Verbal Disputes and Deep Conceptual Disagreements

To say that a philosophical dispute is â merely verbalâ seems to be an important diagnosis. If that diagnosis is correct for a particular dispute, then the right thing to do would be to declare that dispute to be over. The topic of what the disputing parties were fighting over was just a pseudo-problem (thus not really a problem), or at least â if there is a sense in which also merely verbal disputes indicate some problem, for example, insufficient clarity of terminology â this problem is not substantial, or not as substantial as the disputing parties believed their problem initially to be. In this paper I will try to clarify what it means if we diagnose that two arguing parties are having a merely verbal dispute

Cognitive psychology · Cognitive science · Political science · Child and Animal Learning Development · Psychology · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation