The Argument from Disagreement (AD) (Mackie, 1977) depends upon empirical evidence for ‘fundamental’ moral disagreement (FMD) (Doris and Stich, 2005; Doris and Plakias, 2008). Research on the Southern ‘culture of honour’ (Nisbett and Cohen, 1996) has been presented as evidence for FMD between Northerners and Southerners within the US. We raise some doubts about the usefulness of such data in settling AD. We offer an alternative based on recent work in moral psychology that targets the potential (...) universality of morally significant distinctions (e.g. means vs. side-effects, actions versus omissions). More specifically, we argue that a recent study showing that a rural Mayan population fails to perceive as morally significant the distinction between actions and omissions provides a plausible case of FMD between Mayans and Westerners. (shrink)

Arguments from disagreement against moral realism begin by calling attention to widespread, fundamental moral disagreement among a certain group of people. Then, some skeptical or anti-realist-friendly conclusion is drawn. Chapter 2 proposes that arguments from disagreement share a structure that makes them vulnerable to a single, powerful objection: they self-undermine. For each formulation of the argument from disagreement, at least one of its premises casts doubt either on itself or on one of (...) the other premises. On reflection, this shouldn’t be surprising. These arguments are intended to support very strong metaphysical or epistemological conclusions about morality. They must therefore employ very strong metaphysical or epistemological premises. But, given the pervasiveness of disagreement in philosophy, especially about metaphysics and epistemology, very strong premises are virtually certain to be the subject of widespread, intractable disagreement—precisely the sort of disagreement that proponents of these arguments think undermine moral claims. Thus, these arguments undermine their own premises. If Chapter 2’s argument is sound, it provides realists with a single, unified strategy for responding to any existing or forthcoming arguments from disagreement. (shrink)

This essay begins with the assumption that many of our moral disputes have deeper roots in disagreement over worldview propositions. If this is true, and if there is a fact of the matter about worldview propositions, such that one could know the truth of at least some of them, then this makes it possible for one to maintain one’s moral beliefs, even despite the persistent, pervasive disagreements so common today. I argue that this holds true even when those debates (...) include supposed peers and when the worldview propositions themselves are highly disputed. (shrink)

According to the Argument from Disagreement (AD) widespread and persistent disagreement on ethical issues indicates that our moral opinions are not influenced by moral facts, either because there are no such facts or because there are such facts but they fail to influence our moral opinions. In an innovative paper, Gustafsson and Peterson (Synthese, published online 16 October, 2010) study the argument by means of computer simulation of opinion dynamics, relying on the well-known model of (...) Hegselmann and Krause (J Artif Soc Soc Simul 5(3):1–33, 2002; J Artif Soc Soc Simul 9(3):1–28, 2006). Their simulations indicate that if our moral opinions were influenced at least slightly by moral facts, we would quickly have reached consensus, even if our moral opinions were also affected by additional factors such as false authorities, external political shifts and random processes. Gustafsson and Peterson conclude that since no such consensus has been reached in real life, the simulation gives us increased reason to take seriously the AD. Our main claim in this paper is that these results are not as robust as Gustafsson and Peterson seem to think they are. If we run similar simulations in the alternative Laputa simulation environment developed by Angere and Olsson (Angere, Synthese, forthcoming and Olsson, Episteme 8(2):127–143, 2011) considerably less support for the AD is forthcoming. (shrink)

Several recent articles have weighed in on the question of whether moral philosophers can be counted as moral experts. One argument denying this has been rejected by both sides of the debate. According to this argument, the extent of disagreement in modern moral philosophy prevents moral philosophers from being classified as moral experts. Call this the Argument From Disagreement. In this article, I defend a version of AD. Insofar as practical issues in moral (...) philosophy are characterized by disagreement between moral philosophers who are more or less equally well credentialed on the issue, non-philosophers have no good reasons to defer to their views. (shrink)

