Disagreement lost
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Disagreement lost Martín Abreu Zavaleta1 Received: 21 January 2020 / Accepted: 5 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract This paper develops a puzzle about non-merely-verbal disputes. At first sight, it would seem that a dispute over the truth of an utterance is not merely verbal only if there is a proposition that the parties to the dispute take the utterance under dispute to express, which one of the parties accepts and the other rejects. Yet, as I argue, it is extremely rare for ordinary disputes over an utterance’s truth to satisfy this condition, in which case non-merely verbal disputes are extremely rare. After examining various responses to the puzzle, I outline a solution using the framework of truthmaker semantics. Keywords Disagreement · Truthmaker semantics · Verbal disputes
1 Introduction Think of disputes as linguistic interactions (as opposed to, say, conflicts in people’s attitudes).1 So understood, it is enough for two people to have a dispute over the truth of a given utterance that one of them makes that utterance and the other rejects it— e.g. by saying ‘that’s not true’, ‘that’s false’, ‘you’re wrong’, or something along those lines. Since two people may have a dispute over the truth of a given utterance without having conflicting beliefs about the facts they take that utterance to be about, we can make a broad division between disputes that are merely verbal and disputes that are not. If the parties to a dispute over the truth of a certain utterance have conflicting beliefs about whether the utterance is true, but non-conflicting beliefs about the facts which they take the utterance to be about, then their dispute is purely about whether 1 Cf. Cappelen and Hawthorne’s (2009) distinction between disagreement as an activity and disagreement as a state.
Parts of this paper were written while holding a postdoctoral fellowship from Coordinación de Humanidades, at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. I thank them for their generous support.
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Martín Abreu Zavaleta [email protected], [email protected] Department of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies, Umeå universitet, A, Humanisthuset, HF127, 901 87 Umeå, Sweden
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the utterance is true, and in that sense it is merely verbal. But if the parties to the dispute have conflicting beliefs both about whether the utterance is true and about the facts which they take the utterance to be about, their dispute is not merely verbal.2 For example, suppose that Anna utters ‘Carla’s house is green’ and Bob replies ‘that’s not true’. Other things being equal, Anna and Bob’s dispute reflects a conflict in their beliefs about whether Anna’s utterance is true: Anna believes that it is, but Bob believes that it isn’t. If, in addition, Anna and Bob both believe that Anna’s utterance means that Carla’s house is green, then their dispute also betrays a conflict in their beliefs about the color of Anna’s house, and in that sense is not merely verbal; by uttering ‘Carla’s house is green’, Anna expressed her belief that Carla’s
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