How Moderate Relativists Should Explain the Appearance of Disagreements About Taste

• Authors: Sanna Hirvonen
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Moderate relativists such as Kölbel (2003, 2009) and Lasersohn (2005) have motivated the semantic framework by arguing that unlike contextualism, it can explain why there appear to be disagreements of taste. The solution relies on the relativist notion of a proposition whose truth depends on a judge parameter. This notion coupled with the view that contradicting propositions create an appearance of disagreement allegedly enables them to secure the right predictions. This paper questions the argumentative strategy by showing that there are no basis to infer pragmatic data (an appearance of disagreement) from formal semantics (locating an element of truth-conditions to the circumstance rather than propositional content). I then present a way to understand the relativist framework from the point of view of mental representation. The view put forward explains the missing relation between the semantic framework and pragmatics, and predicts why there is an appearance of disagreements about taste.

Keywords

EN

moderate relativism; predicates of taste; disagreement

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Journal: Lodz Papers in Pragmatics
• Year: 2011
• Volume: 7
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 223-240

Dates

published

2011-01-01

online

2012-01-05

Contributors

author

Sanna Hirvonen

• University College London

References

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Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/v10016-011-0012-7