Apparent Distinctions Worth Preserving

Distinctions:

A) Disagreements about belief vs. Disagreements about meaning
B) Disagreements about belief vs. Ethical disagreements

Illuminating similarities between the philosophical debates that have arisen in regard to these distinctions:

Debate A: Quine vs. Carnap

i) Quine: denies that there’s anything distinctive about disagreements about meaning, and thereby reduces disagreements about meaning to disagreements about belief

ii) Carnap: in order to preserve the distinction, reduces disagreements about meaning to non-cognitive disputes

iii) Kuhn: in attempting to preserve the distinction while not reducing disagreements about meaning to non-cognitive disputes runs the risk of making a mystery of how genuine disagreements about meaning are so much as possible (Kitcher’s point)

iv) Travis: there are no meanings, but there are shared ways of understanding contextual factors

Debate B: McDowell vs. Blackburn

i) McDowell: denies that there’s anything distinctive about ethical disagreements, and thereby reduces ethical disagreements to disagreements about belief

ii) Blackburn: in order to preserve the distinction, reduces ethical disagreements to non-cognitive disputes

iii) McDowell: in an attempt to preserve a sense that there’s something distinctive about thick ethical concepts while neither assimilating their use to the use of ordinary empirical concepts nor reducing what’s distinctive about them to a separable non-cognitive element, runs the risk of making a mystery of how genuine ethical disagreements which utilize thick ethical concepts are so much as possible (Blackburn’s point)

iv) ?

Question

Disagreements about meaning are settled, for the late Kuhn, by choices of packages of meanings. Such choices, however, are guided by how the world is, or, at minimum, by the recognition of how the world is not (i.e., by the recognition that a particular package is falsified by how the world actually is). Is there anything analogous to such a form of choice in regard to ethical disagreement?