Making Sense of Faultless Disagreement

This dissertation examines the phenomenon of faultless disagreement: situations in which it seems that neither of two opposing sides has made a mistake in upholding their respective positions. I explore the way in which we ought to conceive of the nature of the kinds of claims that give rise to faultless disagreement and what the possibility of such disagreement reveals with a view to the rationality of tolerance. My starting point is a rather simple observation: persistent disagreements about ordinary empirical claims, say, that it's now raining outside or that Columbia's Philosophy Department is located at 1150 Amsterdam Avenue, are significantly more puzzling than persistent disagreements about matters of taste and value. Suppose you and I are standing at 1150 Amsterdam Avenue and you deny that this is where Columbia's Philosophy Department is located. My immediate--and I believe justifiable--reaction is to suspect that you suffer from some sort of cognitive shortcoming: bad eyesight, the influence of drugs, or what have you. As opposed to that, I am not particularly shocked to see that our disagreement about the tastiness of snails persists. More importantly, I would not want to say that you are mistaken in any real way if you call snails tasty. The problem is of course that if we are prepared to allow for the possibility of faultless disagreement, it seems inevitable to conclude that for certain subject matters the law of non-contradiction does not hold. The tension between this rather uncomfortable consequence and what seems to be a datum of our linguistic practices motivates the guiding question of my dissertation--namely, if there is a way to make sense of the phenomenon of faultless disagreement. In trying to do so, I make three central claims. First, I argue that the possibility of faultless disagreement is characteristic of what I call "basic evaluations." Evaluations are basic, on my account, not by being fundamental or universal, but by being rooted in the agent's sensibilities. Such evaluations are basic insofar as the agent cannot step outside of her inner frame of personal tastes and preferences. Second, I argue that what characterizes faultless disagreements is that there are no established methods of determining who has gotten things right. This is why we tend to think that the opponents may rationally stick to their respective positions--or, as I put in my dissertation, why we do not epistemically downgrade each other whenever we encounter such disagreements. The absence of established methods of resolution entails various epistemological challenges for realist accounts of the kinds of claims that give rise to faultless disagreement. The realist insists that despite the appearance that these disagreements are rationally irresolvable, at least one of the opposing sides must have made a mistake. But then she is forced to maintain either that we might lack epistemic access to the realm of evaluative facts and properties, or that we have access to this realm due to special evaluative capacities. Neither option is particularly attractive from the point of view of an agent. In response to such challenges I therefore propose a non-cognitivist, robustly anti-realist account of the subset of the evaluative domain of discourse that allows for faultless disagreement. I argue that we can make sense of the dimension of faultlessness, if we construe the relevant claims as expressions of our individual evaluative attitudes. More precisely, I suggest that we can construe them as dispositional intentions or plans to bring the world into line with what one deems worthy of pursuit. I also show how we can make sense of the dimension of disagreement by proposing a pragmatic account of the way in which evaluative attitudes can stand in relations of inconsistency. Third, I argue that whenever there is no way of demonstrating that one side has gotten things wrong, it is unjustified--at least from the point of view of a cognizer who abides by the norms of rationality--to reject a given conflicting evaluation as mistaken. When it comes to the kinds of claims that give rise to faultless disagreement it is thus a rational requirement to be tolerant of our opponents' positions. Contrary to a long-standing tradition that goes back to Locke and Mill I therefore take toleration to be not a moral, but an epistemic value. Moreover, I show that what is sometimes taken to be paradoxical about the kinds of situations that call for toleration is the result of a switch of perspectives: from the perspective of a valuer I genuinely disagree, say, with your claim that it's permissible to lie if this prevents hurting someone's feelings. But from the perspective of a cognizer I realize that I would be unjustified in rejecting your conflicting evaluation as mistaken

Taste Fragmentalism

This paper explores taste fragmentalism, a novel approach to matters of taste and faultless disagreement. The view is inspired by Kit Fine’s fragmentalism about time, according to which the temporal dimension can be constituted—in an absolute manner—by states that are pairwise incompatible, provided that they do not obtain together. In the present paper, we will apply this metaphysical framework to taste states. In our proposal, two incompatible taste states (such as the state of rhubarb’s being tasty and the state of rhubarb’s being distasteful) can both constitute reality in an absolute manner, although no agent can have joint access to both states. We will then develop a formalised version of our view by means of an exact truthmaker semantics for taste assertions. Within this framework—we argue—our linguistic and inferential practices concerning cases of faultless disagreement are elegantly vindi- cated, thus suggesting that taste fragmentalism is worth of further consideration

