Abstract
In some cases of disagreement it seems that neither party is at fault or making a mistake. This phenomenon, so-called faultless disagreement, has recently been invoked as a key motivation for relativist treatments of domains prone to such disagreements. The conceivability of faultless disagreement therefore appears incompatible with traditional realists semantics. This paper examines recent attempts to accommodate faultless disagreement without giving up on realism. We argue that the accommodation is unsatisfactory. However, the examination highlights that “faultless” is multiply ambiguous. The more overarching purpose is to examine the consequences of this—more generally, how to think about faultless disagreement.
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Notes
For a nice general discussion of arguments from disagreement against moral realism or cognitivism, see Tersman (2006).
As far as we know, no thorough examination of this has been undertaken (what is said in this paper is merely the beginning of such a task).
The choice of “judgment” is intentionally meant to be ambiguous. It can be used either to refer to a speech act or a mental state. Different authors tend to focus on either disagreement in talk or thought. Although we think that there are reasons to think that the latter is more fundamental, this will not affect any of the arguments of this paper. Moreover, if understood in the latter sense, “judgment” is neutral between non-cognitive attitudes and beliefs. In this context, it is primarily used to denote the latter. We therefore understand judgments, in the former sense, to express beliefs.
It may, of course, be argued that it is not obvious that relativists can account for disagreement. Relativists may respond that there are a number of different ways in which one can maneuver around this problem. Relativists like Kölbel (2004) and MacFarlane (2007), for example, advance different kind of doxastic solutions. A contextualist, on the other hand, may argue that there are other ways of accounting for faultless disagreement, e.g., by incorporating and advancing an expressivist story about disagreement. See e.g., Björnsson and Finlay (2010) and Huvenes (2012). For nice discussions regarding relativism and disagreement see e.g., Francén (2009) and Marques (2014). For the purposes of this paper, however, it will not be necessary to assess the merits of these views since the issue merely concerns how to account for faultlessness.
Note, however, that Kölbel uses solely the first definition as “a more precise definition of faultless disagreement” (Kölbel 2004: 53). In fact, the remaining definitions are not spelled out as definitions at all by Kölbel. Rather they are to be perceived as different possible consequences of/or symptoms of faultlessness. Although there is some support of thinking that “definition 4” is part of Kölbel’s original description (2002), he now seems opposed to this way of thinking (see Kölbel 2009 n. 19).
This is structurally similar to the kind of idea pursued by relativists like Kölbel and MacFarlane. For example, Kölbel would argue that the propositions expressed by (3) and (4) are contradictory, i.e., Elliot rejects the proposition that John accepts, but that the truth or falsity of the propositions can be assessed only relative to the judges’ respective perspective. We thus have two points of view to assess a belief and a disagreement. The former is important to account for the disagreement intuition whereas the latter is supposed to account for the faultlessness intuition.
By contrast to Hills, we do not share the intuition that moral disagreements are faultless nor that there are any actual faultless moral disagreements. Nevertheless, even if one does not think that faultlessness is an intuitively pervasive phenomenon in a certain domain, it may still be interesting to examine whether realism is consistent with occurrences of faultless disagreement in the domain in question.
It should be noted that Schafer’s exact view is slightly different, viz., it merely requires that the disagreeing parties agree on what kind of norm that one ought to follow. This will not affect any of the considerations we advance. We will therefore stick to this definition.
One may wonder how a faultless belief-forming process can produce false beliefs. If so, is it really epistemically faultless? Beillard (2010) elaborates further on this point, making a distinction between relative and absolute epistemic faultlessness, where the latter notion is conceptually tied to truth. See also Wright (2006). However, this is crucial for Schafer and Hills’ respective arguments to get off the ground.
Palmira (2015) argues in a similar way.
See (Schafer 2011: 279) for a similar response.
Davis (2015: 4) thinks that Kölbel is using ”faultless” in the sense that neither party ”is epistemically at fault.” For reasons just outlined, we think this is highly improbable.
This is based in part on Hills’ list above and MacFarlane’s senses (2014: 133).
Given, for example, a realist or contextualist view, “true” and “accurate” will co-vary. This is not the case according to relativists like Kölbel and MacFarlane.
For what its worth, Kölbel endorses the latter view.
See also Wright (1992).
Even if first-person authority is compelling in matter of taste, it is not the case that taste judgments are infallible or immune to error.
A problem with this response is that it risks making the relevant norm too complicated and if it is too complicated it seems more doubtful that it is what triggers our faultlessness intuition. However, given the realists reliance on the epistemic norm, it ought to be explicated with great care.
Even if this makes the parties tangled up in a so-called peer disagreement, it does not seem to be faultless. More on this in Sect. 8.
It should be noted that Davis’s proposal is anti-realist. The kind of discourses he thinks fit divergentism are anti-realist, dependent on “human practices, conventions, or institutions” and where “truth is partly constituted by the norms of assertion” (2015: 3).
For discussion and defenses of the respective stances, see e.g., Feldman and Warfield (2010).
Disagreement is supposed to be accounted for in virtue of one party expressing or believing the negation of what the other party expresses or beliefs. For doubts about this, see note 5.
See (Richard 2008) ch. 5.
It should be noted that using ”That’s true” as a agreement marker, by contrast, does not seem obviously infelicitous to the same extent as ”That’s false.” Although this is an interesting asymmetry, it is not something that we will try to make sense of here.
For example, we do not think that faultless disagreement if understood in a more inclusive sense is a real problem in the moral domain. However, it may also be possible to ask whether moral disagreements are faultless in some less inclusive sense, which still spells problems for some analysis.
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Acknowledgments
We are very grateful to Ragnar Francén Olinder, Caj Strandberg and the anonymous referees who have read and commented on this paper at one stage or another. This research was partly founded by the Swedish Research Council (Grant Number 2012-988).
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Eriksson, J., Tiozzo, M. Matters of ambiguity: faultless disagreement, relativism and realism. Philos Stud 173, 1517–1536 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0561-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0561-7