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What the first-personal-perspectival-realist might say about ‘disagreement’.

Last night, my buddy Joe wanted to know what disagreement among persons over first-person perspectival facts looks like for the metaphysician that wants to be a realist about such facts. I think I gave a bad answer. So I’m going to try again. In particular, I want to try to make the point by exploiting an analogy that I am increasingly impressed with: the analogy between modal, temporal, and first-personal perspectives.

First, here’s the thesis. Perspectives are sets of facts. Sets of facts disagree when some propositon is in one set and its negation is in the other. Two first personal perspectives disagree if some proposition is true from one perspective and its negation is true from the other. This is disagreement among perspectives and it is (if I can get away with saying this) a metaphysical phenomenon. It is distinct from conversational disagreement, such as two people arguing or debating over whether a proposition is true. However, it’s plausible that faultless disagreement of the sort exploited by contemporary analytic relativism arises when conversational disagreement is over metaphysical perspectival disagreement of the sort I will be outlining here.

Pretend that times are people. An instant, T1, is one person. Another instant, T2 (let’s say, selected from the following day), is another person. Let’s call T1, ‘Raleigh’ and T2 ‘Joe’. Suppose that at T1, rain is [actually] falling across the city of Columbus. Suppose that at T2, rain is [actually] not falling on any of the city of Columbus. Suppose that the set of facts at T1 is the set of Raleigh’s beliefs. Suppose the set of facts at T2 are Joe’s beliefs. So Raleigh believes that it’s actually raining in Columbus. Joe believes that it’s not actually raining in Columbus.

Do Joe and Raleigh disagree? I’m not going to answer this question yet. We could go on to talk about whether the tensed (’now’) facts reduce to tenseless facts, whether the fact that ‘p is true’ when p is presently true is a saturated fact, or whether it has a hidden argument or covert indexical built in. But these are issues that (worded thusly) are specific to the philosophy of time. And though I will talk about times a great deal, what I really want to talk about are first personal facts. So for the sake of making my times more like persons, I’m going to beef up my analogy.

Suppose that Raleigh and Joe share a belief that all truths are eternally true. They know that Raleigh believes p and Joe believes ~p, but they think that p either is or isn’t eternally true, so one of them is simply incorrect. They’re careful to say temporalist things at parties, so as not to offend anyone (’Look Raleigh, relax. What’s true at you is true at you and what’s true at me is true at me. Let’s just agree to disagree’) but they are nonetheless eternalists at heart. Joe pretends to think that Raleigh’s beliefs are ‘true at Raleigh’, but really he thinks that Raleigh’s beliefs, insofar as they disagree with his own, are false.

Sage that he is, Stewart, T3, joins the conversation. “You know,” says Stewart, “there are tensed facts, propositions that are true at one time and false at another. For instance, is it true or false that it raining in Columbus? It’s true at Raleigh, false at Joe. The proposition that it’s raining in Columbus goes from false, to true, to false again.” Joe and Raleigh like this, but they think back to their argument. Were they actually contradicting one another? or were they just talking past one another? Is there disagreement between temporal perspectives? We might want to say that there not, because by ‘true’, Joe and Raleigh both mean “true at me”. Unsure what to say, Joe and Raleigh ask Stewart if there is any disagreement here. Stewart is dismissive. ‘Call it disagreement if you want. Call ‘It’s raining in Columbus’ a saturated proposition if you want, or say it has a hidden argument place to be filled in with a time. Either way you put it, we all know what’s going on here. There are different times, at which different propositions are true. Disagreement or not? Who cares!

Having thus far bitten his tongue, David, T4, simply must get involved. ‘I care’ says David. Here’s why:

Let’s call necessary, eternal, universal truths the “hard truths”. Call all the other truths the “soft truths”.

Modulo some clever arguments by some clever metaphysicians (who can boast theoretical cleanliness, but who have to say awfully strange things about how incorrectly we see and describe the world), reality is chock full of soft truths. The contingent truths are true at some, but not all, worlds. The tensed truths are true at some, but not all, times. The relative truths are true for some, but not all, persons. Call worlds, times, and persons perspectives. Perspectives, we might say, are those theoretical entities that house soft truths. Now, we might plausibly think that telling a story about what is real is in part telling a story about what facts there are. If a lot of the facts are soft truths, then that means we need to say what soft truths are. But that means we need to be clear on the what perspectives are, since we’ve already said that soft truths just are propositions that are true in some perspectives and false at others.

