The paraconsistent life of faultless disagreements. Relevance and information

Naomi Mușan & Ciprian Alexandru

University of Bucharest

It seems that a debate is possible only if both interlocutors admit that at least one of them is wrong. But this goes against the intuition that, concerning taste or aesthetic values, both of them are subjectively justified to hold on to their respective truth. Thus, a faultless disagreement will be the silent expression of the meta-agreement that “”to each their own.””
Our claim is that a faultless disagreement can also be the starting point of a debate that can lead to at least a partial agreement. Classical contextualisms or relativisms will protect the faultlessness at the price of keeping the debate closed. Because, should each keep his / her ground, an encounter will give rise to a contradiction from which anything could follow.
We aim to show that, by employing paraconsistent logic (not anything can follow from p & -p), relevant logic (from p & -p there can only follow either p or -p) and Mares’ (2013) conclusion that “”validity of arguments should be thought of as information preservation rather than truth preservation,”” it is possible to conceive of an initial faultless disagreement in which p and -p respectively are sets of considerable contextual information whose sub-set q, if relevant to both p and -p, can be subject to adjustment by substitution or addition such that the resultant p’ and -p’ will both contain an informationally identical sub-set r. This allows for a debate at the end of which the initial disagreement might actually be settled without rejecting the initial faultlessness.
Stojanovic and Zakkou (2025) argue that faultless disagreements are possible because predicates of personal taste are “”typically gradable, multidimensional, subjective, and evaluative.”” Our argument will show that each of those four characteristics can be identified in an exchange of the paraconsistent relevant information-preserving type described above. Therefore, faultless disagreements do exist, but their very conditions of possibility can keep a dispute alive and meaningful.

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