Context and Disagreement

Abstract

This paper is an occasion to take stock of the place that the argument from faultless disagreement has occupied in philosophy of language in the last fifteen years, in particular in the debate between contextualism and relativism. The survey offered in the first part of the paper appears to show that the phenomenon of disagreement fails to provide any strong motivation for adopting any novel semantic framework, contrary to relativists’ claims. But, on a more positive note, the interest in disagreement has allowed us to better understand how language works. The second part of the paper explains how the fine-grained structure of meaning – at the level of words, sentences and even entire discourse – reveals a variety of sources that may lead discourse participants to disagree.