Agreement and Communication

I distinguish two notions of agreement (disagreement) in belief: (a) believing the same (contradictory) content(s) versus (b) having beliefs that necessarily coincide/diverge in normative status. The second notion of agreement (disagreement), (b), is clearly significant for the communication of beliefs amongst thinkers. Thus there would seem to be some prima facie advantage to choosing the conception of content operative in (a) in such a way that the normative status of beliefs supervenes on their content, and this seems to be the prevailing assumption of many semanticists. I shall argue that de se beliefs and assertions provide a motivation to depart from this assumption, and so do beliefs and assertions concerning what is epistemically possible. I conclude by offering two models of assertoric communication that are compatible with the abandonment of the assumption, and suggesting schematically that each model applies to different cases.