Let’s think about worlds. We don’t know whether the world we‘re on is one on which Obama will be reelected. The proposition that Obama is reelected is contingent. On some worlds, Obama is reelected. On some worlds, he isn’t. Take some world which is just like the actual world up to the present moment, but differs from the actual world concerning whether Obama is reelected. On this fact, let us say that these worlds disagree. Notice, I’m not saying that they disagree on whether Obama is reelected on the (de re) actual world, they disagree on whether Obama is re-elected! Disagreement between worlds is a discrepancy in the set of facts between those worlds. In this metaphysical sense of disagreement, Joe and Raleigh (T1 and T2, that is) disagree on whether it’s raining in Columbus.

Remember what we’re trying to make sense of here. Reality seems to be made up of perspectives in which soft truths reside. Theoretical puzzles arise from considering the incompatibility of these perspectives with one another. In virtue of being distinct perspectives, one must house some fact whose negation is to be found in the other. The nature of these perspectives’ cohabitation in reality with one another is the metaphysical puzzle of perspective.

What sorts of perspectival facts are there? Let us make a vulgar distinction: There are perspectival facts about perspectives, and there are perspectival facts about the world. We can see this distinction in action by again considering the analogy between first-personal perspectives and temporal perspectives. Consider, at T1, here are two true propositions: that now is T1; that T2 is future. Two of the true propositions at T2 are the negations of those two propositions. The relativists we’ve been reading make it clear that they’re not talking about indexical facts. However, indexicals are part of the inquiry I’m pursuing. Indexicalized facts are the perspectival facts about perspectives. It is by considering the ontology of such facts that one is able to ask questions about whether there is an absolute present or absolute actuality. These facts are half of our problem. But there are other tensed facts, that don’t make explicit reference to time. These facts are about the way the world is at that time. For instance, the fact that it’s raining in Columbus. This is a proposition about the way the world is that is true at some times and false at others. Thus, the world has maximal descriptions, relative to temporal perspectives, that are incompatible with one another.

Back to first person. We can divide the first personal facts (before assuming that there are any) into facts about the first person and facts about the world. Well, if there are first personal perspectival facts about first personal perspectives, they will be the I-facts. When looking at collection of temporal perspectives, we may want to know which one is now (and the answer we‘d get from the B-theorist is that there is no single, absolute, now). When looking at a collection of modal perspectives, we may want to know which one is actual (and the answer we’d get from the modal realist is that there is no single absolute actuality). And, when looking at a whole bunch of selves, we may want to know who is I (and the answer we’d get from…pretty much anyone but the solipsist…is that there is no absolute I.) To be sure, there will be true sentences uttered from within a perspective that specify who the I is relative to the perspective, but many will doubt that this expresses an irreducibly first-personal fact.

What about the other side of the coin? What about first-personal facts about the world, the tensed facts like “It’s raining in Columbus”? Does the analogy go through? I take the current analytic relativism project, that of Kolbel, MacFarlane, and Lasersohn, as suggesting: yes. Certain facts about the world are first personal facts. For instance (according to this research project) it’s a first personal fact that licorice is tasty. That fact is true from some first-personal perspectives, false from others. These perspectives disagree with one another insofar as the sum total of propositions that are true from those perspectives are incompatible with one another, because no perspective can have it that licorice is tasty and not tasty.

Now, you’ll say: ”That’s not the kind of disagreement we care about! The ‘disagreement’ data that Macfarlane is insisting we ‘take seriously’ is conversational disagreement; it’s the similarities between ‘difference in taste talk’ and ‘difference in fact talk’ that we’re trying to accommodate.” That, indeed, does seem to be the philosopher of language/semanticist’s interest. The metaphysician’s interest is related but distinct. The disagreement I’m referring to is the intrinsic incompatibility of distinct perspectives. Two first-personal perspectives disagree when there is a proposition true from one perspective whose negation is true from another. However! This can shed some light on the linguistic data that contemporary analytic relativism is attempting to make sense of. When there is linguistic disagreement about an objective fact (whether Obama is president), one of the interlocutors is wrong. One of them thinks that from their perspective Obama is not president, but they are wrong, because Obama is president of the United States from all first-personal perspectives. This is what makes that Obama is president a third-personal or objective or universal (take your pick) fact. But, if there are first-personal perspectival facts (IF THERE ARE), such as facts about what is tasty or what is fun, these are facts from some but not all first-personal perspectives. There will be disagreement among perspectives; for some perspectives, it is true that licorice is tasty; for some,it is true that it is not the case that licorice is tasty. When these disagreements between perspectives give rise to conversational disagreements, that’s when we have genuine disagreement (the conversation is reflecting a difference between the sets of facts that constitute the two perspectives) where both sides are right (because both sides are asserting a proposition that is true from their respective first-personal perspective).

