Disagreement in Philosophy – What it Means and Why It Matters (original) (raw)
In the past few years, the topic of disagreement has received a great deal of attention. In particular, four clusters of issues have been at the core of recent discussions in the philosophy of language and epistemology. First, and foremost, there is the conceptual issue of how to understand the very notion of disagreement and of whether some kind of pluralistic account is needed in order to capture the variety of phenomena that intuitively are thought to be instances of disagreement. Second, there is the question of how to distinguish in a principled way between disputes based on the occurrence of some genuine disagreement and disputes which turn out to be merely verbal. Third, there is the issue of which semantics for natural languages best capture disagreement phenomena. Last, there is a trend of research within epistemology that has focused on the normative significance of disagreement, in particular on the questions whether some form of faultless disagreement is possible and how to rationally respond to a situation of disagreement. Research on these four clusters has progressed quite significantly, in fact reaching a point of high sophistication and technicality. This course aims at providing a systematic map of the current cutting-edge literature on disagreement in order to allow students to achieve a full grasp of the complexity of this much-debated topic.
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