Epistemology of Conversation: First Essays

Epistemology of Conversation: First Essays Table of content Introduction. Conversation: Epistemological investigations Waldomiro J. Silva Filho 01 Conversation and joint agency: Why addressees are epistemically special John Greco 02 On the contours of a conversation Sanford C. Goldberg 03 Virtuous arguing Duncan Pritchard 04 Wit, pomposity, curiosity, and justice: some virtues and vices of conversationalists Alessandra Tanesini 05 Conversation and joint commitment Margaret Gilbert & Maura Priest 06 Group belief and the role of conversation Fernando Broncano-Berrocal 07 Knowledge norms and conversational J. Adam Carter 08 Norms of Inquiring Conversations Florencia Rimoldi 09 Deception detection research: Some lessons for the epistemology of testimony Peter Graham 10 Twisted ways to speak our minds, or ways to speak our twisted minds? Luis Rosa 11 Aesthetic disagreement, aesthetic testimony, and defeat Mona Simion & Christopher Kelp 12 Critical social epistemology and the liberating power of dialogue Solmu Anttila & Catarina Dutilh Novaes Introduction Conversation: Epistemological investigations Waldomiro J. Silva Filho Yes, meaning something is like going toward someone. L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 457. In my opinion, the most fruitful and natural exercise of our mind is the conversation. Michel de Montaigne, De l’art de conferer, Les Essais III.8 1. Conversation, dialogue, reasonable disagreement, and the acquisition of knowledge through the words of others, all of this has always been at the center of philosophers’ concerns since the emergence of philosophy in Ancient Greece. It is also important to recognize that in contemporary philosophy, marked by the linguistic turn, there is a wealth of intellectual production on ethical (e.g. McKenna 2012), psycho-linguistic (e.g. Clark 1996), logical-linguistic (e.g. Grice 1989) and pragmatic (e.g. Walton 1992) aspects of the conversation. Despite all this, this is the first collection of texts dedicated exclusively to the strictly epistemic aspects of this phenomenon which is so decisive for the very constitution of our humanity. This book brings together the contributions of fifteen leading philosophers on some of the most relevant issues of what we could call the Epistemology of Conversation. The recent publications of Conversational Pressure by Sandford Goldberg (2020) and The Transmission of Knowledge by John Greco (2021), each in their way, mark a movement of growing convergence of interest around epistemological investigations into conversation. On the one hand, Goldberg (2020, 2) deals with the constrictions and regulations that are generated by the very performances of some linguistic acts, such as assertions, declarations, testimonies, reports, and other similar acts that involve “saying something” to someone. Goldberg (2020, passim) understands conversation as involving two aspects: an interpersonal aspect and an epistemic aspect. By interpersonal aspect he considers the fact that conversation is a rational and cooperative act; when someone performs some linguistic acts, such as declaring, reporting, affirming, this generates rational expectations and demands in the participants. By epistemic aspect, he considers that these acts imply the exchange of the speaker's representations and beliefs about how the world is. Greco (2021, viii) explores the nature of the epistemic relationship between speakers and listeners in testimonial exchanges, the nature and extent of epistemic dependence, the importance of an epistemic division of labor, and the role of trust in testimonial justification and knowledge. For Greco, Social Epistemology seeks to understand how the quality of a person's epistemic position depends not only on their individual cognitive resources and capacities but on the good health and proper functioning of interactions in a wider epistemic community. Also for Goldberg, Social 1 Epistemology has the basic assumption that the various people who make up an epistemic community are important cognitive agents precisely because there is a characteristic feature of human experience based on the distribution of epistemic tasks. This practice emerges in real-time conversation, both in its good and bad forms, and when it does, it reflects the cooperative norms of the conversation itself. That’s what this book is about. About how the participation of people as agents of conversational acts is a rich horizon of themes for epistemology. 2. Like everything else in philosophy, there is always a long history and countless paths that lead us today to return to an old and persistent question about the technique, value, and possibility of conversation. On the occasion of receiving the Hegel Prize from the city of Stuttgart, Germany, Donald Davidson gave a lecture entitled “Dialectic and dialogue” (Davidson 1994). On this occasion, Davidson, on the one hand, suggested that the Platonic dialogues in which Socrates plays a central role establish a common heritage that intertwines the traditions of analytic and continental philosophy and, on the other hand, summarized one of his most important contributions to philosophy: it is in the effective practice of linguistic communication, dialogue and disagreement that our metaphysics, the notions of truth, knowledge, justice, make sense. The conference “Dialectic and Dialogue” is part of a short series of articles by Davidson (1985; 1992a; 1994; 1997) on Plato’s work. They are short texts that are different from the typical