ABSTRACT:Expressivists have trouble accounting for disagreement. If ethical or other normative judgments are desire-like rather than belief-like, it is puzzling why we think people often disagree in those domains. While previous expressivists have proposed only straightforwardly descriptive conditions under which disagreement occurs, we argue that disagreement itself should be understood normatively: two or more people disagree just in case their diverging attitudes imply, given a common project of theirs, that at least one of them has reason to change his or her mind.

If ethical expressivism is true, then moral judgements are motivational desire-like states and do not robustly represent reality. This gives rise to the problem of how to understand moral error. How can we be mistaken if there is no moral reality to be mistaken about? The standard expressivist explanation of moral doubt is couched in terms of our fear that our judgements may not survive improvements to our epistemic situation. There is a debate between Egan

When theorising about disagreement, it is tempting to begin with a person's belief that p and ask what mental state one must have in order to disagree with it. This is the wrong way to go; the paper argues that people may also disagree with attitudes that are not beliefs. It then examines whether several existing theories of disagreement can account for this phenomenon. It argues that its own normative theory of disagreement gives the best account, and so, given that there is good reason to believe disagreement without belief is possible, there is good reason to think that disagreement itself is normative.

Many people believe that if you identify as a particular gender, then you are that gender. This paper is my attempt at making sense of this claim. I propose to conceive of genders as names: determined by the individual and not requiring any specific biological or psychological qualities, yet still important to the bearer.

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