Abstract
Many philosophical disputes, most prominently disputes in ontology, have been suspected of being merely verbal and hence pointless. My goal in this paper is to offer an account of merely verbal disputes and to address the question of what is problematic with such disputes. I begin by arguing that extant accounts that focus on the semantics of the disputed statement S (Chalmers, Hirsch, Sider) do not capture the full range of cases as they might arise in philosophy. Moreover, these accounts bring in heavy theoretical machinery. I attempt to show that we can capture the full range of cases with an approach that is theoretically lightweight. This approach explains verbal disputes as a pragmatic phenomenon where parties use the same utterance type S with different speaker’s meaning. Moreover, it provides an answer to the crucial question Jackson’s (Erkenntnis 79:31–54, 2014) pragmatic account leaves, at best, highly implicit. Based on my account, we can distinguish between different ways in which disputes can be verbal and different extents to which they are defective. Distinguishing between these varieties of verbalness furthermore allows us to specify what kind of substantive issues remain to be discussed once the linguistic confusion is resolved.
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Notes
For a more extensive list see Sidelle (2007: 84–85).
Plunkett and Sundell (2013, Sect. 3) argue that non-conflicting literal semantic content is not necessary for genuine disagreement. What deferential cases of verbal disputes suggest is that conflicting literal semantic content is not sufficient for genuine disagreement either. This further supports Plunkett and Sundell’s claim that we cannot directly draw semantic conclusions from the fact that a dispute reflects genuine disagreement.
This reveals something interesting about disagreement. A natural assumption is that parties who disagree express conflicting propositions. However, expressivists who hold that moral claims do not have propositional content have argued that while disagreement requires a clash of attitudes, these attitudes need not be propositional (e.g. Blackburn 1984: 168, 1998: 69). Hence, it is not necessary for disagreement that parties express conflicting propositions. Deferential cases of verbal disputes suggest in addition that parties expressing conflicting propositions is not even sufficient for disagreement, namely, when one party makes a linguistic mistake and thus misrepresents her actual beliefs.
As far as I can see, Sider uses “nonsubstantive” and “verbal” interchangeably. This usage seems problematic because it takes for granted that verbal disputes are always nonsubstantive and vice versa, which is highly controversial (see e.g. Jackson 2013).
It might be suggested that in order to fix this problem, we can simply modify Hirsch’s account such that what is required is that once parties charitably interpret each other, each party will not disagree that the other speaks the truth in its own language. However, this move is only available if one is prepared to defend the more general view that charitable interpretations are best understood as minimizing disagreement rather than as maximizing truth or agreement. And at any rate, this would not avoid the shortcomings discussed in the following sections.
I am grateful to Richard Woodward for pointing out some relevant cases.
Note that it will not matter for my account of verbal disputes whether there is such a thing as utterance meaning even though this seems plausible to me.
Note that for my account of verbal disputes, it does not matter whether what I call speaker’s meaning is part of the meaning of the statement in any semantically interesting sense of “meaning”.
Moreover, ass noted earlier (p. 14, fn. 7 and 8), it is not necessary to accept that there is such a thing as utterance meaning or that speaker’s meaning is part of the meaning of the uttered statement in any semantically interesting sense of “meaning”.
See (MacFarlane 2014, Chap. 6) for a discussion of other alternatives and their shortcomings.
The argument in this section applies to Jenkins's (2014) account of verbal disputes as well. The core idea of her account is that disputants do not disagree over the subject matter(s) of their dispute. However, she leaves it unspecified how to identify the subject matter(s) of a dispute. This is certainly a difficult matter, but it seems that what subject matters are raised in a dispute depends at any rate on the statements parties utter or, if I am right, on what they intend to say. As a result, we need to consider the speaker’s meaning of parties’ utterances in order to identify the subject matters of a dispute. The upshot is that the notion of speaker’s meaning is more basic than the notion of subject matter. My account can be used to supplement Jenkins’, but it also shows that even though talk about subject matters can be a convenient way of framing the problem, it is not necessary for an account of verbal disputes.
For helpful discussion, I would like to thank the audiences at the Carnap Lectures 2013 with David Chalmers in Bochum, at the Australian National University, at the University of Hamburg and the EFAK X on Disagreements at the University of Tartu. I am particularly grateful to Rachael Briggs, Rosanna Keefe, Stephen Laurence, Wolfgang Schwarz and Richard Woodward for insightful comments. Generous financial support was provided by the Swiss National Science Foundation and, at later stages, by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft via their support for the Emmy Noether Research Group “Ontology after Quine”.
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Vermeulen, I. Verbal Disputes and the Varieties of Verbalness. Erkenn 83, 331–348 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-017-9892-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-017-9892-4