Disagreement and Belief I: Puzzles About Disagreement

This chapter is dedicated to an inquiry into the nature of belief insofar as this nature is relevant to our understanding of disagreement. It first considers a common sentiment according to which a disagreement is a conflict at the level of propositional contents being the objects of beliefs. On closer inspection, this picture raises some questions concerning our understanding of the phenomenon of disagreement. Granted that we can give a rather straightforward semantic explanation of what exactly a disagreement is in terms of propositional contents, the following question remains: what is the relationship between rational agents believing those contents and those contents themselves? The chapter examines this by reviewing familiar puzzles of belief attribution.