So that…I think…is what one might say. If one were a realist about first-personal facts. And if one wanted to make sense of blameless disagreement between first-personal perspectives.

This entry was posted on 16. April 2010 at 17:57 and is filed under Metaphysics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

16 Responses to “What the first-personal-perspectival-realist might say about ‘disagreement’.”

Vasilis says:
16. April 2010 at 19:43
I see that this seminar is really worth it
I’ll have to think about it more and get back to you, but one question: Is the relativist a realist about first personal (perspectival) facts?
I remember Kit Fine’s http://philosophy.fas.nyu.edu/docs/IO/1160/tenseandreality.pdf tried to take some middle ground view but damnit I’m not gonna read 99 pages to find out
Raleigh Miller says:
16. April 2010 at 20:27
Yeah, Fine’s piece was one of my biggest influences of recent, though I’m sure I don’t quite know what he’s up to.

I can imagine a semantic relativist rejecting first-person-perspectivalism. If I assume that the former thinks that you can have a true belief that p and I can have a true belief that ~p…

Some construal of truth in semantics that is ontologically inert would allow the relativist to steer clear of perspectivalism, but if I’m to imagine such a construal I think that it would make relativism pretty inoccuous/conventional
Brian McLean says:
16. April 2010 at 21:24
Hi Raleigh,

This all looks like good fun. I wish I were in Stewart’s seminar!

Sorry to bore with the exegesis, but I want to make sure I’m following the picture, and I apologize ahead of time if I botch it. Perspectives are sets of propositions true for some subject. A proposition P is true relative to a perspective S just in case P is a member of S. Some propositions, however, are true relative to all perspectives; this occurs for some P just in case for any perspective S, P is a member of S. Then we’ve got this song and dance about disagreement, on which it’s challenging to see what to make of disagreement when P is true-relative-to-S, i.e. P is a member of S, but false-relative-to-S*, i.e. ~P is a member of S*. A disagreement is ‘blameless’ as to P (or ~P) just in case, for two agents A and A*, A utters P and A* utters ~P, and P is a member of A’s perspective but ~P is a member of A*’s perspective. (Presumably, a disagreement is ‘blameful’ [or whatever] as to P [or ~P] just in case, for two agents A and A*, A utters P and A* utters ~P, but either [i] P is a member of A’s perspective and of A*’s perspective or [ii] ~P is a member of A’s perspective and of A*’s perspective. So either A or A* is wrong about what’s true from his perspective.)

[Note: you might think that instead of uttering propositions, we utter sentences semantically expressing those propositions. If you want to get hyper-nitpicky, it should be clear enough how to make the relevant revisions.]

I think I’m on board with most of the stuff in your post, insofar as I think I understand it. One thing we need to do is provide a way to utter propositions about what you call ‘hard truths.’ Typically I want to say stuff that’s not true merely from my perspective but also from yours; and if I’m talking about a proposition true only from my perspective and not yours, I have said something false (even from my perspective!). I mean to utter a proposition *as* a hard truth. Here’s a proposal for doing so. (For simplicity and due to my inability to understand this shit, hold constant worlds, times, or anything else that would relativize the picture.)

An agent A expresses a ‘hard truth’ that P just in case he expresses the following higher-order proposition about P and the relevant perspectives:

P*: For any perspective S, P is a member of S.

For example, I might utter “Obama is president” and mean for it to be a hard truth, in which case the semantic content of my utterance would be

(∀s) ∈ s

Depending on the contents of P, P* either is true-from-all-perspectives or ~P* is true-from-all-perspectives (but not both). (I think.) Sure, there is no absolute fact about which perspective is the ‘correct’ one; but by uttering propositions ranging over all perspectives, we can say stuff about what’s true from any perspective without privileging any particular one. When I want to express a hard truth about P, I do so by uttering a sentence whose semantic content is something like P*: this lets me beat out any relativity that would make way for a blameless disagreement. Likewise, you could disagree with me - blamefully! - by uttering either:

~P*: It’s false that [for any perspective S, P is a member of S.]
or
~P**: For any perspective S, ~P is a member of S. (Which would entail ~P*, the proper negation of P*.)

In the first case you’d be arguing that it was only a matter of perspective; in the second you’d be asserting a hard truth that the contents of my purported hard truth were false.

