Abstract
The argument from faultless disagreement employed by the relativist purports to show that contextualism falls short of explaining cases of faultless disagreement. The demonstration is intended to give credence to the relativist semantics of epistemic modality expressions. In this paper we present some cases showing that even though cases of faultless disagreement do reveal some intrinsic features of epistemic modality claims, they do not support the relativist semantics. The sophistication of faultless disagreement goes beyond what the relativist semantics can cope with. We also advance an epistemologically oriented proposal to account for faultless disagreement.
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Notes
The sufficiency thesis and the necessity thesis for retractions can be construed in a similar fashion.
The scenario can be reset if necessary, due to the controversy of future knowledge, having the asserter making his claim after the lottery numbers have been drawn.
It is debatable whether the asserter’s claim is faultless, though his claim is coherent with his information state, and he sincerely believes that he will win. If the coherence leads to the asserter’s claim being deemed as faultless, then this is a case of faultless disagreement. If one takes that the asserter’s lacking good reason in favour of his claim leads to the asserter’s claim being deemed as not faultless, then it is a genuine puzzle why the assessor’s disagreement is inappropriate and the asserter’s retraction is also inappropriate.
One concern of this argument is that in order to argue for the desired result, we need that the modality ‘might have been’ in the case receives an epistemic interpretation rather than an alethic interpretation. See DeRose (1998: 67), von Fintel and Gillies (2008: 87), and Wright (2007: 272) for arguments in favour of its having an epistemic interpretation.
This assumption is also employed in Wright (2007: 267–268) where he takes this type of example as arguing that an assessor’s disagreement may not be actually targeting the asserter’s epistemic modality claim but rather the embedded prejacent proposition. See also von Fintel and Gillies (2008: 82–83).
We consider the case of the evidential assessor also as a counterexample of the necessity thesis. To judge that the assessor’s disagreement is appropriate, that the asserter or the assessor does or does not know whether or not this particular sparrow is able to fly is not the concern.
There is actually a fourth type, that both the retraction and the resistance of retraction are inappropriate. We do not present cases of this type in this paper, but they can be easily constructed given what we have presented so far.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank audiences at the 2010 annual conference of the Australasian Association of Philosophy and the 2010 annual conference of the Taiwan Philosophical Association. Funding for this study was supported by research grants of Taiwan Natural Science Council (NSC-97-2628-H-194-063-MY3, NSC-98-2410-H-031-002-MY3, NSC-99-2410-H-194-016, NSC-100-2410-H-194-085-MY3).
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Hou, R., Wang, L. Relativism and Faultless Disagreement. Philosophia 41, 203–216 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-012-9379-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-012-9379-0