According to the skeptical argument from disagreement, we are mandated to suspend judgement about a question if we discover that others disagree with us. Critics, however, have proposed that this skeptical argument fails if there are not equally many people on either side of the debate: numbers matter. The present paper explicates this as the argument that a group can be more likely to arrive at the correct view by majority rule than the members are (...) on their own. Defenders of the skeptical argument have resisted that numbers matter by observing that if group members depend on each other when forming their beliefs, then the group can be less competent than its members. However, neither side of the debate has accompanied their views with quantitative estimates of how detrimental dependence is for group competence. This paper tries to improve this situation by drawing on jury theorems from social choice theory. The paper cannot settle the debate, but it shows that even the lower limit on group competence will exceed the average individual competence when dependence among voters remains moderate. This should give confidence to those who propose that asymmetry between the disputing parties can counter the skeptical argument from disagreement since being in the majority can thus be higher-order evidence for the disputed proposition. (shrink)

In this paper we shed new light on the Argument from Disagreement by putting it to test in a computer simulation. According to this argument widespread and persistent disagreement on ethical issues indicates that our moral opinions are not influenced by any moral facts, either because no such facts exist or because they are epistemically inaccessible or inefficacious for some other reason. Our simulation shows that if our moral opinions were influenced at least a little (...) bit by moral facts, we would quickly have reached consensus, even if our moral opinions were affected by factors such as false authorities, external political shifts, and random processes. Therefore, since no such consensus has been reached, the simulation gives us increased reason to take seriously the Argument from Disagreement. Our conclusion is however not conclusive; the simulation also indicates what assumptions one has to make in order to reject the Argument from Disagreement. The simulation algorithm we use builds on the work of Hegselmann and Krause (J Artif Soc Social Simul 5(3); 2002, J Artif Soc Social Simul 9(3), 2006). (shrink)

In his Pyrrhonian Outlines , Sextus Empiricus employs an argument based upon the possibility of disagreement in order to show that one should not assent to a Dogmatic claim to which at present one cannot oppose a rival claim. The use of this argument seems to be at variance with the Pyrrhonian stance, both because it does not seem to accord with the definition of Skepticism and because the argument appears to entail that the search for (...) truth is doomed to failure. In the present paper, I examine the passages in which Sextus utilizes the argument from possible disagreement and offer an interpretation that makes the use of this argument compatible with the Pyrrhonian outlook. (shrink)

One way to discredit the suggestion that a statement is true just in virtue of its meaning is to observe that its truth is the subject of genuine disagreement. By appealing to the case of the unorthodox philosopher, Timothy Williamson has recast this response as an argument foreclosing any appeal to analyticity. Reconciling Quine’s epistemological holism with his treatment of the ‘deviant logician’, I show that we may discharge the demands of charitable interpretation even while attributing trivial semantic (...) error to Williamson’s philosophers. Williamson’s effort to generalize the argument from disagreement therefore fails. (shrink)

Ronald Dworkin argues that disagreement in hard cases is ‘theoretical’ rather than empirical and of central importance to our understanding of law, showing ‘plain fact’ theories such as H. L. A. Hart’s sophisticated legal positivism to be false. The argument from theoretical disagreement targets positivism’s commitment to idea that the criteria a norm must meet to be valid in a given jurisdiction are constituted by a practice of convergent behavior by legal officials. The ATD suggests that (...) in hard cases there is no such pattern of convergent behavior. Positivists are divided over the force of the ATD. Much of this disagreement over the force of the ATD can be understood as disagreement over just what it is that legal officials disagreeing ‘theoretically’ are disagreeing about. Once the scope of empirical and theoretical disagreements are more accurately plotted, we will see that the actual disagreements that occur in hard cases are not ones which threaten a deeper and pervasive pattern of convergent behavior, one which focuses not upon rules specifying criteria of legal validity, but instead upon broad processes for making, interpreting, and applying law. Such an account remains positivist, relying on the social fact that there is such a consensus, but allows for considerable disagreement among legal officials deciding cases within such procedures. (shrink)

According to the argument from moral disagreement, the existence of widespread or persistent moral disagreement is best explained by, and thus supports, the view that there are no objective moral truths. One of the most common charges against this argument is that it “overgeneralises”: it implausibly forces its proponents to also deny the existence of objective truths about certain matters of physics, history, philosophy, etc. (“companions in guilt” objections) or even about the argument’s own (...) conclusion or its own soundness (“self-defeat” objections). My aim in this article is to provide a detailed clarification and assessment of this overgeneralisation charge. Various (mostly empirical) issues relevant to assessing the above objections have so far not been sufficiently investigated. Nevertheless, there are good reasons to believe that realists have exaggerated the significance of their overgeneralisation charge. Both its companions in guilt and its self-defeat versions likely fail. (shrink)

Theoria, Volume 88, Issue 4, Page 850-867, August 2022.

