Abstract
My aim in the paper will be to better understand what faultless disagreement could possibly consist in and what speakers disagree over when they faultlessly do so. To that end, I will first look at various examples of faultless disagreement. Since I will eventually claim that different forms of faultless disagreement can be modeled semantically on different forms of context-sensitivity I will, in a second step, discuss three different semantic accounts that all promise to successfully accommodate certain forms of context-sensitivity: Indexical Contextualism, Nonindexcal Contextualism (aka Moderate Relativism) and Radical Relativism (aka Assessment-sensitive Relativism). Focussing on the controversy between Indexical and Nonindexical Contextualists the remainder of the paper will be devoted to the question which theory is best suited to handle what kind of disagreement.
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Notes
Pending a plausible account of faultless disagreement, one might think it advisable to speak more carefully of “seemingly” faultless disagreement; for reasons of brevity (and given that I will try to given an account in due course) I will omit the “seemingly” throughout the paper.
Note also that the extension of context sensitive terms varies systematically with certain features of their context of use and not in the haphazard fashion that vagueness and related forms of indeterminacy would allow for.
The notion of “faultlessness” stands in dire need of explication, too; I will come back to that in §7.
As Wayne Davis very aptly called it. He defends a pragmatic account of the data, based on the idea that we often use expressions of our language loosely. So "S knows that P" is, according to Davis, "commonly used loosely to implicate 'S is close enough to knowing that p for contextually indicated purposes.'" (Davis 2007, p. 395).
Some think it infelicitous to speak of utterances’ being true, given that utterances are commonly taken to be acts of asserting something (cf. MacFarlane 2014: 44–52). But then, if “utterances of sentences have truth values, they presumably have them in virtue of expressing propositions that have truth values.” (MacFarlane 2014: 49) So I will continue to speak of utterances being true-and define utterance truth accordingly (cf. §5 below). Yet for all I care, one may just as well speak of utterances as being accurate or correct instead of true.
Alternatively, one might prefer to speak of utterances being assertible only if the propositions expressed are true when elevaluetd relative to the epistemic standard operative in the respective contexts of utterance and hold on to the claim that there is a single correct epistemic standard when it comes to assessing utterance truth. This is not the position defended here, though. Note that speakers may still be taken to faultlessley differ; see §7.
As MacFarlane puts it: “So the presence of outlandish parameters of the index (taste, informational state, etc.) does not itself make a semantic theory “relativist” in any philosophically interesting sense.” (MacFarlane 2012, p. 135). For some reason dependency of truth-value on worlds has traditionally not been considered to be a kind of relativity. If I said “The earth has only one moon” then the fact that there is another possible world where there are five moons so that evaluated with respect to that world the proposition I expressed were false would usually be taken to be irrelevant to the question of whether my utterance is in fact true. It is true, true simpliciter, just in case the proposition expressed is true when evaluated at the context-world. Obviously, dependency of truth-value on worlds is not taken to be a kind of relativity because truth simpliciter is truth at the world of the context. But then, by parity of reasoning, dependency of truth-value on epistemic standards should not be taken to be a kind of relativity either as long as it is the epistemic standard of the context of utterance.
I am greately indebted to Stephen Schiffer for discussion here.
According to MacFarlane “assertoric commitment is a commitment to meeting all legitimate challenges to the accuracy of one’s assertion.” (MacFarlane 2007b, p. 28).
Note, though, that the Nonindexicalist can nonetheless perfectly well accommodate the idea that what has been said in making a knowledge claim can be assessed as true or false relative to different epistemic standards. If I say: Tom knows that P” you may well reply: “What you said is false”, evaluating the proposition I expressed relative to your standard, thereby indicating disagreement. Similarly, a speaker could retract what he said before by saying something like “What I said before is false”, thereby evaluating what he said before relative to some ‘new’ standard. What the Nonindexical Contextualist will insist on, though, is that whether my utterance was true or not does not depend on your epistemic standard but on mine (of course P has to be the case, too, for my utterance to be true). What I said might be assessed as false–relative to some other standard. Yet my utterance is true if the proposition thereby expressed is true relative to my epistemic standard.
Nonetheless, they can both allow for speakers to adopt (or pretend to adopt) someone else’s standard for the time being (cf. DeRose 2005, p. 189). The standard operative in a context of utterance need not be the speaker’s own standard. That is most easily seen in the aesthetic case. A speaker may say of a famous male fashion model: “I guess he is handsome.” Meaning something like “(I am not attracted to men of the guy’s type but) he is, presumably, handsome according to common standards or received opinion”.
Again, much turns on our theory of meaning here. Do we really disagree about the meaning of the word “know”? Is the suggested analysis relevant to the question of which proposition has been expressed in a knowledge claim? One might, again, prefer a slender conception of meaning according to which there is a core meaning that we share–otherwise we would not be talking about the same thing. In differing over how to further analyze the concept, on the other hand, we are disputing what form our theory of knowledge should take. But then we had to relativize the truth-vaue of an utterance to an analysis of the words employed.
According to Robyn Carston, for instance, often in linguistic interpretation “an ad hoc concept is constructed and functions as a constituent of what is explicitly communicated” (Carston 2002, p. 357).
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Acknowledgments
The paper has grown out of a couple of talks I gave at various places. I am very grateful to Alex Burri and Anna Kollenberg who organized the conference on “Language: The Limits of Representation and Understanding” in Erfurt, August 2012. They also made very valuable comments on earlier drafts of the paper. I am also very grateful to Elke Brendel and Erik Stei for organizing (and inviting me to) a conference on “Contexts, Perspectives, and Relative Truth” in Bonn, June 2011; and to Elke Brendel for organizing a workshop on Relativism and Disgareement with me at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg in Göttingen, February 2012. I would like to thank the participants of all three conferences for discussion and critique. Special thanks go to Anna Nuspliger, Stephen Schiffer, Sebastian Schmoranzer for very helpful comments on various parts of the paper.
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Kompa, N. Contextualism and Disagreement. Erkenn 80 (Suppl 1), 137–152 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-014-9663-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-014-9663-4