Disagreement and Conceptual Understanding

Theoria 84 (2):179-210 (2018)
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Abstract

Does the epistemology of disagreement have significant consequences for theories of conceptual understanding? I argue that it does. I argue that the epistemology of disagreement manifests the existence of a special kind of concept, perspectival modes of metarepresentation, a kind of concept instances of which figure in the thinking about thoughts that occurs in deep disagreement. These perspectival modes of metarepresentation are de re modes of presentation of thoughts themselves – hence de re modes of metarepresentation – in which one and the same thought is presented to higher‐order thinking about thoughts in different ways. These modes or ways are de re and perspectival because they are individuated by facts about whether the thought being thought about is the grasped or understood propositional object of one's own or another's thinking. I outline a broadly Fregean framework for theorizing conceptual understanding and draw out three significant consequences of the existence of perspectival modes of metarepresentation for theories of conceptual understanding: they (1) constitute a new philosophical motivation for a restricted fragment of what Terence Parsons calls a “libertine” hierarchy of Fregean sense; (2) provide, against David Chalmers, examples of a priori equivalences that are nevertheless cognitively significant; and (3) constitute a novel and pervasive example of Kripkean ‘Paderewski’‐type designators.

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Gurpreet Rattan
University of Toronto, Mississauga

Citations of this work

Suspension of Belief and Epistemologies of Science.Anjan Chakravartty - 2015 - International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 5 (2):168-192.
On the Practical Significance of Irrelevant Factors.Seyed Mohammad Yarandi - 2023 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 53 (2):156-171.
Attribution and Explanation in Relativism.Gurpreet Rattan - forthcoming - Philosophical Quarterly.

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References found in this work

Verbal Disputes.David J. Chalmers - 2011 - Philosophical Review 120 (4):515-566.
Reference and Consciousness.John Campbell - 2002 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
Reflection and disagreement.Adam Elga - 2007 - Noûs 41 (3):478–502.
Content preservation.Tyler Burge - 1993 - Philosophical Review 102 (4):457-488.

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