Reversibility or Disagreement

Mind 122 (485):43-84 (2013)
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Abstract

The phenomenon of disagreement has recently been brought into focus by the debate between contextualists and relativist invariantists about epistemic expressions such as ‘might’, ‘probably’, indicative conditionals, and the deontic ‘ought’. Against the orthodox contextualist view, it has been argued that an invariantist account can better explain apparent disagreements across contexts by appeal to the incompatibility of the propositions expressed in those contexts. This paper introduces an important and underappreciated phenomenon associated with epistemic expressions — a phenomenon that we call reversibility. We argue that the invariantist account of disagreement is incompatible with reversibility, and we go on to show that reversible sentences cast doubt on the putative data about disagreement, even without assuming invariantism. Our argument therefore undermines much of the motivation for invariantism, and provides a new source for constraints on the proper explanation of purported data about disagreement

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Author Profiles

Mark Schroeder
University of Southern California
Jacob Joshua Ross
Cambridge University (PhD)

Citations of this work

Tempered expressivism.Mark Schroeder - 2013 - Oxford Studies in Metaethics (1).
Relativism.Maria Baghramian & Adam J. Carter - 2020 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Retractions.Teresa Marques - 2018 - Synthese 195 (8):3335-3359.
Disagreement Lost and Found.Stephen Finlay - 2017 - In Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics 12. Oxford University Press. pp. 187-205.

View all 17 citations / Add more citations

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Knowledge and practical interests.Jason Stanley - 2005 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Attitudes de dicto and de se.David Lewis - 1979 - Philosophical Review 88 (4):513-543.
Reflection and disagreement.Adam Elga - 2007 - Noûs 41 (3):478–502.

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