The most popular argument against moral realism is the argument from disagreement: if there are mind‐independent moral facts, then we would not expect to find as much moral disagreement as we in fact do; therefore, moral realism is false. In this paper, I develop the flipside of this argument. According to this argument from agreement, we would expect to find lots of moral disagreement if there were mind‐independent moral facts. But we (...) do not, in fact, find much moral disagreement; therefore, moral realism is false. I defend the argument, explain the empirical evidence that supports it, and show what makes this challenge novel and powerful. (shrink)

Ronald Dworkin’s argument from theoretical disagreement remains a pressing challenge for legal positivists. In this paper, I show how positivists can answer Dworkin’s argument without having to attribute confusion or disingenuity to legal officials. I propose that the argument rests on two errors. The first is to assume that positivism requires legal officials to converge on precise grounds of law when convergence on more general grounds will do. The second is to construe judicial speech too (...) literally. If we pay attention to the pragmatics of judicial speech, we see that judges do not disagree over what the grounds of law are; they at most disagree over how courts should proceed when agreed-upon, though imprecise, grounds of law underdetermine what the content of the law directs in the case at hand. (shrink)

This study deals with the sceptical arguments by one of the most important figures in the philosophical Sufi tradition (the Akbarian school) and the foremost disciple of Ibn ʿArabī, Ṣadr al‐Dīn al‐Qūnawī. Though not a sceptic in the strict sense, Qūnawī employs sceptical arguments from relativity of rational knowledge and disagreement among philosophers to prove inefficacy of reason and rational procedures of knowledge in terms of achieving certain knowledge of metaphysical matters, namely of God and the ultimate principles (...) of things. The paper questions Qūnawī's implicit assumption that, if there is disagreement on a proposition p, then p is relative and thus cannot provide certain knowledge. It aims to philosophically analyse and assess his scepticism as well as to shed light on the largely unknown terrain of scepticism in the mediaeval Islamic world. (shrink)

Facts about moral disagreement and human evolution have both been said to exclude the possibility of moral knowledge, but the question of how these challenges interact has largely gone unaddressed. The paper aims to present and defend a novel version of the evolutionary “debunking” argument for moral skepticism that appeals to both types of considerations. This argument has several advantages compared to more familiar versions. The standard debunking strategy is to argue that evolutionary accounts of moral beliefs (...) generate skeptical implications because they attribute those beliefs to factors that are unrelated to their truth. That strategy is vulnerable to “third-factor” responses, which invoke first-order moral claims to challenge the assumption that Darwinian factors and the moral truths are really unrelated in that way. In contrast, our version is immune to those responses, as it does not proceed via assumptions about how Darwinian factors relate to the moral facts. Instead, it focuses on what evolutionary accounts of moral beliefs have to say about the fact that people often reach divergent moral beliefs. The argument thereby illustrates how the debunking strategy can join forces with the argument from moral disagreement. The combination of those strategies presents, we think, a challenge that is more formidable than when they are considered separately. (shrink)

It is commonly said that ethical disputes either involve disagreements of fact or disagreements of principle and that while disagreements of fact can be overcome by rational means, disagreements of principle cannot. The difficulty is supposed to be this: for an argument to be rationally persuasive it must appeal to premises already accepted by the person to be persuaded, and if the premises include the principle in question then they will not be acceptable to that person; however, if the (...) premises do not include the principle in question the argument cannot succeed because the conclusion can only validly be inferred from premises which do include the principle in question. While this doctrine is appealing to philosophers who find the idea of ultimate disagreement in ethics comforting, it is a visciously skeptical view which can be generalized to cover all systematic areas of human knowledge. As ‘disagreements of principle’ can appear in almost any domain of human inquiry, the hidden cost of this doctrine is terribly high. (shrink)

