A faultless disagreement is a disagreement when Party A states that P is true, while Party B states that non-P is true, and neither party is at fault. Disagreements of this kind may arise in areas of evaluative discourse, such as aesthetics, justification of beliefs or moral values, etc. A representative example is that John says Paris is more interesting than Rome, while Bob claims Rome is more interesting than Paris. In the case of a faultless disagreement, it is possible that if any party gives up their claim, there will be no improvement in the position of any of them.[1][clarification needed]
Within the framework of formal logic it is impossible that both P and not-P are true, and it was attempted to justify faultless disagreements within the framework of relativism of the Truth (propositional truth being relative to perspectives),[2] Max Kölbel and Sven Rosenkranz argued that genuine faultless disagreements are impossible.[1][2] However, defenses of faultless disagreement, and of alethic relativism more generally, continue to be made by critics of formal logic as it is currently constructed.[3]
References
edit- ^ a b Max Kölbel, "Faultless Disagreement", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, Vol. 104 (2004), pp. 53-73
- ^ a b Sven Rosenkranz, "Frege, Relativism and Faultless Disagreement", doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199234950.003.0010
- ^ Engle, John (2013). "Alethic relativism and faultless disagreement: weighing in on the puzzle from a general semantics perspective". ETC: A Review of General Semantics. 70 (4): 372–376. JSTOR 24761805.