Abstract

The paper addresses the situation of a dispute in which one speaker says ϕ and a second speaker says not-ϕ. Proceeding on an idealising distinction between “basic” and “interesting” claims that may be formulated in a given idiolectal language, I investigate how it might be sorted out whether the dispute reflects a genuine disagreement, or whether the speakers are only having a merely verbal dispute, due to their using different interesting concepts. I show that four individually plausible principles for the determination of the nature of a dispute are incompatible. As an example, I discuss the question whether Sarai lied in the story told in Genesis 12