Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-07T02:18:17.839Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Expressivism and Crossed Disagreements

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 September 2019

Javier Osorio  and
Neftali Villanueva
Javier Osorio*
Affiliation:
University of Granada
Neftali Villanueva*
Affiliation:
University of Granada
*
[email protected]
[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to explore the connection between expressivism and disagreement. More in particular, the aim is to defend that one of the desiderata that can be derived from the study of disagreement, the explanation of ‘crossed disagreements’, can only be accommodated within a semantic theory that respects, at the meta-semantic level, certain expressivistic restrictions. We will compare contemporary dynamic expressivism with three different varieties of contextualist strategies to accommodate the specificities of evaluative language –indexical contextualism – truth-conditional pragmatics –, pragmatic strategies using implicatures, and presuppositional accounts. Our conclusion will be that certain assumptions of expressivism are necessary in order to provide a semantic account of evaluative uses of language that can allow us to detect and prevent crossed disagreements.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 86: Expressivisms, Knowledge and Truth , October 2019 , pp. 111 - 132
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 See Kappel, Klemens, ‘Fact-Dependent Policy Disagreements and Political Legitimacy’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 20 (2016), 313–331CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Field, Hartry, ‘Epistemology without metaphysics’, Philosophical Studies 143 (2009), 249–290CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Lynch, Michael P., ‘Epistemic Circularity and Epistemic Incommensurability‘, in Social Epistemology (eds.) Haddrock, A., Millar, A. and Pritchard, D., (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Op. cit. Note 2, 263.

4 Fogelin, Robert, ‘The Logic of Deep Disagreements’, Informal Logic 25 (1985), 3–11Google Scholar.

5 De Cruz, Helen and De Smedt, Johann, ‘The Value of Epistemic Disagreement in Scientific Practice. The Case of Homo Floresiensis’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 44 (2013), 169–177CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Bakalova, Marina, ‘Evidence vs. Virtues in Epistemic Disagreement’, Organon F 23 (2015), 72–82Google Scholar.

7 As De Cruz and De Smedt state, although in practice it would be impossible to find scientists with an identical research background, a possible approximation would be to find a similar amount of academic output, such as number of citations or number of publications. However, evidential equality turns out to be a more complex problem. In a broad sense, evidence is the entire body of background knowledge that includes, but is not limited to, knowledge gained through research training. This type of evidence is, if not impossible, very difficult to be shared by the parties.

8 See Christensen, David, ‘Epistemology of Disagreement: the Good News’, Philosophical Review 116 (2007), 187–217CrossRefGoogle Scholar and White, Roger, ‘Epistemic permissiveness’, Philosophical Perspectives 19 (2005), 445–459CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Kopec, Matthew and Titelbaum, Michael G., ‘The Uniqueness Thesis’, Philosophy Compass 11 (2016), 189–200CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 See Kelly, Thomas, ‘Peer Disagreement and Higher-Order Evidence’ in Disagreement (eds.) Feldman, Richard and Warfield, Ted, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)Google Scholar and Rosa, Luis, ‘Justification and the Uniqueness Thesis’, Logos and Episteme 3 (2012), 571–577CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Matheson, Jonathan, The Epistemic Significance of Disagreement (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Stojanovic, Isidora, ‘When (True) Disagreement Gives Out’, Croatian Journal of Philosophy 11 (2011), 183–195Google Scholar.

11 Plunkett, David and Sundell, Timothy ‘Disagreement and the Semantics of Normative and Evaluative Terms’, Philosophers Imprint’ 13 (2013), 1–37Google Scholar.

12 Field, Hartry, ‘Epistemology without metaphysics’, Philosophical Studies 143 (2009), 249–290CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Perry, John, ‘Thought without representation’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 60 (1986), 137–151CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Cruz, Helen De and De Smedt, Johann, ‘The Value of Epistemic Disagreement in Scientific Practice.  The Case of Homo Floresiensis’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 44 (2013), 169–177CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Op. cit. Note 14, 172.

16 Kappel, Klemens, ‘Fact-Dependent Policy Disagreements and Political Legitimacy’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 20 (2016), 313–331CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Stanley, J., How Propaganda Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015)Google Scholar.

18 It is important to stress here that we see no intrinsic problem in appealing to the opinion of experts. It does not necessarily give rise to crossed disagreements, and, even if it did, this might be justified. The consequences of this appeal to experts, when it facilitates a crossed disagreement, should be nevertheless taken into consideration.

19 See Egan, Andy, ‘Disputing About Taste’ in Disagreement (eds.) Feldman, Richard and Warfield, Ted, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 247–286CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Marques, Teresa and García-Carpintero, Manuel, ‘Disagreement about Taste: Commonality Presuppositions and Coordination’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 92 (2014), 701–723CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Sundell, Tim, ‘The Tasty, the Bold, and the Beautiful’, Inquiry 59 (2016), 793–818CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 See David Bordonaba, ‘Higher-Order Operators and Taste Predicates: An Expressivist Proposal’ (PhD thesis, Universidad de Granada, 2018).