In philosophical methodology, intuitions are used as evidence to support philosophical theories. In this paper, I evaluate the skeptical argument that variation in intuitions is good evidence that our intuitions are unreliable, and so we should be skeptical about our theories. I argue that the skeptical argument is false. First, variation only shows that at least one disputant is wrong in the dispute, but each disputant lacks reason to determine who is wrong. Second, even though variation in intuitions (...) shows that at least one disputant has the wrong intuition in the thought experiment, it is not evidence of unreliability of any disputant’s intuition regarding the philosophical theory being tested. So, variation in intuitions is not good evidence that one’s own intuitions are unreliable. One reply from the literature in peer disagreement is that we should conciliate if we cannot determine who is wrong. I argue that these disagreements are instead unconfirmed peer disagreements (i.e., no good reason to take or dismiss disputants as an epistemic peer, inferior or superior). I argue that if you have a strong intuition about a case, then it is rational for you to remain steadfast. Thus, variation in intuitions does not call for skepticism. (shrink)

In the debate between contextualism and relativism about predicates of taste, the challenge from disagreement (the objection that contextualism cannot account for disagreement in ordinary exchanges involving such predicates) has played a central role. This paper investigates one way of answering the challenge consisting on appeal to certain, less focused on, uses of predicates of taste. It argues that the said thread is unsatisfactory, in that it downplays certain exchanges that constitute the core disagreement data. Additionally, (...) several arguments to the effect that the exchanges in question don’t amount to disagreement are considered and rejected. (shrink)

There is a classic disagreement in moral psychology about the mental states that constitute the sincere acceptance of moral claims. Cognitivists hold that these states are beliefs aiming at a correct description of the world; whereas non-cognitivists argue that they must be some other kind of attitude. Mark Eli Kalderon has recently presented a new argument for non-cognitivism. He argues that all cognitivist inquiries include certain epistemic obligations for the participants in cases of disagreement in the inquiry. (...) I will provide additional support for this claim. Kalderon then claims that our moral inquiry lacks the required epistemic obligation and that therefore it must be non-cognitive. I will show that Kalderon’s case against the required obligation fails and furthermore provide some evidence for the existence of this obligation. Therefore, his argument for non-cognitivism is not sound and provides no pressure against cognitivism. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop an epistemological argument for freedom from poverty, building on Gerald Gaus’ work on political and moral disagreement in New Diversity Theory (NDT). NDT argues that diversity and disagreement are fundamental to political and moral learning. In this paper, I address Gaus’ central arguments in NDT, and focus on what I argue to be the key epistemological distinction of his account—namely, the argument that the relevant diversity, which is conducive to political (...) and moral learning and should therefore be protected by an institutional order, should not be defended or defined by reference to its performance with regards to discovery of true beliefs, but by reference to the independent epistemic value of protection of disagreeing, redundant and distant investigators. I develop a restatement of this argument from the perspective of institutional epistemology, and show that (along with constitutional liberties, polycentric self-governance and markets) freedom from poverty must be considered an institutional “device” conducive to such a conception of diversity. While Gaus rejects redistributive policies at the level of an institutional order, it is precisely his account of the epistemic powers of diversity and disagreement which provides the strongest defense of minimal redistribution. (shrink)

People argue to reconcile differences of opinion, but reconciliation may fail to happen. In these cases, most theorists assume arguers are left with the same disagreement from which they started. This is too optimistic, since disagreement might instead escalate, and this may happen because of the argumentative practice, not in spite of it. These dangers depend on epistemological, pragmatic, and cultural factors, and show why arguers should be careful in picking their dialogical fights.

Dworkin's theoretical disagreement argument, developed in Law's Empire, is presented in that work as the motivator for his interpretive account of law. Like Dworkin's earlier arguments critical of legal positivism, the argument from theoretical disagreement has generated a lively exchange with legal positivists. It has motivated three of them to develop innovative positivist positions. In its original guise, the argument from theoretical disagreement is presented as ‘the semantic sting argument’. However, the (...) argument from theoretical disagreement has more than one version. This article briefly discusses two versions and the leading replies to them, then focuses on the most influential version, directed at Hartian positivism. The article surveys the leading positivist rejoinders to the recast version, indicating key Dworkinian replies or assessing the strength of these rejoinders, and concludes with a rejoinder of its own, making a new case that the argument from theoretical disagreement isn't fatal for Hartian legal positivism. (shrink)

