The Limits of Faultless Disagreement

Some have argued that the possibility of faultless disagreement gives relativist semantic theories an important explanatory advantage over their absolutist and contextualist rivals. Here I combat this argument, focusing on the specific case of aesthetic discourse. My argument has two stages. First, I argue that while relativists may be able to account for the possibility of faultless aesthetic disagreement, they nevertheless face difficulty in accounting for the intuitive limits of faultless disagreement. Second, I develop a new non-relativist theory which can account for the full range of data regarding faultless disagreement. This view—‘Humean Absolutism’—integrates two of Hume’s central principles from Of the Standard of Taste into a truth-conditional framework, resulting in a nonbivalent theory of aesthetic truth. I argue that Humean Absolutism can underwrite the possibility of faultless disagreement whilst retaining reasonable limits around the phenomenon. I close by relating this positive account of faultless disagreement to broader issues concerning the cognitive role of truth-value gaps. In the debate between semantic relativism and its rivals, the notion of faultless disagreement has been highly influential. In particular, some have argued that the possibility of faultless disagreement weighs in favour of relativist semantic theories for certain areas of discourse. Here I contest this argument as it applies to aesthetic judgments. The central data in the aesthetic domain arises from cases like the following: (1) Dave: “Mozart is a better composer than Beethoven.” Eve: “No, Beethoven is a better composer than Mozart.” Assuming that Dave and Eve are sincere, this case appears to exhibit a state of disagreement. But some claim that the case also exhibits a further feature which is 1 Contact email: [email protected]. Version of 18 Feb 2014. 2 Prominent defenders of this view include Kölbel (2004) and Lasersohn (2005). 3 I adopt the distinction between disagreement as a state and disagreement as an activity from Cappelen and Hawthorne (2009, pp.60-61). While the appearance of disagreement here could be undermined by further description of the case, I will assume that (1) is best thought of as a case in which Dave and Eve stand in a state of disagreement. The Limits of Faultless Disagreement 2 absent in ‘ordinary’ disagreements: specifically, that the disagreement appears to be faultless, in that the two subjects could—in some sense—both be correct. In this paper I aim to clarify this claim and to examine its consequences. I argue that even if we admit the possibility of faultless aesthetic disagreement, we need not accept a relativist semantics for aesthetic judgments. I argue that relativists themselves face trouble accounting for the full range of data regarding faultlessness, and that the supposed explanatory deficiency of absolutism with respect to faultless disagreement is illusory. The structure of the paper is as follows. In section one I outline the argument from faultless disagreement to aesthetic relativism and clarify what the idea of a ‘faultless’ disagreement amounts to. In section two I argue that, once we consider further data regarding faultless disagreement, the putative relativist advantage falls away. Specifically, I argue that relativists face trouble accounting for the limits of faultless aesthetic disagreement, and that this fact deals a serious blow to the relativist’s ability to explain the phenomenon. In the second half of the paper I move on to consider how aesthetic absolutists can account for appearances of faultless disagreement. In section three I explain why absolutist views which appeal to epistemic notions of faultless disagreement should not be considered a viable option in this debate. In section four I begin to develop my positive view—Humean Absolutism—which is based on two of David Hume’s principles from ‘Of the Standard of Taste’. Humean Absolutism makes the verdicts of ideal critics central to determining aesthetic value and involves a denial of the principle of bivalence for aesthetic truth. In section five I argue that this account can endorse the possibility of faultless disagreement whilst nevertheless retaining reasonable limits around the phenomenon. Finally, in section six, I comment on some broader issues arising from the Humean Absolutist account of faultlessness, concerning the cognitive role of