Michele Palmira (University of Barcelona and LOGOS), ex-stagiaire postdoctoral du CRÉ, nous rendra bientôt visite. Ce sera l’occasion de l’entendre parler de « Conative Disagreement ».

Résumé

Expressivsts and indexical contextualists about morality explain the presence of disagreement about moral matters by invoking the idea that conative attitudes – such as preferences, desires, planning states – can give rise to disagreement.

In this talk, I investigate the nature of conative disagreement. In the first part of the talk I distinguish between two varieties of conative disagreement: a first-order variety being about what we prefer or desire; a higher-order variety being about what concept of preferability or desirability we should use in a given context. In the second part of the talk I critically assess non-normative definitions of conative disagreement advanced by Gibbard (2003), Marques (2015), and Stevenson (1963). In the third and final part of the talk I tentatively argue, by analogy with the doxastic case, that if there is any room for a genuine notion of conative disagreement, this notion has to be defined by appealing to the normative properties of conative attitudes.