Normative Alethic Pluralism

I discuss what I take to be an interesting variability in the normative significance of disagreement and I sugges that such variability requires some flexibility in the normative function that truth exerts in different areas of discourse. Because a monistic view on truth’s normative function forces us to adopt a Procrustean attitude towards the normative significance of disagreement, it is inadequate as a general model of the normativity of truth. I argue for this by presenting a variation of what is known in the truth pluralism literature as the scope problem. I then outline a pluralist framework for understanding the normativity of truth—normative alethic pluralism—that promises to score better than monism in addressing the variability in the normative significance of disagreement. The key point of my proposal is to understand variation in normative fault by looking at which dimensions of truth’s normative profile operate in a given domain of discourse. Once we adopt this pluralistic stance towards the normativity of truth, we obtain a framework which adequately models the variability in the normative significance of disagreement across different areas of discourse.