Towards a Unified Notion of Disagreement

The recent debate on Semantic Contextualism and Relativism has definitely brought the phenomenon of disagreement under the spotlight. Relativists have considered disagreement as a means to accomplish a defence of their own position regarding the semantics of knowledge attributions, epistemic modals, taste predicates, and so on. The aim of this paper is twofold: first, we argue that several specific notions of disagreement can be subsumed under a common “schema” which provides a unified and overarching notion of disagreement. Secondly, we avail ourselves of such a unified notion of disagreement to assess the arguments devised especially by Relativists in order to criticise certain forms of Contextualism, which crucially rely on the idea that Relativism is better suited than Contextualism to capture certain intuitions of disagreement