Basic Disagreement, Basic Contextualism and Basic Relativism

The aim of this paper is to show that a very natural and intuitive notion of disagreement cannot but lead to criticizing contextualist and relativist attempts at providing positive philosophical explanations of faultless disagreement. First, two distinctions (normative vs. empirical and revisionary vs. descriptive) that are useful for characterizing a philosophical project are introduced. Secondly, a basic view of doxastic disagreement is proposed and it is argued that this view poses a problem to any basic form of contextualism and relativism for any descriptive project on faultless disagreement. Finally, it is contended that even though a revisionary approach to faultless disagreement is a natural option, such an approach is at odds with the methodology usually adopted by supporters of these semantic proposals.