Verbal disputes about the content of experience

A verbal dispute is one in which the disputants agree on all of the facts about the intended subject matter of the dispute and disagree only about how to use certain terms. This paper explores the possibility that the dispute between particularists and generalists about the contents of perceptual experience is a verbal dispute. The aim is less to provide a knockdown argument for the conclusion that this dispute is merely verbal than to show how difficult it is to uncover a substantive dispute between the two sides. A concluding section asks whether the argument generalizes beyond the particularism/generalism dispute to other prominent disputes in contemporary philosophy of mind.