So if the worry is that we can’t capture disagreement over hard truths - ones about which we cannot blamelessly disagree - we can, albeit somewhat obliquely. Likewise, even if there are perspectival facts that *could* make disagreement blameless, we might still by and large utter hard truths, in which case our disagreements would be blameful. I happen to think most of our statements of fact are meant to be statements of hard truths; so the spooky relativist metaphysical view is made less scary by an accompanying view in philosophy of language. The trick is to determine whether, by uttering some sentence, we mean something like P - which could be true from some perspective but false from another, like tastiness facts - or something like P* - which is either true from all perspectives or false from all perspectives (but not both), like facts about who is president. (Hint: it’s probably some story involving speaker intentions!) But we’ve got the metaphysics to handle it because we’ve got the perspectives to scope over. Right?

Best,
Brian
Brian McLean says:
16. April 2010 at 21:26
Gah! Wordpress botched part of my post. You will find this:

(∀s) ∈ s

It should read:

(∀s) [ that Obama is president ] ∈ s

I used ” originally. Apparently wordpress dislikes this, probably because of coding things.
Raleigh Miller says:
16. April 2010 at 21:31
Brian, this is great.
Where i think you’ve confused things, it’s my fault. It’s my fault because one of my goals in this post was to talk about the difference and relationship between perspectival disagreement and conversational disagreement, but I failed to make that distinction crystal clear. I will go through your post bit by bit and try to clarify things some time tomorrow.

See you at John’s tonight?
R
Brian McLean says:
16. April 2010 at 21:38
Whoops, yeah. I think I’m on board with the distinction. Is the idea this:

A metaphysical disagreement occurs when, for two perspectives S and S’, P is a member of S but ~P is a member of S’. A conversational disagreement occurs when A utters P and A* utters ~P; and it’s blameless or blameful depending on whether there’s an underlying metaphysical disagreement.

By ‘disagreement’ I just meant conversational disagreement. The main thrust of my response was to give a view on which we can capture a stronger sort of conversational disagreement - one that’s necessarily blameful! - on the perspectival picture you gave. And that might be an itch some people are trying to scratch.

- Brian
Raleigh Miller says:
17. April 2010 at 11:42
So, I want to make some things clear that were unclear in my post.

First, I want to emphasize two sorts of disagreement. There is disagreement *among* perspectives. Call this perspectival disagreement. Say that p is true from some perspective, S, if it is in S, and it is false from some perspective, S’ if its negation is in S’. In this case, S and S’ disagree over p. For all that’s been said, some propositions could lack truth values with respect to some perspectives and have truth values with respect to others; I don’t know what the benefits and costs of such an allowance would be, so let me just stay agnostic on that. It is not sufficient for p to be true from, for instance, Raleigh’s first personal perspective that Raleigh believe p. This is because p may not be a perspectival fact. p could be an objective, thus true from all first personal perspectives, and insofar as Raleigh thinks that some objectively false proposition is true, Raleigh disbelieves a proposition that *is* true from his perspective. In fact, the conventional view will be that all of the normal facts we normally think of as facts are objective facts, and so it doesn’t matter what a person thinks, such propositions are true from their perspectives. The purported counterexamples are going to be funky facts that involve predicates of personal taste like ‘fun’ and ‘tasty’. So perspectival disagreement is the metaphysical phenomenon of propositions being true from some perspectives and false from others.

Perspectival disagreement is different from *two people disagreeing*. The latter occurs when one person asserts or believes p and the other person asserts or believes the negation is p. The phenomenon of *two people disagreeing* I will call “Conversational disagreement”. As I just said, in the vast majority of cases, p will be objective proposition, not a perspectival proposition. Such cases will be conversational disagreement that is not undergirded by perspectival disagreement.

Now I want to go through Brian’s post, to make sure his comments are addressed. I’ll finished by worrying about the relationship between perspectival disagreement and conversational disagreement, and whether the former can provide a metaphysical basis for blameless conversational disagreement.

“Perspectives are sets of propositions true for some subject. A proposition P is true relative to a perspective S just in case P is a member of S. Some propositions, however, are true relative to all perspectives; this occurs for some P just in case for any perspective S, P is a member of S.”

Yes, that’s right, except we should be careful with the phrase “true for some subject”, because that makes it sound like perspectives are persons. They can be; that is first-personal perspectives are one sort of perspective. Additionally, there are temporal and modal perspectives, and though we could define ’subject’ such that it seamlessly includes these two, that’d be a weird use of the word, and as stated it threatens to overemphasize first-personal perspectivalism.

