Abstract
In this paper, I present two tools that help shed light on deep disagreements and their epistemological consequences. First, I argue that we are best off construing deep disagreements as disagreements over conflicting understandings of certain concepts. More specifically, I suggest that deep disagreements are disagreements over how to understand concepts that play what Michael Friedman calls a “constitutive” role for speakers. Second, I argue that we need a better understanding of what speakers are doing when they engage in deep disagreements—what speech acts they are carrying out. I show that we are best off not reducing the relevant speech acts to more familiar speech act kinds, such as assertions or imperatives. I argue that when a speaker articulates an understanding of a concept, they are in part carrying out an act of stipulation. I provide an account of the pragmatics of stipulation and apply the account to examples of deep disagreement. Focusing on the stipulative dimension of deep disagreement opens up, in turn, a novel approach to defusing the epistemological challenges such disagreement seems to pose.
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Notes
Fogelin takes his account to be aligned with Wittgenstein’s reflections in On Certainty on whether our linguistic practices necessarily condemn us to justificatory exhaustion – condemn us ultimately to digging in our heels and simply declaring the opposing side “a fool and a heretic” when we have reached “the end of reasons” (1969/1972, § 611 and § 612, 81e). Wittgenstein famously observes in Philosophical Investigations that there will always be contexts in which our reasons run out, where we have “reached bedrock” and our “spade is turned” (1953/2009, § 217, 91e). Godden and Brenner’s (2010) discussion of Wittgenstein on deep disagreement is congenial to the views I advance here. They argue that deep disagreements are “rooted in differences in concepts”, a view I will also endorse (76). They take deep disagreement to involve a specific kind of linguistic exchange, “a kind of ‘persuasion’…a form of rhetoric in the service of concept-formation” (77). My account of stipulation in this paper gives one view of what such persuasion might involve.
Unlike Fogelin, I do not think the debate over affirmative action turns on the question of whether groups can have moral standing. (I think questions concerning the nature of oppression and equality are much more plausibly at stake in these disagreements.) But what I am interested in here is the fact that Fogelin’s examples of deep disagreements are all disagreements over how to understand a concept. This is an important clue for arriving at a more precise account of deep disagreement generally, even if we disagree with Fogelin’s treatment of specific cases. I give my own detailed example of a deep disagreement (PH) below.
Throughout the paper, I rely on a broadly inferentialist understanding of concepts and conceptual content, in line with Brandom (1994): “To grasp or understand a concept is…to have practical mastery over the inferences it is involved in – to know, in the practical sense of being able to distinguish, what follows from the applicability of a concept, and what it follows from” (89).
I cite a different excerpt from Magie than van Fraassen. Van Fraassen’s discussion of Magie can be found on (2002, 68).
An approach to deep disagreement Godden and Brenner (2010) also take.
To be clear, I am not committing myself to the strong claim that deep disagreements only ever involve conceptual disagreements. But for the purposes of sharpening the epistemological challenge posed by deep disagreement, I think we are well served by focusing on cases where we do not share an understanding of the concept in question with our interlocutors. When we do not have the same understanding of the concept, we do not seem to have the corresponding normative reasons this understanding generates for its users. I also say that reasons “appear” to run out in these cases because while I think my view of deep disagreement accounts for this appearance, I argue in the second half of the paper that it need not be the case that our normative reasons are exhausted in deep disagreements.
The character of “Peter” here is of course based on Singer – hence the use of text from a piece of his – but I intend Peter to be taken as a fictional legal theorist for the purposes of the case and not as the real-world philosopher. (Making Peter and Linda legal theorists is intended to make clear that the kind of conceptual disagreement at stake in PH is not the exclusive province of philosophers, as McConnell-Ginet (2006), Plunkett and Sundell (2013), Thomasson (2017 and forthcoming), and Cappelen (2018) have argued.)
Friedman also emphasizes this point: “Carnap is able to accept the basic idea lying behind Duhemian holism without dissolving the desired distinction between conventional and factual, constitutive and empirical” (1999, 70). I came across this passage thanks to Yap’s citation of it in her (2010, 445).
Also relevant here is that I have often talked in this paper of one’s commitments with respect to a certain “domain.” I have left my formulation of the notion of a domain quite vague. This is intentional. I do not want to commit myself to any specific carving up of our activity that gives the impression that this categorization is not itself equally subject to change and revision over time. “Domains,” as I want to understand them, are contextually defined, such that, in certain circumstances, we can talk about the domain of boxing and the concepts we bring to bear on understanding this sport (and the relative status of these concepts as constitutive or not), whereas in other contexts we may talk about the domain of sports in general or the domain of practical versus theoretical activity, and so on.
