Expressing Disagreement: A Presuppositional Indexical Contextualist Relativist Account

Abstract

Many domains, notably the one involving predicates of personal taste, present the phenomenon of apparent faultless disagreement. Contextualism is a characteristically moderate implementation of the relativistic attempt to endorse such appearances. According to an often-voiced objection, although it straightforwardly 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—“genuine,” “real,” “substantive,” “robust” disagreement—is indeed very flexible, and in particular can be constituted by contrasting attitudes. As such, contextualism is clearly straightforwardly compatible with facts about the existence of disagreement. There is, however, a genuine prima facie worry for contextualism involving facts about the expression of (existent) disagreement in ordinary conversations. Elaborating on a suggestion by Lewis (Proc Aristot Soc 63(Suppl):113–138, 1989), I argue that the presupposition of commonality approach in Lopez de Sa (Relative truth. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008) shows that there are versions of contextualism that are in good standing vis-a-vis such facts about the expression of (existent) disagreement.