“Then we’ve got this song and dance about disagreement, on which it’s challenging to see what to make of disagreement when P is true-relative-to-S, i.e. P is a member of S, but false-relative-to-S*, i.e. ~P is a member of S*. A disagreement is ‘blameless’ as to P (or ~P) just in case, for two agents A and A*, A utters P and A* utters ~P, and P is a member of A’s perspective but ~P is a member of A*’s perspective. (Presumably, a disagreement is ‘blameful’ [or whatever] as to P [or ~P] just in case, for two agents A and A*, A utters P and A* utters ~P, but either [i] P is a member of A’s perspective and of A*’s perspective or [ii] ~P is a member of A’s perspective and of A*’s perspective. So either A or A* is wrong about what’s true from his perspective.)”

Again, this is all true, so long as we take every token of ‘disagreement’ in this paragraph to refer to conversational disagreement. Also, it’d probably be most careful if we said ‘assert’ where Brian writes ‘utter’. p is a proposition; propositions are asserted. Sentences are uttered. “Let’s go to the bank” is one utterance that could assert different propositions. Hyper-nitpicky, Brian says, but fair enough.

Brian then expresses worries, and tries to scratch itches, about what I have called hard truths. Now, the real category we’re talking about here is objective truths; that is, propositions true from all first-personal perspectives. I only introduced hard truths as propositions that will be true from *all* perspectives, including temporal and modal perspectives, so that the perspectival sensitivity can be discussed as such, whether that sensitivity is to first-personal, temporal, or modal perspectives. I hope what I’ve said so far should make it clear that there is no trouble in talking about aperspectival facts. They’re simply propositions true from all (relevant) perspectives. There may be additional interesting things to say about what the difference between aperspectival and perspectival facts are; perhaps the truth conditions of perspectival facts have interesting structural features that tie them inextricably to a perspective. On this I cannot comment. Suffice it to say, most people think there are contingent and tensed facts, and some people think that there are relativistic facts. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t hard truths, and I can accomodate them just by denying them the perspectival dependence that I am exploiting in giving an account of first personal, temporal and modal facts.

I love Brian’s parsing of different sorts of disagreement. Indeed, if Brian utters p, I might argue with him by saying “no, p is false”, thus ~P*. Or I might argue with him by saying “well, maybe p for you, but not for everyone, so don’t assert it as objective fact”, thus ~P**. I think this is absolutely right, and very helpful.

So yeah, having gone through it more carefully, I see that Brian was pretty much entirely right. And I appreciate the clarifications he pushed me towards.
Raleigh Miller says:
17. April 2010 at 12:35
Last thing, then i’m going to go read about Plato.

Here’s where I got on the soap box.

I say to Joe: If the relativist wins the semantic dispute, that suggests that there are first-personal perspectives in which facts reside; facts that are false from other perspectives.
Joe says to me: Fine, but that’s not disagreement. That’s just different perspectives being made up of different propositions.
Raleigh: That *is* disagreement. Two perspectives disagree insofar as a proposition true from one is false from the other. perspectives are sets of facts, and non-identical sets disagree on those propositions that make them nonidentical.
Joe: Fine, but that’s not the kind of disagreement relativists want.
Raleigh: Sure it is.
Joe: No it isn’t.
Raleigh: We must settle this with Jello wrestling!
Joe: You’re on!

Well…that’s mostly what happened anyway.

So, in writing this post I definitely came to see what was right about Joe’s insistence. We have to distinguish between conversational disagreement and perspectival disagreement, and the phenomenon I was describing was certainly *not* conversational disagreement. Nonetheless, I’m inclined to say that there are three sorts of conversational disagreement.

(a)
Joe: I’m from Schenectady.
Raleigh: No I’m not!

(b)
Joe: Obama is president of the United States.
Raleigh: No he’s not!

(c)
Joe: Licorice is tasty.
Raleigh: No it’s not!

Ok, so here are three sorts of conversational confrontations. Which of them count as real disagreements?
Well, B certainly does, because the proposition in question is not a first-personal perspectival fact. If it’s true, it’s true for all first-personal perspectives (because its truth conditions are not wrapped up in a perspective), so one of us is wrong about the propositions that are true from our own perspective. In this case, Raleigh is wrong, because he thinks ~(Po) is true from his perspective when Po is true from his perspective.