It is worth noting that the word “stipulate” need not have appeared in (1) and (2) to analyze these cases, pragmatically, as instances of stipulation in my sense. In (1), for example, I might have said to my friend, “Whoever scores 11 points first wins” or “Let’s say whoever scores 11 points first wins”. In (2), I might have said: “Say, for the sake of argument, that it will rain tomorrow”. Because I do not take surface grammar to be a decisive indicator of underlying pragmatic structure, the fact that the word “stipulation” does not appear in these versions of the cases has little bearing on how these utterances should be analyzed pragmatically. What matters is the characteristic, normative difference such speech acts make when they are successful. This point will be important when we consider examples of speakers stipulating an understanding of a concept – an analysis at odds with speakers’ own immediate self-descriptions and therefore not straightforwardly reflected in the surface grammar of their utterances. (I discuss this point in more detail in section (iii) of the paper when I address objections to my view).
A reviewer asks how my view compares to Mitchell Green’s account of supposition (2000). Green’s supposition is a subset of stipulation, as I understand the latter. For Green, the speech act of supposition refers “to the acceptance of a proposition for the sake of argument” (376). In this section, I have clarified that different kinds of content can be stipulated and various ends can be appealed to in a stipulative act. Supposing a proposition for the sake of argument is therefore only one example among many of stipulation, according to my view. Many aspects of Green’s account of supposition are, however, congenial to my more general view of stipulation. Green offers what he calls an attitude externalist account of supposition, according to which supposition does not require “an internal physical medium for its realization” (393). Instead: “Like many other statuses, the state of supposition thus attained is to be understood in the first instance in terms of what one in that state is committed and entitled to do, and like many other statuses a state of supposition is not easily attained, but rather requires proficiency in the art of reasoning and an ability to “bracket” questions of the truth of propositions supposed for argument’s sake” (390–391). Green’s emphasis here on the unique normative statuses brought about by a successful act of supposition as the primary means of individuating the speech act, rather than turning to the instantiation of a specific mental state, is very much in line with my methodological approach in this paper.
I say “in part” here and throughout when discussing the pragmatics of deep disagreements because, as I explain below, I endorse a form of speech pluralism, according to which a single utterance can be an expression of multiple speech acts simultaneously. The fact that an utterance may be an expression of a stipulative act does not, therefore, preclude it from also being an expression of other speech acts.
I consider Horwich’s view of semantic stipulation in more detail below.
I use the language of “correctness” here because I want to indicate that there is a crucial normative dimension of the speech act they are performing. The language of “correctness” prevents us from pre-judging whether we should understand this normative dimension of the act in terms of truth (a reading I reject) or in terms of a different source, such as an appeal to certain ends (a reading I endorse).
In their (1997), Lance and O’Leary-Hawthorne argue for a similar view of the function of utterances where a speaker defines a term or concept: “(1) Meaning claims function as inference licenses; to say that P means Q is to endorse the inference from P to Q…(2) Meaning claims functions as censure licenses; to say that P means Q is to license censure of those who refuse to endorse the inference from P to Q” (124). Their account here is very close to (S2) in my account of stipulation. Despite this similarity, there are at least two key differences between their account and mine. First, whereas Lance and O’Leary-Hawthorne focus on meaning claims, I think this inference license and censure is implicated in all stipulative acts, not just stipulations that involve the meaning of a term or an understanding of a concept. Second, I take stipulative acts to be structurally and necessarily ends-directed, which is not a feature of Lance or O’Leary-Hawthorne’s account.
It may turn out, for example, that speakers have all along in fact been appealing to different ends to justify their stipulated understandings, in which case they may be simply talking past one another or may have room among their commitments for a more fine-grained set of distinctions concerning the concept of personhood that vindicates elements of both of their views. As opposed to my view that links a specific justificatory responsibility to stipulation, Juhl and Loomis (2010) advocate a view of stipulation according to which “a rule is introduced into the language such that a particular sentence-type is to be taken as true…and its truth is to be taken as empirically indefeasible” (283). Juhl and Loomis’s discussion of stipulation is closely tied to their preferred view of analyticity (or what they call analyticity*). The connection between stipulation and analyticity was important to the logical empiricists, and I plan to spell out in detail in future work the implications of my account of stipulation for the phenomenon of analyticity (which I have only gestured at in this paper). It is worth noting here, however, that (S3) in my account of stipulation, is directly at odds with Juhl and Loomis’s emphasis on the indefeasibility of stipulations. While I agree with Juhl and Loomis that a speaker who stipulates does not need to assertorically defend the truth of their stipulation, they nonetheless incur the justificatory burden of demonstrating the utility of their stipulation, which in turn makes their stipulation subject to felicitous criticism and therefore defeasible.
