Connoisseurial Contradictions: Expertise modulates faultless disagreement

We report the results of an experiment investigating faultless disagreement by manipulating the relative expertise of the interlocutors. Our findings show that expertise differences affect judgments of faultless disagreement. We discuss ramifi- cations for prior accounts, and propose a novel account of faultless disagreement in a relativist framework making reference to standards of taste.

Indexical Relativism?

The 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.

ЛОГИКО-СЕМАНТИЧЕСКИЙ АНАЛИЗ СУБЪЕКТИВНЫХ ПРЕДИКАТОВ

This article discusses the prominent issues of subjective language, which includes PPTs. They take into account opinions rather than facts. Modern logicians and linguists who consider PPTs notice the puzzle about faultless disagreement and the problem of the acquaintance inference. Over the past 10 years, two main doctrines have formed which offer different solutions to these issues: contextualism and relativism. The competition between them is considered in this article. Additionally, we point out that there is a special attention to the speaker in subjective language because the meaning of the sentence is determined from the position of the speaker. However, we assume that subjective predicates can also involve non-local judges, who are not always the speaker. In this regard, we need to turn to a logical apparatus, namely the de re reading, which allows taking into account non-local judges in subjective statements. В данной статье исследуются субъективные предикаты, которые рассматривают скорее мнение, чем факты. Современные логики и лингвисты обращают особое внимание на проблему безошибочного разногласия и роль непосредственного опыта. За последние 10 лет сформировалось два основных лагеря, которые предлагают различные решения данных вопросов. Дискуссия между данными направлениями будет затронута в данной работе. Отмечается, что особое внимание уделяется говорящему, с позиции которого определяется значение предложения, но субъективные предикаты могут говорить так же и о нелокальных судьях, которыми не всегда является говорящий. В связи с этим отмечается необходимость обращения к логическому аппарату, а именно чтению de re, которое позволяет учитывать нелокальных судей в субъективных высказываниях.

Pragmatik in Geschmacksfragen? Kommentar zu Julia Zakkous Faultless Disagreement

In ihrem wunderbar argumentierten Buch Faultless Disagreement (FD) ver- folgt 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 Nachfra- gen zu Zakkous vorgeschlagener Arbeitsteilung zwischen Semantik und Pragma- tik stellen, zur Reichweite des pragmatischen Überlegenheits-Ansatzes, zu 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.