Predicates of Personal Taste

In this entry, I tackle the phenomenon known as "faultless disagreement", considered by many authors to pose a challenge to the main views on the semantics of subjective expressions. I first present the phenomenon and the challenge, then review the main answers given by contextualist, absolutist and relativist approaches to the expressions in question. I end with signaling two issues that might shape future discussions about the role played by faultless disagreement in semantics.

In this short paper I survey recent contextualist answers to the challenge from disagreement raised by contemporary relativists. After making the challenge vivid by means of a working example, I specify the notion of disagreement lying at the heart of the challenge. The answers are grouped in three categories, the first characterized by rejecting the intuition of disagreement in certain cases, the second by conceiving disagreement as a clash of non-cognitive attitudes and the third by relegating disagreement at the pragmatic level. For each category I present several important variants and raise some (general) criticisms. The paper is meant to offer a quick introduction to the current contextualist literature on disagreement and thus a useful tool for further research.

In this critical paper, we engage with a recent absolutist proposal to account for faultless disagreement: that of Jeremy Wyatt (2018). We first introduce the phenomenon to be explained and briefly present Wyatt's account. The bulk of the paper is dedicated to spelling out objections to various aspects of the view, related to his adherence to semantic minimalism, to the interpretation of the empirical data he relies on, and to his construal of both faultlessness and disagreement. We end with a comparison of the proposal with other views on the market from the point of view of theoretical economy.

David Hume was an early exponent of attending to the language we use to speak about objects of aesthetic and artistic interest. His remarks on this topic were largely negative and designed to warn us against being misled by such discourse. Nearly two centuries later, logical empiricists found inspiration in Hume in setting out constraints on "cognitively" meaningful language, as well as in suggesting ways in which our utterances may have "emotive" rather than cognitive meaning. As logical empiricism waned, Anglophone philosophers looked to ordinary language to illuminate our concepts of artistic and aesthetic phenomena as revealed by the "language games" in which they figure. This approach included studying the role of evaluations ('x is bombastic', 'y' is eloquent) in describing works of art, the conditions under which aesthetic descriptions ('x' is elegant, 'y' is serene) are justified, the sensitivity of such descriptions to the contexts in which they are used, as well as the character of disagreements about the quality of works of art and objects of aesthetic interest more generally. Current research sees a productive cross-fertilization between the fields of aesthetics and philosophy of language as scholars aim to understand how we communicate our interpretation and evaluation of works of art, artifacts, and aspects of our natural environment.

In this paper, we offer a brief, critical survey of contemporary work on truth. We begin by reflecting on the distinction between substantivist and deflationary truth theories. We then turn to three new kinds of truth theory—Kevin Scharp's replacement theory, John MacFarlane's relativism, and the alethic pluralism pioneered by Michael Lynch and Crispin Wright. We argue that despite their considerable differences, these theories exhibit a common 'pluralizing tendency' with respect to truth. In the final section, we look at the underinvestigated interface between metaphysical and formal truth theories, pointing to several promising questions that arise here.

El objetivo de este trabajo es doble. Primero, analizar el desacuerdo sin falta, fenómeno central en el debate sobre el significado de los juicios de gusto, y examinar cómo las distintas posiciones que toman parte en dicho debate –contextualismo deíctico, contextualismo no deíctico y relativismo– dan cuenta de este fenómeno. Segundo, defender que tanto el contextualismo no deíctico como el relativismo pueden dar cuenta de él, pero que solo el segundo de ellos puede hacerlo a la vez que acomoda un fenómeno que parece central en la explicación de este tipo de desacuerdos, la retractación.

Predicates of personal taste give rise to faultless disagreement, meaning that they encode a duality that allows them to invoke objective disagreement and to subjectively refrain from assigning blame. The claim of this paper is that this duality interacts with the evidential step, a conversational move from an assertion that functions as a source of evidence pertaining to a proposition, to the context update of this proposition. PPT assertions fail to do the evidential step due to their irreducible perspective dependency, and are consequently reinterpreted and updated as an objectivized mixture model. The paper presents a conversational theory that is able to account for faultless disagreement as well as for new and old problems and puzzles previously unaccounted for.

