The hermeneutics of disagreement

Disagreement, says Stout, is limited precisely to the extent that we recognize it as disagreement at all. Absent a larger background of agreement, difference would show up as unintelligibility, not disagreement: “Our disagreements … to be, intelligible, require a background of truths taken for granted” (59, cf. 19-21, 43, et passim). To say “that another society has a moral language is to say that it has Views on at least some of the topics we denominate as moral” (69). It is this larger background of agreement that makes disagreement disagreement and simultaneously affords the promise of translation. Hermeneutical enrichment is a real possibility exactly to the extent that disagreement is parasitic upon a deeper agreement and does not—indeed, it apparently cannot—“go all the way down” (20). We inevitably understand something of those with whom we disagree. Articulating this something, finding its linguistic shape and expounding it, discloses the agreement and simultaneously points the way toward the mutually intelligible judgments that are translation in action.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 241–42