(Re-)Defining Racism by Alberto G. Urquidez

Author:Alberto G. Urquidez
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030272579
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

5.3 Metalinguistic Negotiation

David Plunkett and Tim Sundell’s “Disagreement and the Semantics of Normative and Evaluative Terms” seeks to undermine an intuitive form of reasoning, namely, “the argument from (a) the premise that an exchange between two speakers expresses a genuine disagreement to (b) the thesis that those speakers mean the same things by the words they use in that exchange.”4 They cite R. M. Hare as an example of a philosopher who defended such reasoning. The idea seems to be that, even if two speakers disagree about the referent of the disputed term, they must share a conception of its meaning, for shared meaning is a condition for the possibility of disagreement. The argument here is that, otherwise—if our speakers had radically different conceptions of the meaning of “X”—they would be disagreeing about nothing of substance. At best, their disagreement would be about a mere label: is “X” the proper label or should one be using some other term? Their disagreement would be purely verbal and would therefore be illegitimate (so the argument is reminiscent of Garcia).

Suppose that S asserts “X is good” and P asserts “X is not good.” It appears that S and P are disagreeing about something. It is natural to think that if their disagreement is legitimate (non-confused), the word “good” must mean the same on each assertion. Plunkett and Sundell deny that the word “good” must mean the same in order for it to be possible for S and P to disagree. The assumption that “good” must mean the same for disagreement to be possible is false. It is at least conceivable that the word “good” might mean one thing for S and another for P without it being the case that S and P are talking past one another. For Garcia, however, this is mistaken. If “good” does not mean the same, then the disagreement between S and P “vanishes” on account of a mere difference in word use, for there is then nothing about which they disagree. Plunkett and Sundell develop an argument that undermines the necessity presupposed by this logic.

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