In philosophy, there is much discussion about whether disagreements about taste, such as whether a certain wine is delicious, and ontological disagreements, such as whether temporal parts of ordinary objects exist, are substantive disagreements or verbal disputes. The main goal of this thesis is to investigate what substantive disagreements and verbal disputes amount to. The first two parts of this thesis examine whether the various authors offer convincing characterisations of substantive disagreement and verbal dispute and whether they analyse disagreements about taste or ontological disagreement in a compelling way. In the final part, the previously introduced characterisations are compared and assessed, and widely accepted necessary or sufficient conditions for substantive disagreement and verbal dispute are identified. Additionally, an explanation is given as to why disagreements about taste and ontological disagreements are assessed so differently by the various authors.

How do people manage disagreements in conversation? Previous studies of dialogue have shown that the interactional consequences of disagreement are not straightforward. Although often interpreted as face-threatening when performed in an unmitigated manner, disagreement can also encourage novel contributions. This thesis explores how systematically altering the presentation of someone's stance influences the deliberative potential of a dialogue. A corpus analysis of ordinary conversations shows that exposed disagreement occurs rarely, but that speakers can signal a potentially adversarial position in a variety of other ways. One of the most interesting among these is the way people mark their rights to speak about something. Resources such as reported speech and prefacing incongruent content with discourse markers (e.g. 'well') can be important to the management of interpersonal factors. The idea that disagreement is problematic but also useful for deliberation is examined. Using a method that allows fine-grained manipulations of text based dialogues in real-time, agreement and disagreement fragments are inserted into a discussion dialogue. The findings show that inserting exposed disagreement violates the conventions of polite dialogue leading participants to put more effort into the production of their replies, and does not improve levels of deliberation. This raises the question of whether manipulating apparent degrees of speaker commitment might be more important for influencing the quality of deliberation. An experiment was devised which presented oppositional content with differing degrees of 'knowingness'. The findings indicate that marking stance as knowing leads to less guarded exchanges, but does not increase deliberation. Conversely, framing statements as less knowing increases the likelihood that participants consider more alternative viewpoints, thus increasing the deliberative quality of a dialogue. Potential applications include training guidelines for professionals developing tools to support considered debate. Implications for computational argumentation studies include the importance of interpersonal dynamics and stance construction for formulating polite arguments.

Concerning religious matters there are a wide variety of views held that are often contradictory. This observation creates a problem when it comes to thinking about the rationality of religious belief. Can religious belief be rational for those who are aware of this widespread disagreement? This is a problem for a view in religious epistemology known as reformed epistemology. Alvin Plantinga, one of the leading defenders of this view, has argued that there is no successful argument to show that religious belief is irrational or in any other way epistemically unacceptable – he calls these arguments de jure arguments. I respond to this claim by seeking to develop two new versions of de jure argument that Plantinga has not dealt with. The first of these I call the return of the Great Pumpkin; and the second, the problem of religious disagreement. The return of the Great Pumpkin is an objection that develops an earlier objection that Plantinga has considered called, simply, the Great Pumpkin objection. This objection is that Plantinga’s methodology for defending the rationality of religious belief could be adopted by anyone, no matter how strange their beliefs – even someone who believed in the Great Pumpkin could use it. I develop this objection further by showing that it would be possible for a person with clearly absurd beliefs to find themselves in the same situation as the hypothetical Christian whom Plantinga is seeking to defend. There is, however, a response available to Plantinga, which involves showing how the historical and sociological context in which the person finds themselves makes a difference to the rationality of some of the beliefs that they hold. This discussion naturally leads into the second version of the de jure argument which asks whether knowledge of several religious communities who hold incompatible beliefs undermines the rationality of religious belief. This discussion engages with work in religious epistemology, but also more widely with the literature on the epistemology of disagreement. I consider whether, and in what circumstances, finding out that others disagree with you could ever rationally require you to give up one or more of your beliefs. This issue involves discussion of epistemic peers and defeaters. One of the arguments I consider is that if a religious believer continues to hold on to her religious beliefs in the face of disagreement then that will give her a reason to think that she is epistemically superior, which will lead to dogmatism, and a sort of epistemic arrogance. I respond to such an argument by showing that there is a problem with the inference involved in this argument.

