Event Detail

Philosophers often argue from premises about disagreement to conclusions about meaning. For example, from the fact that a fan of brutalist architecture who calls the Bakar BioEnginuity Hub “beautiful” thereby disagrees with a traditionalist who calls it “not beautiful,” we may infer that the two parties mean the same thing by “beautiful.” For if they did not, then their claims would only have the surface appearance of inconsistency. This form of argument has played a central role in metaethics, aesthetics, and discussions of contextualism in epistemology and philosophy of language, but recently its validity has been challenged (most influentially by David Plunkett and Tim Sundell, “Disagreement and the Semantics of Normative and Evaluative Terms,” Philosophers’ Imprint 13, 2013). It is argued that the two parties can disagree even while meaning different things by “beautiful” and asserting compatible claims; the locus of disagreement is not what they have asserted, but the competing normative views about how “beautiful” ought to be used they have thereby expressed. This sort of disagreement has been called a “metalinguistic negotiation.” I give reasons for doubting that any interesting cases of disagreement are metalinguistic negotiations in this sense. But I think there is something right about the idea that, in making assertions, we express normative proposals for the use of words. I sketch an alternative picture that preserves what is plausible in the metalinguistic negotiation account while vindicating the argument from disagreement.