Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

An influential strand of thought in contemporary analytic philosophy maintains that disputes involving predicates of personal taste present the so-called phenomenon of apparent faultless disagreement. The goal of the paper is to clarify to what extent, if at all, paradigmatic cases of apparent faultless disagreement raise a distinctive philosophical challenge. The paper elaborates on a dilemma. On the one hand, we establish desiderata which must be met by any suitable explanation of the phenomenon that raise a distinctive and challenging problem; however, challenging desiderata are prejudicial almost to the point of begging the question against a semantic and an epistemic attempt of endorsing appearances of faultless disagreement. On the other, we make room for weaker desiderata that avoid the threat of prejudiciality and are jointly met by both semantic and epistemic accounts; however, weaker desiderata undermine the contention that paradigmatic cases of apparent faultless disagreement pose a distinctive philosophical challenge.

References

Kölbel, M. (2009) “The Evidence for Relativism”, Synthese 166: 375–395.

Schafer, K. (2011) “Faultless Disagreement and Aesthetic Realism”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 82(2): 265–286.