Thesis advisor: Daniel J. McKaughan / When you learn that you disagree with an epistemic peer, what should you believe about the proposition you disagree about? The epistemology of peer disagreement has made considerable progress in answering this question. But to this point, we have largely neglected a significant resource which can help us to determine how peers who disagree can rationally respond to their disagreement. Closely examining actual disagreements in scientific and nonscientific contexts can help us to understand why peers find themselves in disagreement. And knowing why you disagree with your peer can help you to understand how you can rationally respond to your disagreement. Examining specific scientific and nonscientific disagreements shows us that some peers disagree because they disagree about what evidence is relevant to the proposition they disagree about. Dual disagreements about propositions and evidence can be found in numerous areas of disagreement, including ethical, political, philosophical, and scientific arenas. When you find yourself in these dual disagreements, you can rationally believe that your belief is rational and that your peer’s belief, though it diverges from yours, is also rational. But some philosophers have suggested that this situation in which you and your peer have rational beliefs and recognize each other as holding rational beliefs is impossible. A primary motivation for thinking that at least one of you must be believing irrationally is the thesis of Uniqueness about rationality, which states that at most one doxastic attitude can be rationally held given a body of evidence. However, when you consider the epistemic context of your actual disagreements with your peer carefully, you need not think that at least one of you is believing irrationally, even if Uniqueness is true. In response to your disagreement with a peer who disagrees with you both about what evidence is relevant to the proposition you disagree about and the proposition itself, you can even rationally hold a belief which splits the connection between your evidence and your evidence about your evidence. When we consider their epistemic contexts in full relief, peers in disagreement can simultaneously be believing rationally, even if only one of them is right. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2019. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy.

This dissertation investigates whether controversial beliefs concerning a range of topics can be rational or reasonable. It proceeds by developing a series of challenges to the putative rationality of belief in such topics. In chapter 1, the project is introduced and motivated. Several challenges are set out in chapters 2-5. Finally, a thought behind one solution to these challenges is examined in chapter 6.

Jim Keenan, SJ, of the Theology Department spoke on "Family Dynamics of the Church: Love and Disagreement." Father Keenan addressed the topic of disagreement through the concept of family and church community. He discussed how to manage these tensions and real difficulties that are faced on a constant basis, while maintaining a sense of love and respect for one another. / with Rev. Jim Keenan, SJ / Hillside Cafe

The speech act of disagreement has been one of the speech acts that receive the least attention in the field of interlanguage pragmatics, in terms of both linguistic and non-linguistic realization of disagreement strategies. The present study was aimed to investigate how Chinese EFL learners perform the speech act of disagreement in English by comparing SRQ and DCT data from four groups of speakers, including 60 native speakers of Chinese, 60 native speakers of English, 30 EFL-low proficiency speakers, and 30 EFL-high proficiency speakers. The speakers¡¦ language performance in variation with several contextual factors, such as formality of context, social distance, social status, speaker gender, interlocutor gender and topic, was also examined. The data on linguistic strategies showed that the Chinese speakers avoided disagreement more often while the English speakers frequently used direct disagreement characterized by various and original positive remarks as softening devices. It was also found that the perception data, from the SRQ and the opt-out reasons, suggests rich ¡¥sociopragmatic judgments and motivating factors that have explanatory power in describing products of pragmalinguistic decisions¡¦ (Bonikowska, 1988: 173). Therefore, as evidenced by the perception data and supported by sociological theories, the individualistic culture¡¦s emphasis on ¡¥I¡¦ consciousness might have promoted the English speakers¡¦ bald verbal expressions while the collectivistic culture¡¦s priority of ¡¥we¡¦ concept and face concern have explained the Chinese speakers¡¦ harmony orientation in disagreement. Moreover, cultural difference in distinction between in-group and out-group signified differences in language performance when the speakers were disagreeing with the interlocutor at the longest distance, that is, the stranger or the clerk. As for the interlanguage, the EFL-low speakers behaved closer to the Chinese native speakers in using such strategies as ¡¥avoidance¡¦ and ¡¥contradiction¡¦. The EFL-high speakers overperformed ¡¥challenge to the interlocutor¡¦ when disagreeing with the close friend in order to demonstrate their English proficiency. In addition, both the EFL groups performed non target-like linguistic features partly due to pragmatic transfer from Chinese. In the future, more interlanguage research could elicit the speakers¡¦ perception of the speech act under study, which would supply abundant evidence of cross-cultural differences in social values and other motivating factors that could help interpret the EFL learners¡¦ realization of speech acts.