style of analytical philosophers: they deal with the dialectical method, the role of Socrates, the philosophical meaning of dialogue, conversation, and the problem of linguistic comprehension. Davidson (1992a) discusses, for example, Plato’s reflections on the difference between the spoken word and the written word and why Socrates keeps all this philosophical work in the form of dialectical conversation. The spoken word would be superior to the written form for several reasons: firstly, the written word would be a mere simulation of the episteme, which induces the reader to believe that they know something when in reality they only have a doxa. In Plato’s metaphor, written words are like a painting: its image appears to be alive, but it is completely devoid of vitality, remaining completely silent, unable to interact and respond to any challenge made to it, limiting itself to a monotonous and endless repetition of itself. Without discerning with whom it is convenient and possible to communicate, the written word wanders from hand to hand and can reach both the person competent enough to understand its message and the one who is not prepared to understand it and has no interest in it. In addition, the written word seems to depend on the spoken word, i.e. to defend itself against criticism and challenges from interlocutors, it needs the help of its author’s voice. In the end, written words serve as a remedy for memory. Speech, on the other hand, involves both moral and epistemic commitments on the part of those taking part in a conversation. It is for this reason that participants must be aware that sincerity is not an arbitrary 2 imposition, but a condition. A person’s agency as a speaker is related to their intention to address another person and to be correctly interpreted – and, of course, to exchange positions with their interlocutor. In dialogue, as conducted by Socrates – but which could be present in all forms of linguistic communication – speaking meaningfully does not depend on the fact that speakers and listeners are supported by previously known grammatical rules and conventions (Davidson 1992b); roughly speaking, what is needed is for people to be willing both to assume the provisional position of a speaker who wants to be interpreted and that of a listener, both of whom attribute to their interlocutor the legitimate right to be treated as a rational agent. Above all, people must intend to cooperate with each other in pursuit of something they can only achieve together. Something trivial in a conversation between men and women becomes a central point in philosophy: the mutual desire to act together toward understanding, knowledge, and enlightenment through language. The word ‘conversation’ covers a broad spectrum of episodes that have certain family resemblances. Roughly speaking, we can talk about conversation as an exchange of words as well as conversation as dialog in the philosophical and argumentative sense of the term. Conversation as an exchange of words refers to the fact that many conversations, such as everyday conversations, have diverse and asymmetrical objectives: they are exchanges of words aimed at entertainment, flirting, intimidation, manipulation, gossip, jokes, etc. Conversation as dialog, on the other hand, implies that certain conversations can involve the transmission and generation of knowledge, can be motivated by disagreements and disputes over the justification of beliefs, but can also be guided by epistemic cooperation on a subject, curiosity, doubt, etc. and have epistemic objectives. Our conversations, even the most trivial ones, are not just a succession of disconnected fragments. For Paul Grice (1989), conversations are characteristically joint agencies and cooperative efforts; each person taking part in a conversation recognizes a common purpose or set of purposes, or at least a mutually accepted direction - even though there may be corrections and calibrations along the way. Grice (1989, 26) then suggests a “Cooperative Principle” that participants should observe: “Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk Exchange in which you are engaged.” Similarly, for Herbert Clark (1996), conversation arises when people use linguistic exchange to coordinate the joint activities in which they are involved. In this peculiar type of language use, people cooperate to reach local agreements in the course of each section and subsection, including the opening and closing of the conversation itself. One of the intuitions we can explore is the idea that an Epistemology of Conversation could be a field of investigation for Social Epistemology. Such an Epistemology of Conversation should consider at least six points (there may be others or perhaps not those listed below): 3 (a) norms of conversation: it is necessary to investigate whether the norm of conversation should be reducible to the norm of speaker-audience interaction when the speaker must intend to speak something true and the listener must understand this intention, and whether the theoretical field of the Epistemology of Conversation is contained in the set of problems and concepts of the Epistemology of Testimony. (b) motivations for conversation: people can feel stimulated in a relevant way to start a conversation because of legitimate disagreements, curiosity about an interlocutor’s beliefs, and doubts about a topic they share with the interlocutor; (c) competences required for conversation: since conversation is a joint agency, it involves a performance with many intellectual