Starting from the case of insurance claims, I investigate the dynamics of acceptance, rejection and denial. I show that disagreement can be more varied than one might think. I illustrate this by looking at the Warren/Sanders controversy in the 2020 democratic primaries and at religious agnosticism

Incurvati, Luca

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Rejection, Denial and the Democratic PrimariesLUCA INCURVATIUniversity of Amsterdaml.incurvati@uva.nlNotice. This is the preprint of an article due to appear in Think.AbstractStarting from the case of insurance claims, I investigate the dynamicsof acceptance, rejection and denial. I show that disagreement can bemore varied than one might think. I illustrate this by looking at the War-ren/Sanders controversy in the 2020 democratic primaries and at reli-gious agnosticism.When an insured party incurs an expense, they may submit a claim for reim-bursement. The insurance then reacts. They may accept the claim, reject it, ordeny it.It’s clear enough what happens when the insurance accepts the claim: theinsured party receives the reimbursement requested. But what’s the differencebetween a rejected claim and a denied one? When the insurance companydenies a claim, this means that they will not reimburse the medical expense.By contrast, when the medical insurance rejects a claim, this does not meanthat they will not reimburse the medical expense – it only means that they donot accept the claim, perhaps because it has not been filed properly or certaininformation is missing. Something is wrong with the claim. The crucial differ-ence is that while the insured party may resubmit a previously rejected claim,which might then be accepted, this is not possible for a denied claim.Despite this initial excursus, this article is not about medical billing, or thephilosophy of medicine for that matter. Rather, this article is about the dynam-ics of acceptance, rejection and denial, so beautifully exemplified in our ex-ample. (This doesn’t make insurance practices any more pleasant, of course.)We are interested in how these dynamics play out in dialogue as well non-verbal exchanges. So let’s start from a recent example.We are in early January 2020. The setting is the democratic presidentialprimaries. The day before the first democratic primary debate of the year, CNNpublishes a report alleging that in 2018, during a meeting in which ElizabethWarren communicated to Bernie Sanders her intention to run for president,Sanders told Warren that a woman could not win in 2020. Shortly thereafter,Kristen Orthman, Communications Director for Warren’s campaign, releasesa statement on Twitter from Warren saying that during the meeting the topiccame up of what would happen if the democrats nominated a female candid-ate: Warren ‘thought a woman could win’ while Sanders ‘disagreed’.Sanders, for his part, also releases a statement, this time to CNN. In the firstpart of the statement, Sanders vehemently denies having said that a womancould not win the presidential election:It is ludicrous to believe that at the same meeting where ElizabethWarren told me she was going to run for president, I would tell herthat a woman couldn’t win. It’s sad that, three weeks before theIowa caucus and a year after that private conversation, staff whoweren’t in the room are lying about what happened.In denying that he said that a woman could not win, Sanders is saying that hedid not say that a woman could not win. He is saying that the allegations of theCNN report are false. Just as in the insurance example, Sanders is indicatingthat he will not accept the claim that he said that a woman could not win.Political commentators were quick to conclude that ‘somebody’s not tellingthe truth’, as MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski put it. (According to Brzezinski, it wasElizabeth Warren who wasn’t telling the truth, but opinion was divided.) How-ever, attention to the dynamics of acceptance, rejection and denial suggests adifferent possibility. Let us consider the second part of Sanders’ statement tothe CNN:What I did say that night was that Donald Trump is a sexist, a racistand a liar who would weaponize whatever he could. Do I believe awoman can win in 2020? Of course! After all, Hillary Clinton beatDonald Trump by 3 million votes in 2016.Sanders is here doing something which happens extremely frequently in casesof disagreement about the truth of a certain claim. Having denied the claim –having said that the claim is false – we make a counter-claim. In the insurancecase, you can imagine the insurance saying that although they deny the claim,they will accept a different one, perhaps for a lower amount. In this particularcase, Sanders is saying that while he didn’t say that a woman could not win, he2did say that Trump is a sexist and would use whatever he could to win. Now,is this incompatible with the truth of what Warren said?Recall that Warren’s recollection of what happened is that Sanders thoughtthat a woman could not win. Given the context – Warren informing Sanders ofher intention to run as a president – it would have been natural for Warren toinfer that, by saying that Trump is a sexist who would weaponize whatever hecould, Sanders was communicating that a woman could not win. As Warrenpointed out, she and Sanders disagreed. But note that, again taking both ofthem at their word, it is implausible to think that they disagreed about the letterof what Sanders said: surely Warren would agree with Sanders that Trump isa sexist and a liar who would use the gender or ethnicity of his opponents towin. Instead, the disagreement seems to concern what Warren took Sanders tobe implying – or implicating, using the terminology of philosopher Paul Grice –namely that a woman could not win.1 Because she took Sanders to be implyingthis, Warren rejected his claim even though she herself likely thought his claimto be literally true. As in the insurance case, in rejecting a claim we are notindicating that we will not accept it in the future, once the defects associatedwith the claim are removed. In this particular case, suppose that Sanders wereto reiterate his claim that Trump is a sexist who would weaponize whatever hecan, but stressed that he doesn’t take this to imply that a woman could not win– perhaps saying that he does believe that a woman could win (as he indeeddid in his statement to the CNN). Then there would be no reason for Warrennot to accept his claim.Thus, one may reject a claim because one thinks that the claim is false –one denies the claim. But one may reject the claim for other reasons. TheSanders/Warren case brings this into sharp relief: assuming both Sanders andWarren were telling the truth, what Warren did was to reject Sanders’ claimbecause of its implications (or implicatures, again using Grice’s terminology).There are other reasons different from falsity for rejecting a claim. A prom-inent one is when one rejects a claim because it is not supported by the evid-ence.2 A classic case of this sort concerns debate about the existence of God.Imagine the religious person saying that there is a God. The atheist will wantto deny the claim: they think it’s false that there is a God. The case of theagnostic, however, is different. The agnostic typically thinks that there isn’t1Paul Grice, ‘Logic and Conversation’, in D. Davidson and G. Harman (eds), The Logic ofGrammar (Encino, CA: Dickenson, 1975), 64–75.2For more cases, see Luca Incurvati and Julian Schlöder, ‘Weak rejection’, AustalasianJournal of Philosophy 95(4) (2017): 741–760.3enough evidence for the existence of God and therefore rejects the claim thatthere is a God. However, the agnostic does not want to deny that there is aGod, since they think that there isn’t enough evidence against the existence ofGod either. Again, we have a clear analogy with the insurance case: the insur-ance may reject a claim because the documentation provided is not sufficientfor the claim to be accepted. Instead of denying the claim, the insurance mayask for further evidence that the expense has been incurred.The foregoing observations shed light on the various forms that disagree-ment can take. On a naïve picture, disagreement can only arise when oneparty thinks that a certain claim is true whilst the other party thinks that theclaim is not true. However, paying close attention to the dynamics of making aclaim – what the philosophers call assertion – and rejection shows that this pic-ture is too simple. There can indeed be disagreement of the kind adumbrated,but there often occur disagreements of a different kind: one may disagree notbecause one thinks that what the other party said is false, but because onethinks that it is inappropriate in some other way, such as having undesirableimplications or not being adequately supported by evidence.33This work has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under theEuropean Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No758540) within the project From the Expression of Disagreement to New Foundations for Ex-pressivist Semantics.4

Rejection, denial and the democratic primaries

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Rejection, denial and the democratic primaries

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