While I think my account of stipulation works well with the account of deep disagreement I give in the first half of the paper (as I explain in the next section), there is strictly speaking no necessary connection between the two. One can endorse my account of stipulation without endorsing my view of deep disagreement and vice versa.
In addition to Carnap’s views here and Haslanger’s account of the ameliorative project, Sally McConnell-Ginet’s account of “instrumental definitions” yields conclusions similar to the ones I arrive at in this paper: “[A]n instrumental definition often urges adoption of a definiens somewhat divergent from though closely related to those already established as conventionally associated with the definiendum. The latter case would traditionally be called a ‘stipulative’ definition, but that terminology suggests an arbitrariness and possibly complete novelty that is inconsistent with the connections instrumental definers generally draw to prior uses of the definiendum. In either case, it is the alleged superior utility for certain purposes at hand of the definitions urged that supports definers’ exhortations. Instrumental definitions live in scientific debates, in discussions of morality or of aesthetics, in courtroom exchanges and legal briefs” (2006, 220). Of course, I think McConnell-Ginet is too quick to dismiss stipulation as a tool for making sense of what a speaker is doing when they articulate or defend an instrumental definition, but, as with Carnap and Haslanger’s views, her ends-directed approach to this metalinguistic activity dovetails neatly with the account of stipulation I defend here.
See MacFarlane (2011) for an overall assessment of the advantages and disadvantages of Stalnaker’s view of assertion.
Thanks to two anonymous reviewers for recommending I address Stalnaker’s view here.
Furthermore, even taking in isolation Horwich’s example of a speaker articulating a novel term, it is difficult to see how the speaker could be interpreted as “commanding” others to give uptake to this novel term. The speaker’s goal in such cases seems much more plausibly described as wanting other speakers to view the novel term as, in some sense, correct or useful. They do not simply want other speakers to give uptake to the novel term purely on the basis of the stipulator’s authority.
Because I take up Lance and Kukla’s methodological orientation of analyzing speech acts via their successful uptake, my discussion of stipulation in this paper inevitably involves a certain degree of idealization that abstracts from the circumstances of informal authority attributions. But individuating stipulation as a speech act according to this methodology is compatible with accounting for and acknowledging such circumstances, as my discussion here shows and as Kukla’s own (2014) discussion shows.
“Kashrut” refers to the laws governing Jewish eating practices.
There are an enormous, perhaps incalculable number of causal factors will determine whether a stipulation secures uptake from the relevant community, and these factors are not under speaker control. (See Cappelen (2018), Chap. 7, for more discussion of this point).
My account therefore has an explanation for why Horwich would opt for a general “we” that introduces a novel term. On my account, stipulation is not indexed to a formal position of authority for its felicitous performance. Because of this, any speaker can potentially carry out a successful stipulation. But severing stipulation from formal speaker authority means it cannot be a command or order (without a great deal of further argument) and that a view of stipulation that accounts for this egalitarian dimension of the act is needed – which my account provides.
Bach and Harnish (1979) offer an account of what they call “suppositives” under which they list stipulations as an example. Someone carries out a suppositive if, first, their utterance expresses “the belief that it is worth considering the consequences of P” and, second, if their utterance expresses “the intention that [the hearer] H believe that it is worth considering the consequences of P” (44). As I explain throughout the paper, my account of stipulation is not fundamentally linked to speaker or hearer intentions. I also do not view stipulations as a subset of constatives, as Bach and Harnish do (though they acknowledge on 45 of their (1979) that suppositives are also not a comfortable fit for their understanding of constatives). Bach and Harnish’s emphasis on how speakers appeal to the worthwhile “consequences” of supposing P is, however, congenial to my account.
My view provides one way of elaborating Plunkett and Sundell’s (2013) account of how we metalinguistically advocate for and negotiate over our preferred understanding or use of a particular concept. Plunkett and Sundell do not give a detailed pragmatics of what they take the acts of “advocacy” and “negotiation” to involve; my account of stipulation provides one way of understanding such acts. Thomasson (2017 and forthcoming) develop Plunkett and Sundell’s account in a metaphilosophical direction that is particularly congenial to the views I advance in this paper.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to Brandon Hogan, Bryce Huebner, Rebecca Kukla, Sally McConnell-Ginet, Mark Murphy, Amie Thomasson, and Kate Withy for discussion and feedback on versions of this paper. I am indebted to Mark Lance and Hailey Huget, who both read multiple drafts of the paper and whose feedback improved it substantially. I am also grateful for the extremely helpful comments of two anonymous reviewers and editors David Godden and Pat Bondy.
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Shields, M. On the Pragmatics of Deep Disagreement. Topoi 40, 999–1015 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-018-9602-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-018-9602-0