Arguments in the debate over abortion can, for the most part, be categorized as aiming to provide an answer to one of two questions: “Is abortion Immoral?”, and “Should abortion be legal?” I will argue that those wishing to make arguments in support of the Pro-Choice position ought to focus on providing an answer to the legal question rather than the moral one. I will argue for two claims in support of this thesis, first, that the current state of the debate over the answer to the moral question is one of reasonable disagreement; second, if we accept David Boonin’s methodology of appealing to one’s opponent on terms that she is likely to accept, then it makes sense for the Pro-Choicer to focus on answering the legal question.

When interpretations vary for the same set of evidence, what should be done? Options include just agreeing to disagree, maintaining one’s initial beliefs, or going all the way to completely suspending judgment. Taking this final option binds an agent to some interesting views, including an acceptance of epistemic dilemmas. However, the kind of total skepticism some philosophers want out of disagreement is probably a pipe dream – if there is no best option, no option can be eliminated.

Knowledge of successful Business English as a lingua franca (BELF) has been recognized to be an essential element in overall business know-how (Kankaanranta & Louhiala-Salminen, 2010). In line with this notion, research has found that professionals use BELF and exploit a variety of discourse and pragmatic strategies that aid the process of cooperation and agreement so that mutual understanding can be reached (Firth, 1996; Kankaanranta & Planken, 2010; Pitzl, 2005). However, research has reported situations where business negotiators need to handle discord while maintaining a working rapport with the opposing party (e.g. Bjørge, 2012), indicating that the ability to produce the appropriate expression of disagreement is an imperative skill. Nonetheless, while there is now a better understanding of how business professionals establish common ground through using BELF, little work has been carried out on the subject on how professionals express disagreement in the same aspect (but see e.g. Bjørge, 2012; Stalpers, 1995). The present study aims to address this gap and expand the current knowledge on how business professionals express and handle disagreement in naturally-occurring face-to-face negotiations. The collected material consists of approximately 4 hours of BELF discourse recorded at a business convention in Germany. Fifteen disagreement episodes were identified, transcribed and analyzed using Conversation Analytic (CA) procedures. The present paper seeks to explore two aspects of the current topic, namely how business professionals (using BELF) express disagreement during business negotiations, and whether mitigation strategies are used when disagreement is expressed. The findings suggest that disagreements are solely content-related and are expressed in a variety of ways as they are coupled with a varied use of mitigation devices (i.e. delay and added support). Furthermore, there were instances of unmitigated expressions in the form of blunt contradictions. It is suggested that disagreements in BELF negotiations are required actions and may serve a dual purpose. The main goal of expressing disagreement is to increase clarity in cases where essential information may be misinterpreted or misguided; additionally, it indicates the speaker’s stance in the argument. Lastly, as there is a need for better knowledge of successful BELF, the present study is likely to be of interest for those who are engaged in the global business discourse community as well as researchers studying international business settings.