Alethic Pluralism, Deflationism, and Faultless Disagreement

AbstractThe chapter returns to the “folk”-anti-realist idea about certain areas of my thought and discourse—basic taste, for instance, or comedy—that their lack of objectivity crystallizes in the possibility of “faultless disagreements”: situations where one party accepts P, another rejects P, and neither is guilty of any kind of mistake of substance or shortcoming of cognitive process. As noted in earlier chapters, it proves challenging on closer examination to make coherent sense of this idea, and a majority of theorists have come to reject it as incoherent. There are two significant exceptions in the contemporary literature: relativists often hold it up as something of a coup for their view that it can make straightforward sense of faultless disagreement; and I have argued (Chapters 1 and 2) that making judicious intuitionistic revisions to classical logic can provide resources that suffice to stabilize the notion. The present chapter argues that neither relativism nor intuitionism in fact provides a satisfactory account and indicates how a form of minimalism about truth and truth-aptitude, harnessed within an alethic pluralist framework enables us to do better.