In one of his papers, Moti Mizrahi argues that arguments from an expert opinion are weak arguments. His thesis may seem controversial due to the consensus on this topic in the field of informal logic. I argue that its controversy is framework-dependent, and if translated into a different framework, it appears to be a correct, however trivial, claim. I will use a framework based on Douglas Walton’s argumentation scheme theory and his conception of examination dialogue to demonstrate that it (...) is so. It appears that Mizrahi’s idiosyncratic framework provides an excessively restrictive conception of an argument from expert opinion than Walton’s scheme does. There is no quarrel between both frameworks, as they yield analogous, almost identical, outcomes of argument evaluation. The actual and crucial disagreement is on the topic of argument classification. Mizrahi’s conception of arguments from an expert opinion imposes exact conditions that such argument must fulfil: an expert’s opinion o truth-value must be unknown; o must be unsupported by any evidence; an expert’s peers neither accept o nor reject it. These exclude, by definition, every possible strong, in Walton’s terms, variant of such an argument. Therefore, if rephrased with the notions of the examination dialogue framework, Mizrahi’s thesis sounds as follows: weak arguments from expert opinion are weak arguments. (shrink)

Arguments from analogy are pervasive in everyday reasoning, mathematics, philosophy, and science. Informal logic studies everyday argumentation in ordinary language. A branch of fuzzy logic, approximate reasoning, seeks to model facets of everyday reasoning with vague concepts in ill-defined situations. Ways of combining the results from these fields will be suggested by introducing a new argumentation scheme—a fuzzy analogical argument from classification—with the associated critical questions. This will be motivated by a case study of analogical reasoning (...) in the virtual friendship debate within information ethics. The virtual friendship debate is a disagreement over whether virtual friendships are genuine friendships. It will be argued that the debate could move away from its current impasse, caused by unproductive metaphysical and logical assumptions, if extant arguments are reinterpreted as fuzzy analogical arguments from classification, and subjected to a new set of critical questions which would replace the quest for facts of essence about friendship with an emphasis on empirical data, persuasion, and definitional power. (shrink)

Logical pluralism is commonly described as the view that there is more than one correct logic. It has been claimed that, in order for that view to be interesting, there has to be at least a potential for rivalry between the correct logics. This paper offers a detailed assessment of this suggestion. I argue that an interesting version of logical pluralism is hard, if not impossible, to achieve. I first outline an intuitive understanding of the notions of rivalry and correctness. (...) I then discuss a natural account of rivalry in terms of disagreement about validity claims and the argument from meaning variance that has been raised against it. I explore a more refined picture of the meaning of validity claims that makes use of the character-content distinction of classical two dimensional semantics. There are three ways in which pluralists can use that framework to argue for the view that different logics may be rivals but could nevertheless be equally correct. I argue that none of them is convincing. (shrink)

Arguments from disagreement often take centre stage in debates between competing semantic theories. This paper explores the theoretical basis for arguments from disagreement and, in so doing, proposes methodological principles which allow us to distinguish between legitimate arguments from disagreement and dialectically ineffective arguments from disagreement. In the light of these principles, I evaluate Cappelen and Hawthorne's [2009] argument from disagreement against relativism, and show that it fails to undermine (...) relativism since it is dialectically ineffective. Nevertheless, I argue that an alternative challenge to relativism based on disagreement is available. More generally, I argue that semantic theory is not answerable to data stemming from ‘loaded’ philosophical principles regarding the nature of disagreement. Rather, semantic theorists will exhaust their dialectical responsibilities regarding disagreement if they can demonstrate consistency with a minimal account of the concept. (shrink)

C.S. Lewis’s ‘Argument from Desire’ is best summed up by his famous line, ‘If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world’. In short, unfulfilled ‘seemingly transcendent desires’ point to fulfilment in another realm. Lewis’s argument is fraught with disagreement, and subsequently, questions remain as to its efficacy as a theistic argument. In this essay, I will take (...) a novel approach by using Bayes’ theorem to assess the success of Lewis’s argument in support of theism over and against naturalism. As I will argue, a strength of this approach is that it allows me to largely bypass a significant area of disagreement within the literature, namely, whether these desires are best seen as natural or artificial. Additionally, I will argue for why these desires are the sort of good God would be interested in giving to persons. Then, I will proceed to outline what I take to be the best naturalistic accounts of these desires and outline some of the challenges these accounts face. Finally, I will conclude with plugging these results into Bayes’ theorem. (shrink)