Problems of Religious Luck, Chapter 3: "Enemy in the Mirror: The Need for Comparative Fundamentalism"

Measures of inductive risk and of safety-principle violation help us to operationalize concerns about theological assertions or a sort which, as we saw in Part I, aggravate or intensify problems of religious luck. Our overall focus in Part II will remain on a) responses to religious multiplicity, and b) sharply asymmetrical religious trait-ascriptions to religious insiders and outsiders. But in Part II formal markers of inductive norm violation will supply an empirically-based manner of distinguishing strong from moderate fideism. As we develop these markers we will elaborate their more specific connections with comparative study of religious fundamentalisms (chapters 3 and 4), with exclusivist responses to religious multiplicity (chapter 5), and with working hypotheses in cognitive science of religion (chapter 6). In Chapters 3 the special focus is on the need for comparative fundamentalism (hereafter CF), and on how a better inductive risk ‘toolkit’ can empower its development. The “Enemy in the Mirror” is a metaphor which researchers of CF have sometimes used to describe a phenomena of special concern. This allows that religious fundamentalism per se need not be morally or socially problem, and that the terms such as “fundamentalism” and “fideism should not be over-used by scholars. But the enemy-in-the-mirror phenomena, which gives rise to what I term “bias-mirroring” attributions of good/bad traits to religious insiders and outsiders, carries enormous moral risks. I argue that this is something researchers would do well to study. On the view to be developed, the enemy in the mirror phenomenon is a direct consequent of counter-inductive thinking when applied to a multiplicity of narrative testimonial traditions

Disagreement and the Normativity of Truth beneath Cognitive Command

This thesis engages with three topics and the relationships between them: (i) the phenomenon of disagreement (paradigmatically, where one person makes a claim and another denies it); (ii) the normative character of disagreements (the issue of whether, and in what sense, one of the parties is “at fault” for believing something that’s untrue); (iii) the issue of which theory of what truth is can best accommodate the norms relating belief and truth. People disagree about all sorts of things: about whether climate is changing, death penalty is wrong, sushi is delicious, or Louis C.K. is funny. However, even focusing on disagreements in the evaluative domain (e.g., taste, moral and comedic), where people have the intuition that there is ‘no fact of the matter’ about who is right, there are significant differences that require explanation. For instance, disagreement about taste is generally perceived as shallow. People accept to disagree and live comfortably with that fact. By contrast, moral disagreement is perceived as deep and sometimes hard to tolerate. Comedic disagreement is similar to taste. However, it may involve an element of ‘intellectual snobbery’ that is absent in taste disagreement. The immediate questions are whether these contrasts allow of precise characterization and what is responsible for them. I argue that, once a case is made for the truth-aptness of judgments in these areas, the contrast can be explained in terms of variable normative function of truth – as exerting a lightweight normative constraint in the domain of taste and a stricter constraint in the moral domain. In particular I claim that while truth in the moral domain exerts a sui generis deontic control, this normative feature of truth is silent in both the taste and the comedic domains. This leads me to investigate how to conceive of truth in the light of normative variability. I argue that an amended version of deflationism – minimally inflated deflationism – can account for the normative variability of truth

The nature of disagreement: matters of taste and environs

Predicates of personal taste (PPT) have attracted a great deal of attention from philosophers of language and linguists. In the intricate debates over PPT, arguably the most central consideration has been which analysis of PPT can best account for the possibility of faultless disagreement about matters of personal taste. I argue that two models of such disagreement—the relativist and absolutist models—are empirically inadequate. In their stead, I develop a model of faultless taste disagreement which represents it as involving a novel incompatibility relation between preferences that I call type-noncotenability. This model is available to all parties in the ongoing debates about PPT, but it points up an advantage enjoyed by expressivist accounts of PPT. In closing, I consider four objections against the model that, while failing to fully undermine it, open up promising avenues of inquiry about the nature of disagreement

Taking Disagreement Seriously: Towards understanding the significance of disagreement in judicial decision making

