Radical Holism and Disagreement

Abstract Traditional accounts of disagreement require that different subjects can entertain the same propositional contents. For most views of mental content, this ‘shared content’ approach seems an obvious choice. However, for the radical holist, this framework is problematic: the holist claims that different subjects cannot, in practice, share thoughts. This paper has two aims. The first is to suggest an account of agreement and disagreement for the holist, which treats both agreement and disagreement as graded notions. The second aim is to show that the structure of this account should be attractive to all philosophers who work on disagreement, regardless of their metasemantic commitments. I argue that there is an important variety of disagreement (and agreement) between subjects that cannot be adequately characterized by appeal to shared content. Instead, all parties to the debate should endorse accounts of these phenomena that appeal to a holistic notion of linguistic and conceptual understanding.