Deep disagreements: on the normative Agrippan trilemma, grammatical sovereignty, and hinge certainties as metacriteria for action

Abstract

This article develops a skeptical and materialist critique of the contemporary literature on deep disagreements, arguing that it fails to capture the actual dynamics of persuasion in persistent ethical and political conflicts. We argue, first, that even in Fogelin (1985/2005) persuasion appears as an under-theorized residue of the failure of rational argumentation, abstracted from relations of power, affect, and the material conditions that structure language games. Second, we defend a normative turn in the analysis of deep disagreements: such disagreements are not primarily about the truth of beliefs, but about disputes over criteria, procedures, and norms that determine what counts as fact, reasonable, legitimate, or true. This criterial dispute leads to a normative reading of the Agrippan trilemma, in which the regress is not one of beliefs but of criteria, and is stabilized at the level of hinge certainties. Third, we argue that these hinge certainties function as metacriteria for action and that, in contexts of structural injustice, they can and should be made explicit, contested, and transformed. An analysis of several scenarios drawn from the imaginary dialogue between Moore and the king in Wittgenstein’s On Certainty (1969) shows that persuasion, when it occurs, is always mediated by institutions, affects, and power. On this basis, we defend the possibility of collective normative intervention in conceptual practices, which we characterize as grammatical sovereignty, as a practical condition for the transformation of unjust language games.