21 Huckfeldt, Robert, Johnson, Paul E. and Sprague, John, Political Disagreement: The Survival of Diverse Opinions Within Communications Network (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 De Conti, Manuele, ‘Debate, Education, and Polarization: Why Polarization Is Not a Debate Side Effect’, Cogency: Journal of Reasoning and Argumentation 5 (2013), 33–59Google Scholar.

23 See Kuhn, Deanna and Lao, Joseph, ‘Effects of Evidence on Attitudes: Is Polarization the Norm?’, Psychological Science 7 (1996), 115–120CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 DiMaggio, Paul, Evans, John and Bryson, Bethany, ‘Have American's Social Attitudes Become More Polarized?’, American Journal of Sociology 102 (1996), 690–755CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 op. cit., note 24, 693.

26 Bramson, Aarom et al. , ‘Understanding polarization: Meanings, measures, and model evaluation’, Philosophy of Science 84 (2017), 115–159CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Iyengar, Shanto, Sood, Gaurav and Lelkes, Yphtach, ‘Affect, Not Ideology’, Public Opinion Quarterly 76 (2012), 405–431CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Layman, Geoffrey C, Carsey, Thomas M. and Mensace, Julianna, ‘Party Polarization in American Politics: Characteristics, Causes, and Consequences’, Annual Review of Political Science 9 (2006), 83–110CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Jones, David R., ‘Party Polarization and Legislative Gridlock’, Political Research Quarterly 54 (2001), 125–141CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Sunstein, C., #Republic. Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Hetherington, M. and Rudolph, T., Why Washington won't work. Polarization, political trust, and the governing crisis (London: The University of Chicago Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 See Levitsky, S. and Ziblatt, D., How Democracies Die (New York: Crown, 2018)Google Scholar and Mounk, Y., The People Vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 See Kunda, Ziva, ‘The Case for Motivated Reasoning’, Psychological Bulletin 108 (1990)CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed and Taber, Charles S. and Lodge, Milton, ‘Motivated Skepticism in the Evaluation of Political Beliefs’, Critical Review 21 (2012), 157–184CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 For an analysis on the notion of argument pool see Sunstein, C., #Republic. Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2017), 72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Fiedler, Klaus, Ecology, Information and the Explanation of Social Cognition and Behavior, in Social Psychology. Handbook of Basic Principles (eds.) Kruglanski, Arie and Higgins, Tory, (London: The Guilford Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

36 “A contribution to public discourse that is presented as an embodiment of certain ideals, yet is of a kind that tends to erode those very ideals” (Stanley op.cit., 53)

37 See Andrés Soria, ‘The Place of Value in Natural Language: A Non-Factualist Approach to Evaluative Terms and Judgments’ (PhD thesis, Institut Jean Nicod, 2019) and Charlow, Nate, ‘The Problem with the Frege-Geach Problem’, Philosophical Studies 167 (2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Yalcin, Seth, ‘Nonfactualism about Epistemic Modality’, in Epistemic Modality (eds) Egan, A. and Weatherson, B., (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011)Google Scholar and Stalnaker, R., Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 McNally, Louise and Stojanovic, Isidora, Adjectives, Aesthetic, in Semantics of Aesthetics Judgement (eds) Young, J., (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015)Google Scholar.

39 Kinzel, Katherina and Kusch, Martin, ‘De-idealizing disagreement, rethinking relativism’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies 26 (2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 DeRose, Keith, ‘Contextualism: an Explanation and Defense’, in The Blackwell Guide to Epistemology (ed) Greco, J., (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998)Google Scholar.

41 See Lyons, David, ‘Ethical Relativism and the Problem of Incoherence’, Ethics 86 (1976), 107–121CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 Potts, Cristopher, The Logic of Conventional Implicatures, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

43 José Ramón Torices, ‘Ranking The World Through Words: Disagreement, Dogwhistles, and Expressivism’, (PhD thesis, Universidad de Granada, 2019).

44 Díaz-León, Esa, ‘Epistemic Contextualism and Conceptual Ethics’, in The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Contextualism (ed) Ichikawa, J., (New York: Routledge, 2017)Google Scholar.

45 Beaver, David, ‘Presuppotition’, in The Handbook of Logic and Language (eds) van Benthem, Johan and Geraldine, Alice (London: Elsevier, 1997)Google Scholar.

46 Yablo, Stephen, ‘Non-Catastrophic Presupposition Failure’, in Content and Modality: Themes From the Philosophy of Robert Stalnaker (eds) Thomson, Judith Jarvis and Byrne, Alex, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

47 Teresa Marques and Manuel García-Carpintero, ‘Really expressive presuppositions and how to block them’, Grazer Philosophischen Studien (forthcoming).