Faultless Disagreement: A defense of Contextualism in the Realm of Personal Taste

by Julia Zakkou

Overview

People fight a lot. Both about objective and about subjective matters. But while at least one party to a dispute must be wrong in a disagreement about objective matters, it seems that both parties can be right when it comes to subjective ones: it seems that there can be faultless disagreements. But how is this possible? How can people disagree with one another if they are both right? And why should they? Over the last 15 years, various philosophers and linguists have argued that we have to become relativists about truth to explain what is going on. This book shows that we can dispense with relativism. It combines a conservative semantic claim with a novel pragmatic one to develop the superiority approach. The book discusses both classic and recent, as well as general and debate-specific literature in philosophy and linguistics and provides an introduction as well as an original contribution to the recent debate on the semantics and pragmatics of perspectival expressions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783465043478
Publisher:	Verlag Vittorio Klostermann
Publication date:	03/01/2019
Series:	Studies in Theoretical Philosophy , #7
Edition description:	2018
Pages:	178
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.60(d)

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

1 The Phenomenon of Faultless Disagreement 13

1.1 The realm of personal taste 13

1.1.1 A faultless disagreement 13

1.1.2 Skeptical stances 14

1.1.3 Faultless disagreements within and across contexts 18

1.1.4 Faultless disagreements on different levels 19

1.1.5 Endorsing the faultless disagreement intuition 19

1.2 Other domains? 21

2 Standard Options 25

2.1 The standard semantic framework 25

2.1.1 Two dimensions: context and index 25

2.1.2 Two stages: character and content 28

2.1.3 Sentence and content truth 30

2.2 Four options 30

2.2.1 Indexicality 31

2.2.2 Context sensitivity 36

2.2.3 Four combinations 40

2.3 Conclusion 45

2.4 Appendix 46

3 A Challenge without Semantic Solution 53

3.1 Semantic flexibility 53

3.2 The challenge 56

3.2.1 The faultlessness intuition 56

3.2.2 The disagreement intuition 59

3.2.3 The FPS approach and the data 64

3.2.4 The FPP approach and the data 69

3.2.5 Objections and replies 73

3.3 Individualism vs. communitarianism 78

3.3.1 Faultless disagreements across contexts 78

3.3.2 Faultless disagreements with background beliefs 80

3.4 Idealizing or generalizing? 82

3.5 Consequences 84

4 Two Pragmatic Attempts: the Commonality and the Metalinguistic Approaches 87

4.1 Pragmatic flexibility 87

4.1.1 The commonality approach 89

4.1.2 The metalinguistic approach 90

4.1.3 Some flexibility left 91

4.2 The paradigm case 91

4.3 More complicated cases 97

4.3.1 Faultless disagreements across contexts 97

4.3.2 Objections and replies 100

4.3.3 Faultless disagreements with background beliefs 101

4.3.4 Objections and replies 103

4.3.5 Kinds of pragmatic conveying 105

4.4 Conclusion 108

5 A Pragmatic Solution: the Superiority Approach 109

5.1 Pragmatic flexibility (again) 109

5.1.1 The superiority approach 110

5.1.2 Initial worries 112

5.2 The paradigm case 115

5.3 More complicated cases 117

5.3.1 Faultless disagreements across contexts 117

5.3.2 Faultless disagreements with background beliefs 119

5.3.3 Objections and replies 120

5.3.4 Kinds of pragmatic conveying 122

5.4 Further cases 126

5.4.1 Faultless disagreements on different levels 126

5.4.2 Faultless disagreements? 127

5.5 Conclusion 128

6 Pragmatics Defended 129

6.1 The basic argument 129

6.2 The crucial premise 131

6.2.1 Evidence for the crucial premise (^*) 131

6.2.2 Evidence against a stronger version of (^*) 136

6.3 Ways to pragmatically convey 137

6.3.1 Particularized vs. generalized implicatures 137

6.3.2 Conversational vs. conventional implicatures 138

6.4 What denial devices can target 141

6.5 Conclusion 146

7 A Further Challenge: Embeddings 147

7.1 Semantic flexibility (again) 147

7.1.1 Embeddings under singular noun phrase constructions 148

7.1.2 Embeddings under plural noun phrase constructions 150

7.2 Defense: complex semantics 151

7.3 Pragmatic flexibility (again) 156

7.3.1 Embeddings under verbs with truth evaluative adverbs 156

7.3.2 Embeddings under factive verbs 160

7.4 Defense: embedded pragmatics 161

7.5 Conclusion 165

Bibliography 167