This thesis concerns the understanding of disagreement, exploring what implications its study might possess for law. Specifically, I focus my attention on the recent Epistemology of Disagreement literature (ED), which seeks to identify what one should do when one finds oneself in disagreement with an 'epistemic peer'. In applying ED, I use as a test site the UKSC - an elite forum of peers from which rulings are of great social importance, thereby providing a critical test of the insights offered by ED's approach. My findings lie across the disciplines. In philosophy, I suggest that ED fails a test of their making; that the theory can extend from the idealised instances of disagreement typical of the literature, to more complex 'real-world' disagreements such as those in law. Within my analysis two features warrant special mention. First, I identify deficits in the construction of peers in ED. Through application to UKSC Justices I argue that the definition employed is simply unattainable, failing to extend even to the narrow forum of the UKSC. Second, deficits are identified in the construction of 'disagreement' - I argue that unnecessary restrictions unduly limit our understanding of genuine disagreement. The identified deficits enable us to see that ED's limited focus on circumscribed and artificial instances of disagreement offers little about disagreement itself, and little about disagreement in real-world cases. In law, I conclude that ED fails to apply to the disagreements subject to analysis. I further argue that the deficits encountered are not in fact limited to ED, but rather betray a more foundational mistreatment of the notion of disagreement that is evidenced in wider jurisprudential literature. In this respect, I identify a gap that is faced in both philosophy and jurisprudence in the treatment of disagreement. Finally, in spotlighting deficits in the present literature, I begin to map out important clarifications and insights that can be brought together to fill the gap, so that we might begin to take disagreement seriously

Desacuerdos estratégicos y dinámicas de conflicto antagónicas

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, to study strategic disagreements, i.e., those situations in which one of the parties uses an expression that allows it to restructure the debate and, in this way, obtain some strategic advantage to advance its political agenda. The paper examines this type of disagreement in a specific context: the parliamentary debates in the Spanish Congress of Deputies during the VIII Legislature (2004-2008). Second, to show that strategic disagreements constitute antagonistic conflict dynamics, i.e., situations in which one or both parties are denied a morally adequate treatment of their points of view. In this way, strategic disagreements prevent the development of the dynamics necessary to manage the conflict in a cooperative way.El objetivo de este artículo es doble. Primero, analizar los desacuerdos estratégicos, es decir, aquellas situaciones en las que una de las partes usa una expresión que le permite reestructurar el debate y, de este modo, obtener alguna ventaja estratégica para hacer avanzar su agenda política. El trabajo examina este tipo de desacuerdos en un contexto específico: los debates parlamentarios del Congreso de los Diputados de España pertenecientes a la VIII Legislatura (2004-2008). Segundo, mostrar que los desacuerdos estratégicos constituyen dinámicas de conflicto antagónicas, es decir, situaciones en las que se niega a una o a ambas partes un tratamiento moralmente aceptable de sus puntos de vista. De este modo, los desacuerdos estratégicos impiden que se puedan desarrollar las dinámicas necesarias para gestionar el conflicto de manera cooperativa

Problems of Religious Luck, Chapter 6: The Pattern Stops Here?

This book has argued that problems of religious luck, especially when operationalized into concerns about doxastic risk and responsibility, can be of shared interest to theologians, philosophers, and psychologists. We have pointed out counter-inductive thinking as a key feature of fideistic models of faith, and examined the implications of this point both for the social scientific study of fundamentalism, and for philosophers’ and theologians’ normative concerns with the reasonableness of a) exclusivist attitudes to religious multiplicity, and b) theologically-cast but bias-mirroring trait-ascriptions to religious insiders and outsiders. It is important to keep the descriptive/explanatory and normative concerns properly separated, but philosophy of luck and risk are relevant to both. More specifically, inductive risky theological strategies,we have argued, are a relevant concern both descriptively and normatively. The descriptive/explanatory relevance of measures of high inductive risk connects it with cognitive and social psychology of religion, while its normative relevance connects with critical concerns with epistemology of testimony, the epistemology of disagreement, and the ethics of belief. A research program to examine fideistic orientation and its relation to epistemically risky doxastic strategies is one of potentially numerous research programs on which philosophers and psychologists might work collaboratively. So this concluding chapter of our study culminates with the outline of a proposed research program at the intersection of shared concerns. I term this research program CICI, because it examines what lies at the intersection of CSR’s standing interest in the appeal of counter-intuitive ideas, and our own study’s focus on the fideistic penchant for counter-inductive thinking. Religious Studies scholars typically focus on particular traditions and teachings, while CSR scholars tend to eschew such content-focused approaches in favor of a study of evolutionary and hence generic or trans-religious functions and processes. I argue that CICI has the added benefit of effectively mediating this generic-specific contrast between CSR and Religious Studies, allowing CSR research to be more closely connected with and relevant to comparative fundamentalism