Disagreement without belief

Abstract

When theorising about disagreement, it is tempting to begin with a person's belief that p and ask what mental state one must have in order to disagree with it. This is the wrong way to go; the paper argues that people may also disagree with attitudes that are not beliefs. It then examines whether several existing theories of disagreement can account for this phenomenon. It argues that its own normative theory of disagreement gives the best account, and so, given that there is good reason to believe disagreement without belief is possible, there is good reason to think that disagreement itself is normative.

Illocutionary Disagreement in Faultless Disagreement

“…Let me just say that I agree with some authors (i.a. Marques and García-Carpintero 2014, Marques 2015, Marques 2016, Zouhar 2019, Bex-Priestley and Shemmer 2021, who argue that the notion of conflicting attitudes on its own is unable to give us a plausible explanation of disagreement intuitions in discussions about value. If we grant that the contextualist picture which envisages that in [Dialogue 1] the speakers express the enriched propositions that Brussels sprouts are tasty to Amy and that Brussels sprouts are not tasty to Betty does not explain the intuition of disagreement, it is hard to see how possessing or expressing attitudes of liking and disliking towards Brussels sprouts would do the job.…”