Faultless disagreement, cognitive command, and epistemic peers

John Davis

pp. 1-24

in: Synthese 192 (1), 2015.

Abstract

Relativism and contextualism are the most popular accounts of faultless disagreement, but Crispin Wright once argued for an account I call divergentism. According to divergentism, parties who possess all relevant information and use the same standards of assessment in the same context of utterance can disagree about the same proposition without either party being in epistemic fault, yet only one of them is right. This view is an alternative to relativism, indexical contextualism, and nonindexical contextualism, and has advantages over those views. Wright eventually abandoned this view in favor of relativism for reasons related to a conciliationist view of disagreement between epistemic peers. I argue that he gave up on divergentism too soon.

Cited authors

Wright Crispin