of relations among mental states. The main purpose of the present discussion is to present an alternative way of thinking about the relationship between mental states and agreement and disagreement. The idea is to connect agreement and disagreement with the individuation of mental states. More specifically, for at least some mental states, standing in the same relations of agreement and disagreement is both necessary and sufficient for identity. This provides us (...) with a framework for discussing issues related to agreement and disagreement. It is for instance well-known that de se beliefs raise questions about agreement and disagreement. The present framework allows us to discuss such beliefs while relying on assumptions that are interestingly different from the standard assumptions in the literature. While most of the discussion focuses on beliefs, there are other mental states, such as desires, that can seemingly also stand in relations of agreement and disagreement. This raises questions about how far the framework can be extended. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a pluralistic framework for disagreement and I develop a strategy to account for the varieties of disagreement on the basis of the varieties of the truth across different domains of discourse. Truth-pluralism is thus sufficient for delivering pluralism about disagreement—that is, diaphonic pluralism.

Recent work on evaluative discourse and judgements of personal taste in particular has focused on active interpersonal disagreements. I explore the communicative import of judgements of taste: why we issue them, why we sometimes get involved in disputes about taste, and what acceptance or rejection of such judgements consists of. The view developed here – that the core use of such judgements lies in seeking to align our attitudes in view of a shared project – makes it plausible that the (...) use of a sentence of the form ‘a is F’ (where F is a predicate of taste) semantically expresses the simple, semantically articulated proposition that a is F, is subject to an unrelativized truth predicate and not enriched by personal standards or perspectives. Our model shows that personal standards or perspectives are, contrary to a widely shared assumption in the debate, not the entities or objects that require coordination. What is shared among interlocutors are projects that require the coordination of the participant’s strategic choices. The semantically articulated proposition functions as a focal point, proposed by the speaker, for coordinating their choices. (shrink)