I'd expect "publish or perish" to apply broadly in academic fields, but there are several broad categories of ways in which one can publish. One can indeed come up with a disagreement with a view that someone else is promoting, but one can also come up with a view on an entirely different question than anyone else addresses. In a very abstract sense, this might count as as disagreement, a kind of claim that the "interesting" area of a field is located in a different area than existing publications have pointed to, but this isn't quite the same thing as claiming that the existing claims about the previously investigated area are wrong.