Alethic pluralism, deflationism, and faultless disagreement

Abstract

One of the most important “folk” anti‐realist thoughts about certain areas of our thought and discourse—basic taste, for instance, or comedy—is that their lack of objectivity crystallises in the possibility of “faultless disagreements”: situations where one party accepts P, another rejects P, and neither is guilty of any kind of mistake of substance or shortcoming of cognitive process. On close inspection, however, it proves challenging to make coherent sense of this idea, and a majority of theorists have come to reject it as incoherent. There are two significant exceptions in the contemporary literature: relativists often hold it up as something of a coup for their view that it can make straightforward sense of faultless disagreement; and the author of this paper has argued (Wright 2006) that making judicious intuitionistic revisions to classical logic can provide resources that suffice to stabilise the notion. The present paper argues that neither relativism nor intuitionism in fact provides a satisfactory account and indicates how an alethic pluralist framework enables us to do better.

Global expressivism and alethic pluralism

“…6) to a disagreement about the remaining cases, those that Wright regards as merely minimally truth-apt. Wright (2021) argues that his view offers a better account of faultless disagreement than recent relativist approaches, including that of MacFarlane. I'll explain why I disagree with both Wright and MacFarlane, and explain my alternative account of these cases.…”

“…Along the way (Sect. 4.2), I'll compare my own proposal about the coordinative role of the truth norm to proposals by MacFarlane, as well as Wright (2021) himself.…”

“…Happily, I can now describe this alternative case using materials that Wright himself provides in one of his most recent pieces. In 'Alethic pluralism, deflationism, and faultless disagreement' (Wright, 2021), Wright puts on the table many of the considerations on which my argument rests (including, though in an indirect sense, the central point). This piece is so useful for our present purposes that I'll devote the next subsection to a summary of the key points, mainly in Wright's own words.…”

“…Let me pause to compare this proposal to the one offered by Wright (2021), to explain why we give voice to value judgements in what he calls the objectifying idiom. As Wright puts it, we have an interest in having an idiom that enables us, more than merely reporting a response we personally have, to project it as a possible point of coordination.…”

“…I call such speech acts 'merely opinionated assertions', or MOAs, and imagine them used by a community called the Mo'ans. As I point out, and noted above, it is easy to get to something like MOAs in our own linguistic practices, by using devices to cancel the third norm: 'My own opinion is that P'; 'Mine is that not-P.' In Wright's (2021) terms, then, the Mo'ans are speakers who don't, or no longer, have the device of putting their opinions into a public realm. 29 I cover similar ground in 'Truth as convenient friction' (Price, 2003).…”