ABSTRACT
In what ways do political conflicts involve political beliefs? Political conflicts might emerge from disagreements over facts or disagreements over values; alternatively, they might involve “merely verbal” disagreements, in which people use words differently, or they might be “pure,” in which there is no disagreement, just mutually exclusive desires. This framing allows us to characterize the realist and materialist traditions as holding that all political conflicts are ultimately “pure” and not founded in disagreements. Philosophical principles of interpretation, like the principle of charity, may give us some guidance as to how to decide what some given political conflict is grounded in, but more works needs to be done to determine just how.
