Faultless disagreement

About this book

People fight a lot, both about objective and about subjective matters. But while at least one party to a dispute must be wrong in a disagreement about objective matters, it seems that both parties can be right when it comes to subjective ones: it seems that there can be faultless disagreements. But how is this possible? How can people disagree with one another if they are both right? And why should they? Over the last 15 years, various philosophers and linguists have argued that we have to become relativists about truth to explain what is going on. This book shows that we can dispense with relativism. It combines a conservative semantic claim with a novel pragmatic one to develop the superiority approach. The book discusses both classic and recent, as well as general and debate-specific literature in philosophy and linguistics and provides an introduction as well as an original contribution to the recent debate on the semantics and pragmatics of perspectival expressions.