A faultless disagreement is a disagreement when Party A states that ''P'' is true, while Party B states that ''non-P'' is true, and neither party is at fault. Disagreements of this kind may arise in areas of evaluative discourse, such as

aesthetics Aesthetics, or esthetics, is a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of beauty and taste, as well as the philosophy of art (its own area of philosophy that comes out of aesthetics). It examines aesthetic values, often expressed t ...

, justification of

belief A belief is an attitude that something is the case, or that some proposition is true. In epistemology, philosophers use the term "belief" to refer to attitudes about the world which can be either true or false. To believe something is to take ...

s or moral values, etc. A representative example is that John says Paris is more interesting than Rome, while Bob claims Rome is more interesting than Paris. Furthermore, in the case of a faultless disagreement, it is possible that if any party gives up their claim, there will be no improvement in the position of any of them. Within the framework of

formal logic Logic is the study of correct reasoning. It includes both formal and informal logic. Formal logic is the science of deductively valid inferences or of logical truths. It is a formal science investigating how conclusions follow from premis ...

it is impossible that both ''P'' and ''not-P'' are true, and it was attempted to justify faultless disagreements within the framework of

relativism Relativism is a family of philosophical views which deny claims to objectivity within a particular domain and assert that valuations in that domain are relative to the perspective of an observer or the context in which they are assessed. Ther ...

of the

Truth Truth is the property of being in accord with fact or reality.Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionarytruth 2005 In everyday language, truth is typically ascribed to things that aim to represent reality or otherwise correspond to it, such as belie ...

,Sven Rosenkranz, "Frege, Relativism and Faultless Disagreement", Max Kölbel and Sven Rosenkranz present arguments to the point that genuine faultless disagreements are impossible.Max Kölbel, "Faultless Disagreement", ''Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society'', New Series, Vol. 104 (2004), pp. 53-73 However, defenses of faultless disagreement, and of alethic relativism more generally, continue to be made by critics of formal logic as it is currently constructed.

References

{{Formal semantics Epistemology Truth Semantics Formal semantics (natural language)