Merely Verbal Disputes
The long-awaited (by me, mainly) draft of my merely verbal disputes paper is now in a sharable form. Comments are welcome as always.
In the draft I set out to argue against some existing approaches to mere-verbalness, whilst drawing morals from what is right about them. Then I try out my own account.
MVD: Parties A and B are having a merely verbal dispute iff they are engaged in a sincere prima facie dispute D, but do not disagree over the subject matter(s) of D, and merely present the appearance of doing so owing to their divergent uses of some relevant portion of language.
It seems fruitful to me the way your analysis makes the contextual “subject matter” do more of the heavy lifting (instead focusing chiefly on whether the facts held in agreement or disagreement are verbal).
Minor corrections:
should I think be 2009
“despite the fact that they do no agree” (p. 5)
“Manley (2008, p. 14)” (p.
Thanks for that Nat!
Would be interesting to see a follow up looking into the difference between a merely verbal disagreement and for lack of a better phrase, a ‘functionally-equivalent’ or ‘practically-equivalent” argument.
Climate change strikes me as an obvious example.
Say you have 2 sides locked in dispute.
Side A) believes carbon spewed by fossil fuel waste taken for free from the environment, is warming the globe and threatening civilization. They want to stop emitting carbon into the atmosphere and generally consider this somewhere between a crime and an emergency.
Side B) Agrees that carbon is emitted, and that pollution and undesirable effects are caused. Disagrees that this is a significant cause of global climate change. However does recognize that the climate is changing regardless. However, they do also believe that having an economic system that doesn’t take into account inputs and cleaning up outputs is unsophisticated and inefficient, tilting the economy to rely on underpriced goods because of these uncharged costs.
In practical details, these two sides largely agree on what to do. Namely change the economics to include inputs and outputs and by so doing change behaviour to be more efficient, use less polluting sources of energy, and manage waste outputs. Being efficient is desirable, whether for the climate or economics/pollution. Similarly, a fair playing field in the marketplace is desirable in itself, in addition to removing unfair advantages for fossil fuels.
However, in practice the two sides deadlock over the distinction between whether carbon emissions cause climate change or not. In practical matters they are not opposed, since whether it does or not does not affect the actions to take.
I think technically this is not entirely a verbal disagreement, as they do have a fundamental ideological/scientific dispute which could later on become meaningful. However, they agree on functionally equivalent issues and remedies from where they are now, so there is no reason for there to be a paralyzing fight.