(a) certainly isn’t a disagreement. Now, I DID say that indexical propositions were among those over which perspectives disagree, and that is true. Different times, on my reading, disagree over which moment is the present (and over whether/by how much a moment is past/future). and different first-personal perspectives DO disagree over who is ‘I’ and who is ‘thou’. But for most speakers, it’s evident that the ‘I’ indexes to the speaker, so the content of Joe’s assertion is ‘Joe is from Schenectady’. So, as I said, different perspectives disagree over propositions over perspectives; but this isn’t plausibly expressing such a disagreement. Possible weird cases in which it would be? Maybe Raleigh is a solipsist that thinks that all I-facts are his I-facts. In which case, Raleigh would be disagreeing with the proposition he thinks Joe is asserting (though he’d be wrong. facts about what proposition Joe is asserting are, by the way, not first-personal perspectival facts).

Now, what about (c). Here, the proposition in question is a proposition about the world, but its truth conditions are tied up with a perspective. ‘licorice is tasty’ is a perspectival fact. My perspective is made up of lots of propositions, including ‘Raleigh is from Kansas City’, ‘Joe is from Schenectady’ ‘I am Raleigh Miller’ and ‘it is not the case that licorice is tasty’. Joe and I are not disagreeing over whether I am Raleigh Miller, and we are not disagreeing over whether Joe is from Schenectady, so there’s nothing left for us to be disagreeing about. So long as I know that, in (a), Joe is expressing that Joe is from Schenectady, I will not take him to be contradicting any of the propositions that make up my perspective. however, the metaphysical counterpart of the linguistic debate over relative truth is to claim that ‘it is not the case that licorice is tasty’ is a perspectival, but *not indexical*, fact. It is a perspectival fact about the world. And Joe’s perspective and my perspective disagree over the fact. So when we assert our beliefs, we are giving voice to the discrepancies between our perspectives. I think the best way to describe disagreement over relative truth is to say that this is what’s going on. It has all the markings of disagreement because (a) it has the superficial linguistic structure of disagreement over aperspectival facts, and (b) we take the propositions that are (i) true from our perspective and (ii) not *about* our perspective to be true from other people’s perspectives as well, until we are shown otherwise.

Is that *genuine* disagreement? Ok, fine, now I fall back to Stewart’s answer. Locate ‘genuineness’ where ever you want. But this is what I think is really going on, and it bears enough similarity to other sorts of disagreement to reward analysis that takes it to be disagreement.

P.S. I think the resistance to faultless disagreement comes from the assumption that if there is faultless disagreement, the world is made up of contradictory propositions.
What may be unclear is: This is not a dispute about linguistics anymore. This is a dispute about whether reality is fundamentally first-perspectival, in the ways that people want to say it is fundamentally temporal or fundamentally modal. There are reasons to think it is; there are probably much better to think that it isn’t. Also, if we take seriously that *this* is the real disagreement (and if we take the contradiction of allowing such perspectival facts simpliciter into reality to be inadmissible) then we will be extremely impressed by the parallel for this platitudinous anti-realism about first-personal perspectives and JME Mctaggart’s argument for the unreality of time.
Joe Reich says:
19. April 2010 at 14:18
Hi Raleigh. Sounds like an interesting project.

(Caveat: I skipped the Brian-Raleigh exchange in its entirety.)

There’s a lot here, but here are a couple things to get going on.

1) I’m not sure there’s any useful sense in which metaphysical things can disagree. It strikes me that only language-y things can disagree. Perspectives, on your view, are facts, and facts are language-y things.

3) Do you want these perspetives to be closed under implication?

2) The last paragraph ostensibly takes up my central claim, that the disagreement Macfarlane (and you, and all these relativists) produce is unworthy of the name. But I don’t think it’s deallt with satisfactorily. A way to put this is to ask: insofar as the utterances disagree, is (a) more like (b) or (c).

(A) Alphonse: Capers are tasty.
Beatrice: Capers are nasty.

(B) Clarissa at t1: Bush is President.
Clarissa at t2: Bush is not President.

(C) Derrick: Capers are members of the anchovie family.
Ephraim: Capers are a type of plant.

If Macfarlane/you say that (a) is more like (b) than (c), then we’re talking about something pretty dull and mundane–hardly worth building a seminar/book around. But if (a) is more like (c) than (b), your/Macfarlane’s strategy won’t do the trick.
Joe Reich says:
19. April 2010 at 14:21
Maybe you’re right that there is a sense of metaphysical disagreement..”If things are this way, then they can’t be that way, too.”

But if you’re talking about facts, maybe you want something linguistic anyway.
Raleigh Miller says:
19. April 2010 at 15:08
Thanks Joe! I was really anxious to have your thoughts on this.