demands, we must investigate which virtues facilitate and which vices hinder its epistemic achievements; (d) conversation as a means of inquiry: conversation can be a means or method of inquiry in cases of the intentional pursuit of epistemic goods when the interlocutors believe that joint agency can lead them to achieve, understanding, knowledge, or another epistemic good; (e) goals of the conversation: since disagreement, curiosity, and doubt are among the motivations of conversation and the interlocutors must have intellectual virtues and avoid vices, any outcome of a conversation will fulfill an epistemic good, whatever it may be, such as knowledge, justification, keeping an open mind, etc. and1; (f) benefits of an Epistemology of Conversation: considering the new scenarios of liberal democracies and the processes of corrosion of public space, an Epistemology of Conversation could contribute to shedding some light on events such as polarization (total impossibility of conversations), disintegration of epistemic communities, silencing and epistemic injustices and so on. 2 The chapters of this book sail on the waves of these and other subjects. 3. As will be seen in the chapters of this book, there is a crucial epistemic proximity and difference between testimony and conversation. Similar to 1 It could be argued that reaching a state of doubt or impasse, recognizing a cognitive difficulty and even suspending judgment can be considered epidemic goods. Thanks to Plínio Smith for pointing this out. 2 More recently, more specifically in Social Epistemology, there has been a rich growth of studies on the epistemology of politics and the epistemology of democracy that deal with the formation and distribution of beliefs in the political environment, especially the processes of epistemic formation of deliberation, the central pillar of liberal democracies (Johnson 2018; Broncano-Berrocal & Carter 2021; Edenberg & Hannon 2021; Tanesini & Lynch 2021). This is because it seems that one of the necessary characteristics of the democratic way of life is associated with the fact that political agents cannot renounce the power of words and the open and indeterminate game of disputing reasons in the environment of dialog, of conversation based on arguments. 4 testimony, when a person forms a belief from the words of others (Lackey 2008; Goldberg 2010; McMyler, B. 2011), the conversation is a cooperative means of forming and transmitting epistemic states. However, unlike testimony, conversation is characterized by a dynamic (often adversarial) in which people continually switch positions as speaker and listener in the same event. In addition, the position of conversation participants (as speakers and addressee) and overhearers can have some crucial differences. This is the starting point of this book. In the first chapter of this book, “Conversation and joint agency: Why addressees are epistemically special”, John Greco explores the idea that the category of conversation is both broader and narrower than the category of testimony. For him, the epistemologies of conversation and testimony overlap in ways that need to be investigated. Drawing on Herbert H. Clark’s (1996) description of conversation as a structure, Greco claims that both conversation and testimony essentially involve joint agency3. Furthermore, he argues that an appreciation of this point resolves an important dispute in the Epistemology of Testimony: whether addressees have a special epistemic position in relation to eavesdroppers or mere observers. The claim defended by Greco in this chapter is that the participants have a special position and that the etiologies of the beliefs of the recipients and those the non-recipients are different. This difference makes the testimonial beliefs of addressees epistemically superior because the model of cooperation between speakers and addressees usually has the consequence of making the testimonial belief more reliable, more secure, better supported by evidence, etc. Around the same problem, the second chapter, “On the contours of a conversation” was written by Sanford C. Goldberg. As I said earlier, Goldberg is the author of an important and influential monograph on the epistemology of conversation, Conversational Pressure (Goldberg 2020). In the chapter that integrates this book, Goldberg states that conversations are normatively structured exchanges: to be a participant in a conversation is to be subject to certain normative expectations. At the same time, the information that speakers offer in a conversation seems to be available also to those people to whom the statements are not directly addressed. This suggests that the contours of a conversation are not epistemically significant. In the chapter, Goldberg argues that the contours of a conversation have a broad normative significance because the participants will be within the conversation under distinct forms of constrictions and obligations. However, he claims that these norms that underpin a conversation are non-epistemic in nature and that epistemic norms themselves go beyond the contours of a conversation. Once we accept that conversation is a joint agency, we must imagine that this requires certain specific skills and competences from the participants. Some 3 Elsewhere, John Greco (2021, 47) understands “joint agency” in these terms: “... recent action theory recognizes a special kind of action, one that can be characterized as ‘acting together.’ It is now standard that joint agency involves a network of shared intentions and common understanding between the participating actors, as well as specific kinds of interdependence.” 5 requirements for the participants in a conversation are linguistic competences and others are epistemic virtues. What are the intellectual virtues required for conversation? Duncan Pritchard’s “Virtuous Arguing” explores this problem. For him, an important type of conversation is essentially adversarial in nature, when two parties engage in a debate on a subject of common interest and can hold different opinions. How should these conversations be conducted properly from a specifically epistemic point of view? Pritchard argues that intellectual virtues are of crucial importance in answering this question. In particular, he argues that a conception of good argumentation based on intellectual virtues is preferable to alternative ways of thinking about good argumentation in purely formal or strategic terms (although it may capture what is attractive about these formal conceptions while avoiding some fundamental problems they face). Considering the contemporary social and political scenario, we should seek the cultivation of a virtuous intellectual character and, therefore, the development of individuals who embody the virtuous way of disputing their opinions and beliefs. Alessandra Tanesini, in her “Wit, pomposity, curiosity, and justice: some virtues and vices of conversationalists,” faces the same problem. Her text has two main aims. The first is to defend a virtue-theoretical characterization of what makes a conversation good as a conversation. In Tanesini’s view, excellent conversations are conversations that are carried out in the way in which virtuous conversationalists would execute them. The second aim of the chapter is to outline some character traits that may have a distinct contribution to the epistemology of conversation. Two of these traits, ‘wit’ and ‘justice’ are virtues that contribute to the success of conversations as vehicles for exchanging information and strengthening bonds of trust. Another trait, ‘pomposity,’ is an obstacle to these types of conversational success. Finally, Tanesini argues that 'curiosity' can be a very important component in conversation, promoting both the failures and successes of conversations. A common point in this collection is that conversations are cooperative communicative acts in which the participants assume common purposes and make a commitment to contribute relevant statements. Margaret Gilbert (1996; 2014; 2023) has an influential philosophical contribution on joint commitments and has defended a specific description of collective belief. In “Conversation and joint commitment,” Margaret Gilbert and Maura Priest propose that paradigmatic conversations involve the negotiation of a series of collective beliefs. According to the authors, collective beliefs are constituted by commitments that are joint in a sense that is explained in the chapter. The parties to any joint commitment have associated rights and obligations. This helps to consolidate a given collective belief once it has been established. Even when interlocutors fail to negotiate a collective belief whose content has been explicitly specified, they are likely to establish one or more associated implicit collective beliefs. They call this the negotiation of collective belief thesis – the NCB thesis, for short. The NCB thesis holds that conversation, as described in the chapter, consists of the development of a collective cognitive 6 profile. This is collective and not summed, in the sense of being attributable to each of the participants as individuals. Building on the ideas of Gilbert and Priest (2013), the chapter “Group Belief and the Role of Conversation” by Fernando Broncano-Berrocal examines the role of conversation in the formation of group beliefs in the context of the summativism/non-summativism debate, i.e. the debate about whether group beliefs are a function of the beliefs of individual group members. Broncano-Berrocal investigates whether it is possible for groups to form collective beliefs without communication between their members and, in doing so, seeks to explain how this relates to the summative and nonsummative views and Margaret Gilbert’s (2014) idea of joint commitment. He analyzes the negotiation of collective belief thesis originally presented by Gilbert and Priest (2013), according to which the process of everyday conversation is structured around the negotiation of collective beliefs. For Broncano-Berrocal, this thesis only makes sense in a non-summative framework, but when specific non-summative views are combined with it, the relevant non-summative views either become inapplicable or yield the wrong results. The chapter closes by concluding that summativism offers a simpler, more neutral, and theoretically less loaded picture of the role of conversation in the formation of group beliefs. The seventh chapter was written by J. Adam Carter. “Knowledge Norms and Conversation” poses the following question: Might knowledge normatively govern conversations and not just their discrete constituent thoughts and (assertoric) actions? Adam Carter answers yes, at least for a restricted class of conversations that he calls “aimed conversations.” In the view defended in the chapter, aimed conversations are governed by participatory know-how – viz., knowledge how to do what each interlocutor to the conversation shares a participatory intention to do by means of that conversation. the specific case of conversations that are in the service of joint inquiry, the