De-idealizing Disagreement, Rethinking Relativism

Abstract

Relativism is often motivated in terms of certain types of disagreement. In this paper, we survey the philosophical debates over two such types: faultless disagreement in the case of gustatory conflict, and fundamental disagreement in the case of epistemic conflict. Each of the two discussions makes use of a (largely) implicit conception of judgement: brute judgement in the case of faultless disagreement, and rule-governed judgement in the case of fundamental disagreement. We show that the prevalent accounts work with unreasonably high levels of idealization. We defend two claims. First, philosophical discussions of disagreement need to be de-idealized. Second, once a less idealized account of disagreement is available, both our conception of judgement and our understanding of relativism need to be revised. Our example is a case study in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge: Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer's classic Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985). This case study gives a less idealized account of disagreement that conceptualizes judgements as situated (rather than brute or rule-governed). We argue that this conception can and should be applied to cases of gustatory and epistemic disagreement. The payoff will be a reformulation of relativism in terms of rationally resolvable yet contingent disagreements. KEYWORDS relativism; disagreement; sociology of scientific knowledge; idealization Faultless DisagreementRecent work in relativist semantics has focused on so-called 'disputes of inclination' in general and gustatory disagreements in particular. 2 In early work in this area, Crispin Wright contrasted 'disputes of inclination' with 'disputes of fact ' . Wright (2006a, 46-47) thinks that disagreements over the following claims are disputes of inclination: Snails are delicious. Cockroaches are disgusting. Marital infidelity is alright provided nobody get hurt. A Pacific sunset trumps any Impressionist canvas. (Perhaps:) Philosophy is pointless if not widely intelligible. The belief that there is no life elsewhere in the universe is justified. Death is nothing to fear. This list thus includes issues of moral conduct, aesthetics, metaphysics, and epistemology. In more recent writings, Wright's focus is much narrower; now the key concern is with so-called 'basic taste' . The homing in on 'basic taste' is common ground between Wright, Max Kölbel and John MacFarlane; the central paradigms for thinking about semantic relativism nowadays are disagreements over the deliciousness of rhubarb, or the tastiness of liquorice (Wright 2012;Kölbel 2016;MacFarlane 2014). Wright's motivation for this narrowing of focus is the thought that if relativism fails in the case of basic taste, it has no chance anywhere else (Wright 2015).Note however that Wright does not claim that it is the situation of disagreement itself that motivates relativism. As Wright (2012, 437) has it, already prior to our detailed philosophical investigations we have something of a 'proto-philosophical theory' concerning disputes of inclination. And it is ...

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