Several things.

First, It’s a shame that you didn’t read the exchange between Brian and I. This was was discussed at length. Your first and third questions is answered there, where we discuss the metaphysical sense of disagreement. I’ll refer you to those comments.

Second, Facts are things that are the case. Not languagy things. languagy things can’t be the case. If facts are true propositions, (as I’m happy to say they are) this is a metaphysical concept of truth, not a linguistic concept of truth. Additionally, sets of facts aren’t facts. Perspectives are sets of facts. This, by the way, seems like the theoretically cleanest way to construe perspectives, and to say the things I should be able to say about them, but i suspect that some people who work in aspect may be unhappy with this construal of things. Construing times (temporal perspectives) for instance, as sets of facts, seems to fail to capture something essential about relationship between one time and another. But any adjustment they’d make is, I think, going to preserve the sorts of things I want to say about perspectives, and make them even less mistakable as languagey entities. No matter, though. Facts aren’t languagey things.

Finally, Closure under implication.
All of the facts that make up a single perspective are compatible with one another. The union of two perspectives (which are of the same sort) will always be an inconsistent set. So a single perspective is closed under implication, a pair of perspectives is not. This is why the question of ontology of perspectives arises; by allowing multiple perspectives into reality, without qualification, we risk allowing contradictions into our ontology. This can be solved by giving ontological privelege to one of the perspectives, or denying the existence of irreducibly perspectival facts (where all purportedly perspectival facts become ‘p at t’ or ‘p to s’ or ‘p in w’ in order to remove the contradiction). Both solutions have their problems. So…suppose from my perspective beets are tasty and licorice is tasty. From this I can derive within the scope of my perspective that beets are tasty, but I can’t assume that that conclusion is true from your perspective. All of that holds so long as ‘licorice is tasty’ is a genuine first-personal-perspectival fact; if there are no such facts, then all of the facts that hold from my perspective should hold from your perspective, and the union of the two should be closed under implication.

The reason that this is supposed to be interest/worth building a seminar around, is that my concept of perspectival disagreement provides a clean explanation of what’s going on in faultless disagreement. If there are irreducibly first-perspectival facts, then first- personal perspectives will disagree with respect to the facts. If there are not (and everything that looks like a fpf of the form ‘p’ is actually an objective fact, or a contextualized fact, ‘p for s’, or is some sortof nonpropositional entity, as the expressivist would have it)then all perspectives will agree on all of the facts (and there won’t be an interesting metaphysical concept of perspective left). FPF’s can have faulty disagreement, when one believes p, the other beleives ~p, and p (if true) is an objective fact (and so is true from both perspectives or neither). But their disagreement is faultless if it reflects one of the factual disagreements between their perspectives.
Raleigh Miller says:
19. April 2010 at 15:39
You said to me the other day that you want a concept of disagreement that yields closure under implication among the disagreeing parties. By asking for this, you’ve ruled out relativism from the start.

No inconsistent set of facts is closed under implication.
If you and I disagree about whether licorice is tasty, then it seems like (a) neither of us has a false belief, and (b) it’s either the case that (b1) we disagree on whether a proposition is true, or (b2) we both believe a proposition indexed to ourselves to be true, and would accept that the same proposition indexed to the other is true. (b1) is relativism. If you take b1 to be correct, and you concatenate the true beliefs that both of us have into a single set of beliefs, you’ve got an inconsistent set.

by asking the relativist to retain a sense of disagreement between two conversants, but to insist that the set of true beliefs on the table during such a disagreement be part of a set that is closed under implication, you’ve given the relativist an impossible task. Perhaps closure under implication can be held up as a theoretical virtue of rejecting relativism, but it can’t be held as one of the desiderata that relativism is supposed to accomodate. CuI is incompatible with relativism.
Joe Reich says:
20. April 2010 at 00:26
Raleigh,

Your “impossible task” is my knock-down objection. I think relativism is a non-starter for just the reasons we (redundantly) laid out so clearly. (And just to spell out the rest of my position,) I suggest that the relativistic account does not provide a satisfactory account of faultless disagreement, because it makes the only disagreement present in matters of taste non-conversational disagreement. And… blah blah blah you know how the line goes.

“True propositions” are linguistic items, sorry. I take it we can agree that propositions are linguistic items. Adding “true”, if you’re a correspondence-theorist, is a property of propositions that holds only if they bear a certain relation to the world. But it sounds like you want something closer to states of affairs?

