ABSTRACT
Let’s keep it simple. You find boiled spinach not only healthy but quite delicious. I disagree profoundly: flavor, texture, smell, I dislike them all—except, perhaps, for the various tones of green. We sometimes express disagreements like this in language, sometimes saying things like “Mmmm, tasty!” or “Not at all!!” My aim in this chapter is to illustrate how it is crucial to differentiate questions and facts about the relations between mental states that constitute disagreements from questions and facts about how these disagreements are linguistically expressed in disputes. There is an element of stipulation here with respect to both ‘disagreement’ and ‘dispute’—what is crucial is to keep issues of language and mind separate, whatever the labels. Proper attention to this, I’ll argue, is essential to properly assessing the relevant metaphysical and semantic alternatives with respect to the realm of the tasty and our discourse about it.
