scholarly journals Predicates of personal taste, semantic incompleteness, and necessitarianism

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Markus Kneer
Keyword(s):  
Personal Taste ◽  
Predicates Of Personal Taste ◽  
Semantic Incompleteness

scholarly journals A Sensibilist Explanation of Imaginative Resistance

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Nils Franzén
Keyword(s):  
Actual World ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Recent Discussion ◽  
Personal Taste ◽  
Predicates Of Personal Taste ◽  
Imaginative Resistance ◽  
The World ◽  
The Right ◽  
Evaluative Terms ◽  
The Way

Abstract This article discusses why it is the case that we refuse to accept strange evaluative claims as being true in fictions, even though we are happy to go along with other types of absurdities in such contexts. For instance, we would refuse to accept the following statement as true, even in the context of a fiction: (i) In killing her baby, Giselda did the right thing; after all, it was a girl. This article offers a sensibilist diagnosis of this puzzle, inspired by an observation first made by David Hume. According to sensibilism, the way we feel about things settles their evaluative properties. Thus, when confronted with a fictional scenario where the configuration of non-evaluative facts and properties is relevantly similar to the actual world, we refuse to go along with evaluative properties being instantiated according to a different pattern. It is the attitudes we hold in the actual world that fix the extension of evaluative terms, even in nonactual worlds. When engaging with a fiction, we (to some extent) leave our beliefs about what the world is like behind, while taking our emotional attitudes with us into the fiction. To substantiate this diagnosis, this paper outlines a sensibilist semantics for evaluative terms based on recent discussion regarding predicates of personal taste, and explains how, together with standard assumptions about the nature of fictional discourse, it makes the relevant predictions with respect to engagement with fictions.

scholarly journals Relativism about predicates of personal taste and perspectival plurality

2016 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Markus Kneer ◽  
Agustin Vicente ◽  
Dan Zeman
Keyword(s):  
Personal Taste ◽  
Predicates Of Personal Taste

scholarly journals Predicates of personal taste: empirical data

Synthese ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Markus Kneer
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Data ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Taste Preferences ◽  
Personal Taste ◽  
Predicates Of Personal Taste ◽  
Truth Value ◽  
Linguistic Behaviour ◽  
John Macfarlane ◽  
Context Of Utterance

AbstractAccording 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.

scholarly journals Indexical Relativism?

Philosophia ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eduardo Pérez-Navarro
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Personal Taste ◽  
Faultless Disagreement ◽  
Predicates Of Personal Taste ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Truth Value ◽  
The One

AbstractThe particular behavior exhibited by sentences featuring predicates of personal taste such as “tasty” may drive us to claim that their truth depends on the context of assessment, as MacFarlane does. MacFarlane considers two ways in which the truth of a sentence can depend on the context of assessment. On the one hand, we can say that the sentence expresses a proposition whose truth-value depends on the context of assessment. This is MacFarlane’s position, which he calls “truth relativism” and, following Weatherson, I rebrand as “nonindexical relativism”. On the other hand, we can say that what proposition a sentence expresses depends on the context of assessment. MacFarlane calls this position “content relativism” and rejects it on the grounds that it leads to implausible readings of certain sentences and is unable to account for the speaker’s authority over the content of her assertions. In this paper, I too argue against content relativism, which, again following Weatherson, I rebrand as “indexical relativism”. However, my arguments against the theory are different from MacFarlane’s, which I prove unsound. In particular, I show that any version of indexical relativism will be unable to account for at least one of the phenomena that have been standardly used to motivate nonindexical relativism—faultless disagreement and retraction—in most of the ways in which it has been proposed to understand them.

scholarly journals Acquaintance content and obviation

2018 ◽  
Vol 60 ◽  
pp. 55-72
Author(s):  
Pranav Anand ◽  
Natasha Korotkova
Keyword(s):  
Epistemic Modals ◽  
Personal Taste ◽  
Predicates Of Personal Taste ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Firsthand Experience ◽  
Shed Light

This paper is about what Ninan (2014) (following Wollheim 1980) calls the AcquaintanceInference (AI): a firsthand experience requirement imposed by several subjective expressions such asPredicates of Personal Taste (PPTs) (delicious). In general, one is entitled to calling something deliciousonly upon having tried it. This requirement can be lifted, disappearing in scope of elements that we willcall obviators. The paper investigates the patterns of AI obviation for PPTs and similar constructions(e.g., psych predicates and subjective attitudes). We show that the cross-constructional variation in whenacquaintance requirements can be obviated presents challenges for previous accounts of the AI (Pearson2013, Ninan 2014). In place of these, we argue for the existence of two kinds of acquaintance content:(i) that of bare PPTs; and (ii) that of psych predicates, subjective attitudes and overt experiencer PPTs.For (i), we propose that the AI arises from an evidential restriction that is dependent on a parameterof interpretation which obviators update. For (ii), we argue that the AI is a classic presupposition. Wemodel both (i) and (ii) using von Fintel and Gillies’s (2010) framework for directness and thus connecttwo strands of research: that on PPTs and that on epistemic modals. Both phenomena are sensitive toa broad direct-indirect distinction, and analyzing them along similar lines can help shed light on hownatural language conceptualizes evidence in general.Keywords: evidentiality, firsthand experience, knowledge, predicates of personal taste, subjectivity

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