Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Many domains, notably that involving predicates of personal taste, present the phenomenon of apparent faultless disagreement. Contextualism is a characteristically moderate attempt to endorse such appearances. According to an often-voiced objection, although it straightfowardly accounts for the faultlessness, contextualism fails to respect "facts about disagreement". With many other recent contributors to the debate, I contend that the notion of disagreement --of genuine, real, substantive, robust disagreement-- is indeed very flexible, and in particular can be constituted by contrasting non-doxastive attitudes. As such, contextualism is clearly straightforwardly compatible with facts about the existence of disagreement. There is however a prima facie worry for contextualism involving facts about how existent disagreement is expressible in ordinary conversations in the domain in question. Elaborating on a suggestion by Lewis (1989), I argue that the presupposition of commonality approach (López de Sa 2008) shows that there are versions of contextualism in good standing vis-à-vis such facts about the expressibility of disagreement. In order to do these, it proves illuminating to contrast the notion of disagreement with that of cases of conflict.

Lewis, D.(1989). "Dispositional Theories of Value" reprinted in Papers in Ethics and Social Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2000).