Wittgenstein famously introduced the notion of ‘hinge propositions’: propositions that are assumptions or presuppositions of our languages, conceptual schemes, and language games, presuppositions that cannot themselves be rationally established, defended, or challenged. This idea has given rise to an epistemological approach, ‘hinge epistemology’, which itself has important implications for argumentation. In particular, it develops and provides support for Robert Fogelin’s case for deep disagreements: disagreements that cannot be rationally resolved by processes of rational argumentation. In this paper, I first examine (...) hinge epistemology in its own right, and then explore its implications for arguments and the theory of argumentation. I argue that the Wittgensteinian approach to hinge propositions is problematic, and that, suitably understood, they can be rationally challenged, defended, and evaluated; there are no well-formed, coherent propositions, ‘hinge’ or otherwise, that are beyond epistemic evaluation, critical scrutiny, and argumentative support/critique; and good arguments concerning hinge propositions are not only possible but common. My arguments will rely on a thoroughgoing fallibilism, a rejection of ‘privileged’ frameworks, and an insistence on the challengeability of all frameworks, both from within and from without. (shrink)

The goal of this study is to examine the argumentative functions of concessive yes, but… constructions. Based on interview transcripts, we examine the ways environmental activists negotiate their agreements and disagreements over climate change through yes, but… constructions. Starting from conversational analyses of such concessive sequences, we develop an account grounded in argumentative discourse analysis, notably pragma-dialectics. The analysis focuses on how in conceding arguments speakers re-present others’ discourse, what types of criticism they exercise through particular sequential patterns and (...) which argumentative techniques they saliently use. We show in particular that, in disputing the standpoints supported by the complex argumentation they encounter, speakers raise different types of criticism. We discuss how examining not only the sequencing of agreements and disagreements, but also the argumentative relations that generate these, may extend our understanding of such concessive constructions. (shrink)

Moral disagreement is widely held to pose a threat for metaethical realism and objectivity. In this paper I attempt to understand how it is that moral disagreement is supposed to present a problem for metaethical realism. I do this by going through several distinct (though often related) arguments from disagreement, carefully distinguishing between them, and critically evaluating their merits. My conclusions are rather skeptical: Some of the arguments I discuss fail rather clearly. Others supply with a (...) challenge to realism, but not one we have any reason to believe realism cannot address successfully. Others beg the question against the moral realist, and yet others raise serious objections to realism, but ones that—when carefully stated—can be seen not to be essentially related to moral disagreement. Arguments based on moral disagreement itself have almost no weight, I conclude, against moral realism. (shrink)

The familiar argument from disagreement has been an important focal point of discussion in contemporary meta-ethics. Over the past decade, there has been an explosion of interdisciplinary work between philosophers and psychologists about moral psychology. Working within this trend, John Doris and Alexandra Plakias have made a tentative version of the argument from disagreement on empirical grounds. Doris and Plakias present empirical evidence in support of premise 4, that ethics is beset by fundamental (...) class='Hi'>disagreement. They examine Richard Brandt on Hopi ethics and, especially, Richard E. Nisbett & Dov Cohen on cultures of honor to make a prima facie version of this case. This raises important questions. Are Doris and Plakias correct that there is even a prima facie empirical basis for moral anti-realism? What sort of empirical contribution can be made to such debates in meta-ethics? I argue that we should have reservations about the prospects of empirical contributions to the argument from disagreement. Specifically, before empirical results from psychology can be used to offer conclusions about meta-ethical issues, more careful attention must be paid to normative ethics, and especially to normative theory. There are two parts to this position. First, there is good reason to think that the evidence we currently have about moral disagreement is irrelevant to the meta-ethical debate. Second, the relevant evidence is useless for meta-ethical purposes on its own. Instead, it must be combined with normative theorizing about value pluralism. (shrink)