Radical contextualists have observed that the content of what is said by the utterance of a sentence is shaped in far-reaching ways by the context of utterance. And they have argued that the ways in which the content of what is said is shaped by context cannot be explained by semantic theory. A striking number of the examples that radical contextualists use to support their view involve sentences containing color adjectives (‘‘red’’, ‘‘green’’, etc.). In this paper, I show how the most sophisticated analysis of color adjectives within the explanatory framework of compositional truth conditional semantics—recently developed by Kennedy and McNally (Synthese 174(1):79–98 2010)—needs to be modified to handle the full range of contextual variation displayed by color adjectives.

The paper gives an analysis of sentences with predicates of personal taste and epistemic modals in terms of generic simulation. It arguing that such sentences involve first-person-based genericity and thus the very same semantics as sentences with generic 'one'.

According to Cappelen (2012), analytic philosophers have traditionally used two arguments to defend the role of intuitions in philosophy. On the one hand, The Argument from Philosophical Practice claims that analytic philosophers rely on intuitions when defending their theories. On the other hand, The Argument from Intuition Talk contends that intuitions must play a prominent role in analytic philosophy because analytic philosophers use intuition talk profusely. Cappelen (2012) identifies three questions to be considered when assessing the Argument from Intuition Talk: a quantitative question, a centrality question, and an interpretative question. The available studies have mainly focused on the quantitative and interpretative questions. In this paper, I examine the centrality question, taking as a case study the literature on taste disagreementsa topic that has received significant attention in the philosophy of language in the last fifteen years. To this end, I first build a corpus with the most relevant works in the area and then examine the centrality of intuition talk. The results show that the use of intuition talk is central in the literature on taste disagreements, and that intuitions are taken as evidence in favor of a given theory if the theory can account for them.

The aim of this work is to defend that aesthetic predicates and predicates of personal taste are quite similar in some respects. Specifically, we will show that the use of aesthetic predicates can give rise to situations of faultless disagreement, a feature rather associated with predicates of personal taste than with aesthetic predicates.

In the debate between contextualism and relativism about predicates of taste, the challenge from disagreement (the objection that contextualism cannot account for disagreement in ordinary exchanges involving such predicates) has played a central role. This paper investigates one way of answering the challenge consisting on appeal to certain, less focused on, uses of predicates of taste. It argues that the said thread is unsatisfactory, in that it downplays certain exchanges that constitute the core disagreement data. Additionally, several arguments to the effect that the exchanges in question don’t amount to disagreement are considered and rejected.

In the recent debate about the semantics of perspectival expressions (predicates of taste, aesthetic adjectives, moral terms, epistemic modals, epistemic terms etc.), disagreement has played a crucial role. In a nutshell, what I call "the challenge from disagreement" is the objection that certain views on the market (i.e., contextualism) cannot account for the intuition of disagreement present in ordinary exchanges involving perspectival expressions like "Licorice is tasty./No, it's not." Various contextualist answers to this challenge have been proposed, and this has led to a proliferation of notions of disagreement. It is now accepted in the debate that there are many notions of disagreement and that the search for a common, basic notion is misguided. In this paper I attempt to find such a basic notion underneath this diversity. The main aim of the paper is to motivate, forge and defend a notion of "minimal disagreement" that has beneficial effects for the debate over the semantics of perspectival expressions.

In the debate between relativism and contextualism about various ex- pressions, the Operator Argument, initially proposed by Kaplan (1989),has been taken to support relativism. However, one widespread reaction against the argument has taken the form of arguing against one assumption made by Kaplan: namely, that certain natural language expressions are best treated as sentential operators. Focusing on the only extant version of the Operator Argument proposed in connection to predicates of personal taste such as “tasty” and experiencer phrases such as “for Anna” (that of Kölbel (2009)), in this paper I investigate whether the reasons offered by Cappelen and Hawthorne (2009) against various assumptions of the argument failing in the case of modal, temporal, locational and precisional expressions transfer to the case of experiencer phrases to undercut support for relativism about predicates of personal taste. My aim is to show that they don’t. Thus, I first show that their considerations against experiencer phrases such as “for Anna” being sentential operators are not decisive. Second, I show that even if granting that such experiencer phrases are not sentential operators, a suitably modified version of the Operator Argument can be defended from the objections they raise.