view defended is that interlocutors (A, B, … n) must intentionally inquire together into whether p, by means of an aimed conversation only if A,B, … n know ations about instrumental rationality, shared intentionality, the epistemology of intentional action, as well as linguistic data. Florencia Rimoldi’s “Norms of Inquiring Conversations” deals with cases in which people converse with strictly epistemic goals. More specifically, it deals with how a conversation can be a way to achieve epistemic goods such as knowledge, understanding, justification, enlightenment, and other epistemic goals. Rimoldi calls this case inquiry conversation (IC). The author argues that the epistemic aspects of these conversations cannot be reduced to the epistemic aspects of assertion, nor is it restricted to the problem horizon of the Epistemology of Testimony. The first part of the chapter deals with the nature of the inquiry conversation and its identity conditions. This part presents the idea that some conversations are epistemically oriented both in a strictly philosophical setting (as in the case of ‘philosophical dialogues’) and in everyday life, where there are many cases of conversations aimed at epistemic goods. The second part of the chapter argues that, although inquiry 7 conversation shares some epistemic aspects with other types of conversation, inquiry epistemology (Freidman 2020) and non-ideal epistemology (McKenna 2020) are suitable theoretical tools for studying them. “Deception detection research: Some lessons for the epistemology of testimony” by Peter J. Graham explores a fundamental topic of conversation, the possibility of lying in linguistic exchanges. According to the author, in the folk-theory of lying, liars let slip observable clues to their insincerity, observable clues that make it easier to detect a liar in real time. Several social epistemologists rely on the explanatory accuracy of this folk-theory as empirically well-confirmed when constructing their normative accounts of the epistemology of testimony. However, research into fraud detection in communication studies has shown that our folk theory is mistaken. Graham draws on a wealth of empirical research material. From this point of view, popular theory is not empirically well confirmed, but empirically refuted. Graham confronts arguments from epistemologists who object to this empirical research and who question whether experiments in the laboratory can be transferred to real life. The chapter then presents the methodology of the research, defends its ecological validity, and discusses further research into the nature and frequency of lies in everyday life. For Graham, social epistemologists stand to gain from understanding the details of fraud detection research and its findings. The chapter concludes with a detailed examination of Elizabeth Fricker’s (1994; 2024) reliance on folk theory in her “local reductionist” epistemology of testimony. “Twisted Ways to Speak our Minds, or Ways to Speak our Twisted Minds?” by Luis Rosa is the ninth chapter. The central problem of the chapter revolves around a problem similar to Peter Graham’s chapter: there are many ways in which a speaker can confuse his audience. In this chapter, Luis Rosa focuses on one of these ways, namely a way of speaking that seems to manifest a kind of cognitive dissonance on several levels on the part of the speaker. The chapter aims to explain why these ways of speaking sound so distorted. The explanation is twofold, since their distorted nature can come from the very mental states that the speaker manifests or from how they choose to express themselves (even if there is nothing wrong with their mental states). So-called ‘Moore-paradoxical’ utterances are but one example of the phenomenon, and the explanation of what is wrong about them is subsumed under a more general explanation here – one that captures also the twistedness of utterances whereby questions are raised or intentions expressed. Mona Simion and Christoph Kelp are the authors of “Aesthetic Disagreement, Aesthetic Testimony, and Defeat”. The chapter investigates the relationship between the epistemology of conversation on aesthetic issues, aesthetic disagreement, defeat, and the semantics of aesthetic discourse. For the authors, the phenomenon of the epistemic defeat of testimony on aesthetic issues has received little or no attention in the literature. This chapter makes up for this lack: it argues that the existence of the defeat of testimony on aesthetic issues gives us reason to prefer a realistic view of the semantics of aesthetic discourse, together with optimism about the epistemology of 8 aesthetic testimony. The epistemology of aesthetic testimony has mainly focused on whether it is possible to gain knowledge about aesthetic issues based on the mere opinion of others. The optimism of aesthetic testimony answers ‘yes,’ but pessimism disagrees. The type of pessimism that Simion and Kelp discuss is known as unavailability pessimism. The authors finally defend a conditional claim: that aesthetic defeat supports realism about aesthetic discourse. This is because rival views, such as contextualism and invariantism, cannot accommodate the phenomenon of aesthetic defeat. Furthermore, aesthetic defeat also supports optimism about aesthetic testimony. The reason for this is that testimony about aesthetic claims can only defeat aesthetic beliefs if it can also justify those beliefs. In short, if we accept aesthetic defeat, there are reasons to be realistic about aesthetic discourse