In a recent paper published in this journal, Hughes (2019) has argued that Machery’s (2017) Dogmatism Argument is self-defeating. Machery’s (2019) reply involves giving the Dogmatism Argument an inductive basis, rather than a philosophical basis. That is, he argues that the most plausible contenders in the epistemology of disagreement all support the Dogmatism Argument; and thus, it is likely that the Dogmatism Argument is true, which gives us reason to accept it. However, Machery’s inductive (...) class='Hi'>argument defines the leading views in terms of their citation counts. But there is no necessary connection between citation counts and truth; it is a truism that many highly cited papers over the past century have turned out to contain false arguments. This inductive information should lead Machery to revise his argument; what Machery (2019) owes—but has failed to provide—is a positive argument for ruling out another plausible contender that Hughes (2019) raises. Without such an account, Machery’s inductive case for the Dogmatism Argument fails. (shrink)

Fogelin’s Wittgensteinian view of deep disagreement as allowing no rational resolution has been criticized from both argumentation theoretic and epistemological perspectives. These criticisms typically do not recognize how his point applies to the very argumentative resources on which they rely. Additionally, more extremely than Fogelin himself argues, the conditions of deep disagreement make each position literally unintelligible to the other, again disallowing rational resolution. In turn, however, this failure of sense is so extreme that it partly cancels (...) its own meaning as a failure of sense. Consequently, it paradoxically opens new possibilities for sense and therefore rationally unexpected resolutions. (shrink)

This paper considers John Doris, Stephen Stich, Alexandra Plakias, and colleagues’ recent attempts to utilize empirical studies of cross-cultural variation in moral judgment to support a version of the argument from disagreement against moral realism. Crucially, Doris et al. claim that the moral disagreements highlighted by these studies are not susceptible to the standard ‘diffusing’ explanations realists have developed in response to earlier versions of the argument. I argue that plausible hypotheses about the cognitive processes underlying (...) ordinary moral judgment and the acquisition of moral norms, when combined with a popular philosophical account of moral inquiry—the method of reflective equilibrium—undercut the anti-realist force of the moral disagreements that Doris et al. describe. I also show that Stich's recent attempt to provide further theoretical support for Doris et al.'s case is unsuccessful. (shrink)

In this paper, I take issue with an idea that has emerged from recent relativist proposals, and, in particular, from Lasersohn, according to which the correct semantics for taste predicates must use contents that are functions of a judge parameter rather than implicit arguments lexically associated with such predicates. I argue that the relativist account and the contextualist implicit argument-account are, from the viewpoint of semantics, not much more than notational variants of one another. In other (...) words, given any sentence containing a taste predicate, and given any assignment of values to the relevant parameters, the two accounts predict the same truth value and are, in that sense, equivalent. I also look at possible reasons for preferring one account over the other. The phenomenon of "faultless disagreement" is often believed to be one such reason. I argue, against Kölbel and Lasersohn, that disagreement is never faultless: either the two parties genuinely disagree, hence if the one is right then the other is wrong, or the two parties are both right, but their apparent disagreement boils down to a misunderstanding. What is more, even if there were faultless disagreement, I argue that relativism would fail to account for it. The upshot of my paper, then, is to show that there is not much disagreement between a contextualist account that models the judge parameter as an implicit argument to the taste predicate, and a relativist account that models it as a parameter of the circumstances of evaluation. The choice between the two accounts, at least when talking about taste, is thus, to a large extent, a matter of taste. (shrink)

This chapter offers a new interpretation of Nietzsche’s argument for moral skepticism, an argument that should be of independent philosophical interest as well. On this account, Nietzsche offers a version of the argument from moral disagreement, but, unlike familiar varieties, it does not purport to exploit anthropological reports about the moral views of exotic cultures, or even garden-variety conflicting moral intuitions about concrete cases. Nietzsche, instead, calls attention to the single most important and embarrassing fact (...) about the history of moral theorizing by philosophers over two millennia: namely, that no rational consensus has been secured on any substantive, foundational proposition about morality. Persistent and apparently intractable disagreement on foundational questions, of course, distinguishes moral theory from inquiry in the sciences and mathematics. According to Nietzsche, the best explanation for this disagreement is that, even though moral skepticism is true, philosophers can still construct valid dialectical justifications for moral claims because the premises of different justifications will answer to the psychological needs of at least some philosophers and thus be deemed true by some of them. The chapter concludes by considering various attempts to defuse this abductive argument for scepticism. (shrink)