The aim of this work will be twofold. On the one hand, I will show that the different positions taking part in the debate originated from 2005 Lassersohn’s work is adequate neither to entertain certain features of the speech acts involving predicates of personal taste nor to explain certain pragmatic phenomena associated with cases of disagreement. On the other hand, we will defend an alternative vision of disagreement, one focused not only on what speakers do when they disagree, but also in how speakers go in and out of this situation. Disagreement explanations require a consideration of certain pragmatic features in order to give a complete account of it. For example, the necessity of speakers to accommodate (Lewis 1979) certain information that can play a relevant role setting off a situation of disagreement.

The paper introduces a phenomenon called perspectival plurality, which has gone largely unnoticed in the debate between relativists and contextualists about predicates of personal taste. Perspectival plurality is the phenomenon according to which certain claims containing multiple predicates of personal taste can be sensitive to various contextually salient perspectives. For instance, if a father reports on a family holiday in Italy by saying ‘The wine was delicious and the water slide a lot of fun’, the predicate ‘delicious’ – in suitable contexts – must be relativized to the father and ‘fun’ to the kids. The paper argues that perspectival plurality raises severe problems for relativist semantics of perspectival expressions. Plurality blocks any attempt to justify parameter proliferation by aid of Kaplanian operator arguments, and it frustrates reasonable relativist strategies to account for syntactic binding.

Contextualism is the view that the extension of perspectival claims (involving e.g. predicates of personal taste or epistemic modals) depends on the context of utterance. Relativism is the view that the extension of perspectival claims depends on the context of assessment. Both views make concrete, empirically testable predictions about how such claims are used by ordinary English language speakers. This chapter surveys some of the recent empirical literature on the topic and presents four new experiments (total N=724). Consistent with contextualism and inconsistent with relativism, the results suggest that the extension of perspectival claims depends on the context of utterance, not the context of assessment.

In ihrem wunderbar argumentierten Buch Faultless Disagreement (FD) verfolgt Julia Zakkou zwei Hauptanliegen. Erstens, das Phänomen der fehlerlosen Meinungsverschiedenheit in Fragen des persönlichen Geschmacks zu erklären. Zweitens, die semantische Orthodoxie des indexikalischen Kontextualismus zu verteidigen, indem sie diesem ihren originellen, pragmatischen Überlegenheits-Ansatz (SA) zur Seite stellt. Ich möchte im Folgenden einige kritische Nachfragen zu Zakkous vorgeschlagener Arbeitsteilung zwischen Semantik und Pragmatik stellen, zur Reichweite des pragmatischen Überlegenheits-Ansatzes, zuv dessen pragmatischen Details und schließlich zum Anspruch des letzten Kapitels in FD, Vorkommnisse von Prädikaten des persönlichen Geschmacks allgemein und in jeglichen linguistischen Kontexten erklären zu können.

Focusing on predicates of taste, this paper puts forward a novel version of relativism, motivated by a recently discussed phenomenon: perspectival plurality. After showing that the phenomenon is problematic for at least some versions of relativism and discussing several possible answers on behalf of the relativist, I put forward my own version. The main feature of the proposal is the introduction in the index not of a single parameter for perspectives, but of a (possibly infinite) sequence of such parameters. In the last part of the paper, I defend the view from three objections.

According to contextualism, the extension of claims of personal taste is dependent on the context of utterance. According to truth relativism, their extension depends on the context of assessment. On this view, when the taste preferences of a speaker change, so does the truth value of a previously uttered taste claim, and the speaker might be required to retract it. Both views make strong empirical assumptions, which are here put to the test in three experiments with over 740 participants. It turns out that the linguistic behaviour of ordinary English speakers is consistent with contextualist predictions and inconsistent with the predictions of the most widely discussed form of truth relativism advocated by John MacFarlane.

In this paper we discuss a phenomenon we call perspectival plurality, which has gone largely unnoticed in the current debate between relativism and contextualism about predicates of personal taste (PPTs). According to perspectival plurality, the truth value of a sentence containing more than one PPT may depend on more than one perspective (subjects, experiencers or judges). Prima facie, the phenomenon engenders a problem for relativism and can be shaped into an argument in favor of contextualism. We explore the consequences of perspectival plurality in depth and assess several possible responses on behalf of advocates of relativism.