and optimistic about aesthetic testimony. The last chapter is by Solmu Anttila and Catarina Dutilh-Novaes, “Critical social epistemology and the liberating power of dialogue.” For the authors, in recent years, epistemologists have extensively discussed how epistemic injustices can occur in conversational situations, for example, when a speaker is given less credibility than is appropriate given their actual experience of the topic in question (injustice of testimony). But conversation and dialog can also be the site for resistance and liberation from oppression, not just injustice. For the authors, this is one of the main insights of the work of Brazilian educator, philosopher, and academic Paulo Freire (1921-1997), who investigated the role of dialogical forms of education in empowering traditionally oppressed groups. This chapter presents some important aspects of Freire’s (2000) thinking, in particular, the centrality of dialogue for the theory and practice of critical pedagogy and for liberation from oppression. The connections between Freire’s views and a selection of recent critical social epistemology topics are also discussed: epistemic injustice, the epistemology of resistance, and epistemic oppression. 4. Just as the ability to make and receive statements is basic for someone to be a speaker, the ability to take part in a civic conversation concerns a basic ability of the game of a form of life like democracy: to replace all force and violence with the power of speech and thus be able to debate in front of a human audience, sustain deliberations in the light of the best reasons, conceive of rivals as equals, investigate the sources of epistemic disagreements and seek virtuous means of resolving these epistemic conflicts. Arguably, the philosopher who best captured the meaning of conversation was Michel de Montaigne. Montaigne speaks of conversation (conférence) in a peculiar sense, even though it is not a sense foreign to tradition: he speaks of conversation both as a confrontation, a dispute between two people about a common subject, and as a movement that teaches certain virtues and skills to enhance the free and autonomous spirit and, likewise, exercises these virtues in the pursuit of the good life and truth. He writes: The study of books is a languid and weak movement that doesn't 9 warm you up, whereas conversation [conférence] teaches and exercises you in one fell swoop. If I converse [Se je confère] with a strong soul and a tough fighter, he assaults my flanks, pokes me left and right, his ideas sharpen mine. Rivalry, ambition, contention drive me on and lift me above myself (Montaigne, III.8, 203). This accommodates a type of conversation that can't just be described as a meeting between speakers who share the same language to deal with the trivialities of life, more like an episode that happens to us in social life – such as events at the table or work relationships. In this conversation, for example, there is the unavoidable rivalry that goes beyond disagreement, the irreconcilable confrontation that drags us either into violence or resentment. This is a rivalry that challenges us, showing us something (perhaps) surprising: more often than not, we hide our intellectual weaknesses and, refugees in the safety of our own home, we almost always “flee from correction.” Montaigne suggests, on the contrary, that we need to “offer and expose ourselves [to correction], especially when it comes in the form of conversation [conférence] and not in the form of a lesson [régence]” (Montaigne, III.8, 205). Of course, adherence to conversation is voluntary; there is no external, heteronomous constraint that forces someone to join and remain in the conversation, only the commitments that the speakers make to each other have this power. The tension at the root of the conversation causes a kind of flowering in the person, lucidity about oneself, about one's own vices that are obstacles to a healthy social life, and about the ways to gain the best information to lead a good private and public life. I sincerely hope that this book is just a starting point for an intense debate. Acknowledgements This book is the result of research funded by the National Council for Technological and Scientific Development (CNPq) (process no. 308967/2022-4). The idea for this book came about during my time as a Visiting Researcher at CONCEPT (Cologne Center for Contemporary Epistemology and the Kantian Tradition) at the Universität zu Köln, Germany, in the biennium 2021-2022. I gratefully acknowledge the support of Sven Bernecker, director of CONCEPT, and the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel, Brazil (CAPES-PRINT) (process 88887.568338/2020-00). I would also like to thank the Philosophy Department of the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA) for allowing me the time and resources to carry out my research and cooperative work with colleagues from various universities in Europe, the United States, and Latin America. I would also like to thank my friend Plínio Smith for his support and encouragement. 10 References Broncano-Berrocal, F. and Carter, J. A. (eds.) 2021. The Epistemology of Group Disagreement. New York, London : Routledge. Clark, H. H. 1996. Using Language. Cambridge :Cambridge University Press. Davidson, D. 1985. Plato’s philosopher. In Truth, Language, and History, pp. 223-240. Oxford : Clarendon Press, 2005. Davidson, D. 1990. Plato's Philebus. New York: Garland Publishing. Davidson, D. 1992a. 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