Frege, Relativism and Faultless Disagreement

AbstractAllegedly, relativism can make sense of faultless disagreements, where A and B faultlessly disagree if A sincerely asserts P, B sincerely asserts ~P and yet neither assertion is incorrect. Such cases seem to abound in areas of evaluative discourse. The trouble with taking these appearances at face value is that P and ~P cannot both be true so that at least one of the speakers would seem at fault. To defuse this objection, relativists suggest conceiving of propositional truth as being relative to perspectives. Drawing on Fregean insights into the nature of assertion, this chapter argues that this manoeuvre will not work and that relativists are anyway hard-pressed to account for genuine disagreement. Discarding the idea of faultlessness, some positive suggestions are made of how relativists might recover a sense in which A and B genuinely disagree. One tentative conclusion is that moral relativism is the non-cognitivists' best bet.