| A faultless disagreement is a disagreement of which both parties are not at fault.There is faultless disagreement at least on some topics.The taste dispute is regarded as a paradigmatic case of faultless disagreement.Given a natural understanding of disagreement that it stems from conflicting beliefs,and assuming that beliefs can be evaluated in terms of truth,then to acknowledge the possibility of faultless disagreement is to acknowledge that the law of non-contradiction does not hold for certain subject matters.This gives rise to a dilemma over the explanation of faultless disagreement:is the conception of faultless disagreement possible,and if it is,how is it possible?The motivation to give an adequate account of faultless disagreement drives a majority of work in the contemporary philosophy of language and semantics.A variety of approaches with different philosophical sources have been proposed.These approaches can be divided into cognitive and non-cognitive,in light of the presuppositions about their different understanding of disagreement,that is,whether taste disagreement is something about the truth of taste judgement.The cognitive approach,such as objectivism,contextualism and relativism,tries to figure out the possibility of faultless disagreement within the framework of a truth-conditional semantic theory.According to objectivism,there is an objective fact of the matter as to whether or not candied hawthorn is tasty.Therefore,when there is a disagreement about the taste of candied hawthorn,one disputant must have a false belief.As a result,objectivism captures the disagreement intuition perfectly,but defies the faultlessness.According to contextualism,predicates of personal taste are more like indexicals in respect of the context-sensibilities those predicates have.That means,though the claims both parties make seem contradictory,the propositions they express are in fact compatible.This causes the problem of lost disagreement.Non-congnitivism is characterized as a claim that evaluative judgements,such as moral and taste judgements,cannot be true or false in any robust sense.Taste disagreement has nothing to do with the truth of taste claims,but with the disagreement about attitude.This approach has a lot of difficulties in itself as it wholly denies taste judgement has any truth-evaluable content.In that these traditional semantic approaches can't handle the problem of faultless disagreement it is quite reasonable to turn to relativism about truth.The basic tenet of relativism is that there can be a variation in truth-value without a variation in content.By constructing a perspective neutral content,it makes possible that contradictory judgements can both be true.It is thought that appealing to relative truth is the only available way to make the conception of faultless disagreement possible within the framework of a truth-conditional semantic theory.But there is still a wide gap to bridge from incompatible semantic contents to the disagreement intuition.Why we still hold that there is disagreement between two parties,even when we are fully aware that "truth" is relative,that others are telling truth,and that there is no privileged perspective?Therefore,the incompatible contents provided by the relativist semantics are not enough on their own to capture the genuine disagreement,and the explanation of faultless disagreement is not just about the formal apparatus of semantic model.Given the difficulties of existing approaches,we would better rethink the intuition of disagreement and the philosophical assumptions about the nature of disagreement.After carefully evaluating a several strategies to challenge the intuition disagreement,the fourth chapter aims to indicate that all these challenges don't succeed.So there is no good reason to preclude the taste dispute such as whether candied hawthorn is taste or not from genuine cases of disagreement.After confirming the disagreement intuition,we are ready for a new plan.A novel strategy for understanding the faultless disagreement begins with a reflection on what disagreement really is.I challenge the assumption that disagreement entails that utterances made by disputants have incompatible contents.I then try to locate the disagreement somewhere else,rejecting the endeavor to search for an explanation of faultless disagreement solely at the semantic level.If incompatible semantic contents do not guarantee genuine disagreement where does disagreement come from?One option is to refer to the features of context,describing it as metalinguistic disagreement or as disagreement that arises at the level of presuppositions.The basic idea of this way of understanding is to construe disagreement as a pragmatic phenomenon,relegating disagreement at the pragmatic level.Since there are quite a few phenomena that are traditionally considered to be pragmatic,this strategy is widely favored.But,while it is indeed that such context disagreement exists,it seems to be too far to claim that all disagreements involving perspectival predicates are of this kind.The second option is to construe disagreement as a clash of non-doxastic attitudes,i.e.,non-doxastic disagreement.All the three semantic approaches within the truth-conditional semantics framework neglect the non-doxastic dimension,while expressivism wholly denies that taste judgement expresses propositional content.The key point of the new strategy is that both the sense of disagreement and faultlessness derive from the assertive expression.The statement 'candied hawthorn is tasty' can generates asserted content,and along with this assertive use,it expresses some non-doxastic attitude.There are two ways to cash out the idea that taste disagreements can be explained in terms of non-doxastic attitudes.Hybrid theories of contextualism and expressivism posit an additional semantic or pragmatic element to explain how a taste judgement is able to present speaker's non-doxastic attitude toward something.Meanwhile,the requisite-based account draws from the idea that propositions expressed by taste statements entail attitudinal propositions in which speakers present themselves as taking non-doxastic attitudes toward something.As a result,the requisite-based account offers a simpler and a more concise explanation than hybrid theories.I suggest that we shall focus on non-doxastic disagreement in the pursuit of a coherent explanation of faultless disagreement. |
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