Contextualism and Disagreement

Abstract

My aim in the paper will be to better understand what faultless disagreement could possibly consist in and what speakers disagree over when they faultlessly do so. To that end, I will first look at various examples of faultless disagreement. Since I will eventually claim that different forms of faultless disagreement can be modeled semantically on different forms of context-sensitivity I will, in a second step, discuss three different semantic accounts that all promise to successfully accommodate certain forms of context-sensitivity: Indexical Contextualism, Nonindexcal Contextualism (aka Moderate Relativism) and Radical Relativism (aka Assessment-sensitive Relativism). Focussing on the controversy between Indexical and Nonindexical Contextualists the remainder of the paper will be devoted to the question which theory is best suited to handle what kind of disagreement.