Michele Palmira

In recent work, J. Adam Carter argues that truth-relativism should be compatible with the so-called conformist response to peer disagreement about taste to the effect that subjects should revise their opinions. However, Carter claims that truth-relativism cannot make sense of this response since it cannot make sense of the idea that when two subjects are recognised as epistemic peers, they should acknowledge that they are equally likely to be right about the targeted issue. The main aim of this paper is a modest one: to argue that truth-relativists should not be worried about their alleged incompatibility with conformism for they should be non-conformists

A popular definition of epistemic peerage maintains that two subjects are epistemic peers if and only if they are equals with respect to general epistemic virtues and share the same evidence about the targeted issue. In this paper I shall take up the challenge of defending the necessity of the evidential equality condition for a definition of epistemic peerage from criticisms that can be elicited from the literature on peer disagreement. The paper discusses two definitions that drop this condition and argues that they yield implausible verdicts about the instantiation of the epistemic peerage relation.

This paper addresses a largely neglected question in ongoing debates over disagreement: what is the relation, if any, between disagreements involving credences and disagreements involving outright beliefs? The first part of the paper offers some desiderata for an adequate account of credal and full disagreement. The second part of the paper argues that both phenomena can be subsumed under a schematic definition which goes as follows: A and B disagree if and only if the accuracy conditions of A's doxastic attitude are such that, if they were fulfilled, this would ipso facto make B's doxastic attitude inaccurate, or vice-versa.

The recent debate on Semantic Contextualism and Relativism has definitely brought the phenomenon of disagreement under the spotlight. Relativists have considered disagreement as a means to accomplish a defence of their own position regarding the semantics of knowledge attributions, epistemic modals, taste predicates, and so on. The aim of this paper is twofold: first, we argue that several specific notions of disagreement can be subsumed under a common “schema” which provides a unified and overarching notion of disagreement. Secondly, we avail ourselves of such a unified notion of disagreement to assess the arguments devised especially by Relativists in order to criticise certain forms of Contextualism, which crucially rely on the idea that Relativism is better suited than Contextualism to capture certain intuitions of disagreement.

This paper investigates the question of how to correctly capture the scope of singular thinking. The first part of the paper identifies a scope problem for the dominant view of singular thought maintaining that, in order for a thinker to have a singular thought about an object o, the thinker has to bear a special epistemic relation to o. The scope problem has it is that this view cannot make sense of the singularity of our thoughts about objects to which we do not or cannot bear any special epistemic relation. The paper focuses on a specific instance of the scope problem by addressing the case of thoughts about the natural numbers. Various possible solutions to the scope problem within the dominant framework are assessed and rejected. The second part of the paper develops a new theory of singular thought which hinges on the contention that the constraints that need to be met in order to think singularly vary depending on the kind of object we are thinking about. This idea is developed in detail by discussing the difference between the somewhat standard case of thoughts about spatio-temporal medium-sized inanimate objects and the case of thoughts about the natural numbers. It is contended that this new Pluralist theory of singular thought can successfully solve the scope problem.

Contemporary epistemology devotes much attention to disagreements among epistemic peers, that is, disagreements in which subjects take themselves to be equals with respect to the evidence that bears on the matter at issue as well as general intellectual virtues. The crucial question is: what should you do when you disagree with an epistemic peer? The paper pursues three goals. First, it clarifies some as of yet unexplained details of the problem of peer disagreement. Second, it distinguishes between Invariantist and Contextualist Treatments of the problem. Third, it provides an assessment of Contextualist Treatments. These are attractive because they seem to have the resources to capture the intuition that the rational response to peer disagreement varies across contexts. However, this paper argues that Contextualist Treatments don’t fare any better than their Invariantist rivals.

The article investigates the significance of the so-called phenomenon of apparent faultless disagreement for debates about the semantics of taste discourse. Two kinds of description of the phenomenon are proposed. The first ensures that faultless disagreement raises a distinctive philosophical challenge; yet, it is argued that Contextualist, Realist and Relativist semantic theories do not account for this description. The second, by contrast, makes the phenomenon irrelevant for the problem of what the right semantics of taste discourse should be. Lastly, the following dilemma is assessed: either faultless disagreement provides strong evidence against semantic theories; or its significance should be considerably downplayed