In this paper I put forward and substantiate a possible defensive move on behalf of the relativist about predicates of personal taste that can be used to block a recent contextualist argument raised against the view: the ‘argument from binding’ proposed in Schaffer (2011). The move consists in adopting Recanati’s (2002, 2004) ‘variadic functions’ apparatus and applying it to predicates of personal taste like ‘tasty’ and experiencer phrases like ‘for John’. I substantiate the account in a basic relativistic framework and reply to several objections to the variadic functions approach in general and to its application to the expressions at hand.

The relevance of cognitive penetration has been pointed out concerning three fields within philosophy: philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, and epistemology. This paper argues that this phenomenon is also relevant to the philosophy of language. First, I will defend that there are situations where ethical, social, or cultural rules can affect our taste perceptions. This influence can cause speakers to utter conflicting contents that lead them to disagree and, subsequently, to negotiate the circumstances of application of the taste predicates they have used to describe or express their taste perceptions. Then, to account for the proper dynamics of these cases, I will develop a theoretical framework build upon two elements: the Lewisian idea of the score of a conversation (Lewis, 1979), and Richard's (2008) taxonomy of the different attitudes speakers can have in taste disagreements. In a nutshell, I will argue that speakers can accommodate these conflicting contents as exceptions to the rule that determines the circumstances of application of taste predicates.

Debates about the semantics and pragmatics of predicates of personal taste (PPT) have largely centered on contextualist and relativist proposals. In this paper, I argue in favor of an alternative, absolutist analysis of PPT. Theorists such as Max Kölbel and Peter Lasersohn have argued that we should dismiss absolutism (also called realism or invariantism) due to its inability to accommodate the possibility of faultless disagreement involving PPT. My aim in the paper is to show how the absolutist can in fact accommodate this possibility by drawing on an account of faultless disagreement that improves upon a recent proposal due to Karl Schafer. In amending Schafer's proposal, I put forward an empirically-informed view of our beliefs regarding matters of personal taste, as well as an account of our assertions concerning such matters. I also argue that absolutists should take disagreement about these matters to be conative, rather than doxastic, in nature. The anticipated result is an independently compelling account of faultless disagreement about matters of personal taste that fits naturally with absolutism.

In this paper I focus on a recently discussed phenomenon illustrated by sentences containing predicates of taste: the phenomenon of " perspectival plurality " , whereby sentences containing two or more predicates of taste have readings according to which each predicate pertains to a different perspective. This phenomenon has been shown to be problematic for (at least certain versions of) relativism. My main aim is to further the discussion by showing that the phenomenon extends to other perspectival expressions than predicates of taste and by proposing a general solution to the problem raised by it on behalf of the relativist. The core claim of the solution (" multiple indexing ") is that utterances of sentences containing perspectival expressions should be evaluated with respect to (possibly infinite) sequences of perspective parameters.

I defend the assumption that an expression like "for Anna," as it occurs in a sentence like "Whale meat is tasty for Anna," is a sentential operator, against two related, albeit opposite worries. The first is that in some cases the putative operator might not be selective enough. The second is that in other cases it might on the contrary be too selective. I argue that these worries have no tendency to cast doubt on the assumption of sententiality for the relevant expressions.

Predicates of personal taste (PPT) have attracted a great deal of attention from philosophers of language and linguists. In the intricate debates over PPT, arguably the most central consideration has been which analysis of PPT can best account for the possibility of faultless disagreement about matters of personal taste. I argue that two models of such disagreement—the relativist and absolutist models—are empirically inadequate. In their stead, I develop a model of faultless taste disagreement which represents it as involving a novel incompatibility relation between preferences that I call type-noncotenability. This model is available to all parties in the ongoing debates about PPT, but it points up an advantage enjoyed by expressivist accounts of PPT. In closing, I consider four objections against the model that, while failing to fully undermine it, open up promising avenues of inquiry about the nature of disagreement.

Perspectival plurality is the phenomenon according to which certain claims containing multiple predicates of taste can be sensitive to various contextually salient perspectives. For instance, if a father reports on a family holiday in Italy by saying 'The wine was delicious and the water slide a lot of fun', the predicate 'delicious' – in suitable contexts – must be relativized to the father and 'fun' to the kids. The paper argues that perspectival plurality raises severe problems for nonindexicalist semantics of perspectival expressions. Plurality blocks any attempt to justify parameter proliferation by aid of Kaplanian operator arguments, and it frustrates reasonable nonindexicalist strategies to account for syntactic binding. Both arguments must be taken serious: As the second, empirical part of the paper demonstrates with experiments targeting both predicates of personal taste and epistemic modals, perspectival plurality is a genuine feature of ordinary linguistic discourse.

