Faultless or Disagreement

AbstractAmong the various motivations that may lead to the idea that truth is relative in some non-conventional sense, one is that the idea helps explain how there can be ‘faultless disagreements’, that is, situations in which a person A judges that p, a person B judges that not-p, but neither A nor B is at fault. The line of argument goes as follows. It seems that there are faultless disagreements. For example, A and B may disagree on culinary matters without either A or B being at fault. But standard semantics has no room for such a case, so there is something wrong with standard semantics. The best way to amend it is to add a new parameter that is relevant to the truth or falsity of what A and B judge, presumably, something related to personal taste. This chapter shows that this line of FN:1 argument is flawed. It is true that standard semantics has no room for faultless disagreements. But there is nothing wrong with this, for it should not be assumed that such disagreements exist.