David J. Chalmers takes a normative approach to resolving disagreements in his article Verbal Disputes. Chalmers argues that most, but not all apparent disagreements are verbal disputes. I will first explain Chalmers' definition of verbal disputes. I will then explain Chalmers' use of elimination to resolve verbal disputes. Then, I will summarize Chalmers' view on how fundamental disputes relate to both verbal disputes and ordinary disagreements. Finally, I will show that Chalmers' method for resolving fundamental disputes is more complicated than his method for resolving verbal disputes. The elimination method cannot apply to fundamental disputes. Then, to resolve the fundamental controversies, Chalmers discusses the anchor inference and transparency versus translucency. I argue that Chalmers must either conclude that fundamental disputes are not really disagreements but errors of knowledge, or conclude that some disputes that are also disagreements are irresolvable. Neither finding shows that the general explanation of fundamental dispute resolution parallels the general explanation of verbal dispute resolution. Chalmers notes that there are three ways to explain verbal disputes, but his main focus is on largely verbal disputes which he simply refers to as verbal. controversies, so this is the only definition I will address (p. 520). Imagine two people, Sam and Dan, assigning distinct meanings to the same T term in an S utterance (p. 520). Both Sam and Dan agree on the truth value of the expression S and agree that the expression contains the term T (p. 520). Where Sam and Dan get into a dispute over the expression S is over the meaning of the term T, where Sam believes it is T1, Dan believes it is T2 (p. 520-1). Therefore the dispute over concepts t...... half of the paper ......ck directly, then we must rely on empirical (or synthetic a priori) information and therefore it cannot be automatically obvious to us that we are having a mere dispute (page 560). A dispute is translucent such that if you agree on the truth values ​​of other disputes, it becomes a verbal dispute (p. 560-1). For example, if the sentence S is translucent compared to T, then it is simply a verbal dispute (p. 560). Yet, before Chalmers claims that fundamental concepts are somehow primitive, so it does not seem to us that they can be translucent to us, if by translucent he means that they regress into a mere verbal dispute! Therefore, there is no way to resolve fundamental disputes in a general story that parallels the general history of verbal dispute resolution. References Works Cited (1) Chalmers, David J. 2011. Verbal Disputes. Philosophical review 120 (4): 515-566