Book Reviews 134 may also find the logical principles previously introduced. Finally, the importance of the topic and the success in dealing with it explains the relevance of the work. It should be evident from the above that Correia's book is a valuable contribution to philosophy. Doubtless, this volume is warmly recommended to anyone interested in dependence and metaphysics, to those who are new to this topic and to those whose studies are more advanced.

What is disagreement, and how can we come to know what disagreement is?  Philosophers from nearly every corner of the discipline have investigated disagreement, so answers to the first question aren’t in short supply.  Answers to the second question, though, are harder to come by.  In this chapter, I outline an approach to the study of disagreement that is modelled on the Canberra Plan.  The core idea behind this approach is to determine the nature of disagreement, we should (i) identify a collection of platitudes about disagreement; (ii) Ramsify over them; and then (iii) use available empirical evidence to determine which relations make the resultant Ramsey sentence true.  To demonstrate the fruitfulness of this approach, I show how it can be used to deliver a satisfying and empirically-informed account of the nature of taste disagreement.

Empirical studies of the characteristics of subjective adjectives. We uncover new insights about subjectivity and its components, present evidence of several sorts of subjective adjective, and underscore the need to be aware of very different definitions of subjectivity in the literature.

El objetivo de este trabajo es defender que no se puede trazar una distinción clara entre dos tipos de gusto, la preferencia personal y la apreciación estética, en contextos de "negociación metalingüística" (Sundell 2016). Para ello, destacaremos ciertas similitudes entre los predicados de gusto personal (Lasersohn 2005) y los predicados estéticos (Sibley 1965; Kivy 1973). Nos centraremos en dos semejanzas: primero, ambos tipos de predicados son adjetivos de grado (Glanzberg 2007) y multidimensionales (ver Cepollaro y Stojanovic 2016); y segundo, el uso de ambos suele producir negociaciones metalingüísticas (Sundell 2016).

The aim of this work is twofold. On the one hand, we will show that what is really at stake in cases in which are implied predicates of personal taste is a complex experience. We are going to distinguish three levels in this kind of experience. The first one is factual and descriptive; the other two are neither factual nor descriptive.
On the other hand, we are going to defend that the disagreement produces a coordination between speakers since it is what allows them to make explicit the relevant elements producing the disagreement.

El objetivo de este trabajo es doble. Primero, distinguir tres sentidos en los que puede entenderse el término 'relativismo' en el debate acerca del significado de los predicados de gusto y examinar si las posiciones en el debate —contextualismo, contextualismo no deíctico y teorías contexto-evaluativas— son relativistas en alguno de estos sentidos. Segundo, argumentaremos a favor de usar el término 'relativismo' para las teorías contexto-evaluativas por dos razones: i) solo estas teorías asignan verdad a las afirmaciones de gusto de manera relativa; y ii) solo estas teorías prestan suficiente atención al fenómeno de la retractación.

The aim of this paper is to highlight some important similarities between the semantics of predicates of personal taste and the semantics of aesthetic predicates. More precisely, we will argue that aesthetic predicates can be involved, as predicates of personal taste allegedly do, in disagreement scenarios where no party can be declared to be at fault. In order to do so, we will not focus on the most commonly used aesthetic predicate in this sort of theoretical context –‘beautiful’– since it is our contention that this adjective does not fully exhibit a very distinctive feature of aesthetic predicates: objectivity. Exploring the similarities between ‘tasty’ and ‘beautiful’ could, therefore, be insufficient to establish a meaningful connection between taste judgements and aesthetic judgments. Instead, we will pay attention to predicates such as ‘atonal’, ‘rural’, ‘political’, ‘narcotic’, ‘virtuosic’, or ‘coherent’, as they appear in actual musical reviews. These adjectives, we will argue, have a more objective component to them, and are therefore better suited to test a putative connection between the semantics of predicates of personal taste and that of aesthetic predicates. We will show that some of them exhibit the kind of features concerning truth-ascriptions, disagreement, and retraction, that motivates a special treatment for predicates of personal taste.