The more I think about it, the more I worry that there’s a semi-serious muddle here. “Closed under implication” will only make sense if we’re talking about propositions. There is no sense in which states of affairs are true: they either obtain or fail to obtain. And I don’t know what to make of this sentence:

“however, the metaphysical counterpart of the linguistic debate over relative truth is to claim that ‘it is not the case that licorice is tasty’ is a perspectival, but *not indexical*, fact. It is a perspectival fact about the world.”

Assuming you’re serious about this being a metaphysical matter, it’s nothing more than a category mistake to say that ‘licorice is tasty’ is indexical. On your view, licorice’s being tasty is a perspectival state of affairs (if I may). But then so is my growing up in Schenectady, and there is no difference in the amount of ‘disagreement’ between the metaphysical counterpart of first-person perspectival states and matter-of-taste perspectival states; you might as well be a metaphysical version of a contextualist. Relativism only gets going once we’ve got the context/circumstance distinction, which you claim (I think) to lose by going metaphysical. If that sort of distinction is one you want to capture, then maybe you’ll want to allow for two sorts of perspectiviality, one corresponding to context and the other to circumstance. But I’m quickly losing track of what the advantage of going metaphysical was in the first place.

This can probably all be sorted out somehow, but it needs doing. Boils down to two choices for you, I think: 1) is the difference betweeen relativism* and contextualism* important to my project? 2) Is there really an advantage to going metaphysical?
Nathan says:
22. April 2010 at 00:36
I’m sure Raleigh can handle this as well as I can, but propositions are not linguistic items. Sentences are linguistic items that express propositions, but multiple sentences can express the same proposition. “There is one cat” expresses the same proposition as “C’est un chat,” but they are clearly different sentences. Propositions are metaphysical, or something like that.
Scott says:
3. May 2010 at 15:54
I’ve come into the discussion after it’s had some time to mature, but I still don’t think I understand what Raleigh is after. One thing he wants is a decidedly metaphysical concept of disagreement, something he calls “perspectival disagreement” in his reply to Brian. This concept is unclear, because it’s unclear what Raleigh takes perspectives to be. He takes them to be tied to facts, but he slides freely between two senses of “fact.”

In the original post, he takes perspectives to be sets of true propositions. This makes it easy for him to say when two perspectives disagree: they disagree just in case one contains a proposition and the other contains its negation. However, he often talks as if propositions need to be evaluated for truth relative to a perspective, so it’s not clear how to make sense of the claim that perspectives are sets of *true* propositions. If perspectives are sets of true propositions, and if a proposition is true relative to a perspective just in case it is a member of the perspective, then Raleigh’s appeal to truth isn’t doing an work: perspectives are just sets of propositions.

However, this would make hash of his attempt to secure propositions that are true from all perspectives. No proposition is a member of every set of propositions. There are far, far too many sets! Raleigh runs into trouble, because he tries to make perspectives set-theoretic constructions, on the one hand, while still trying to make them answer to objective reality, on the other hand. This is the first indication that he’s running together two sense of “fact” that it’s important to keep distinct. In the original post, Raleigh says that reality is “made up” of perspectives. This makes the problem immediate. He tries to back off from this in the comments, by taking true non-perspectival propositions to be propositions true from all “relevant” perspectives. I suspect that it will be hard to say which sets are relevant in a way that’s not circular.

After being pushed by Joe, Raleigh explicitly brings up the second understanding of “fact”: a structured bit of reality, or something that can be the case. However, he immediately tries to square this with his earlier understanding of “fact”: a true proposition. This is a mistake. Call facts in the first sense “states of affairs” and facts in the second sense “true propositions.” One nice, but controversial, way to go here is to take a state of affairs to be an object’s having a property or two or more objects’ standing in a relation. Instead of taking reality to be constructed out of propositions, or sets of propositions, take it to be constructed out of states of affairs.

The worries about whether or not perspectives are closed under logical consequence follow immediately from the confusion between the two conceptions of facts. As Joe and Raleigh both point out, logical consequence holds between propositions, not between bits of reality.

Talking about indexicality is confusing on either understanding “fact.” There are indexical expressions, but no indexical contents or bits of reality. It’s a bad piece of terminology, but it’s one Raleigh doesn’t need. The distinction he wants is the distinction between facts (in whatever sense he decides upon) that have perspectives as constituents and those that do not.

Suppose Raleigh irons out the confusion between the two different sense of “fact” that seem to be in play. I echo the question that has been raised several times. What is the concept of perspectival disagreement supposed to get us?

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What the first-personal-perspectival-realist might say about ‘disagreement’.

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