Abstract
Our main concern in this paper is the semantics of predicates of personal taste. However, in order to see these predicates in the right perspective, we had to broaden the scope to the wider class of relative gradable adjectives. We present an analysis of the meaning of these adjectives in the framework of update semantics. In this framework the meaning of a sentence is not identified with its truth conditions, but with its (potential) impact on people’s intentional states. In this respect, an important characteristic of relative gradable adjectives is the interplay between their evaluative features and people’s expectations. The dynamic set-up also makes it possible (a) to model the interpretation of a relative gradable adjective without supposing that the context always supplies a ‘cut-off’ point determining its application, and (b) to deal in a pragmatic way with situations in which the Sorites paradox arises.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Asher, N. (2011). Lexical meaning in context: A web of words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Barker, C. (2002). The dynamics of vagueness. Linguistics and Philosophy, 25(1), 1–36.
Barker, C. (2013). Negotiating taste. Inquiry, 56(2–3), 240–257.
Bartsch, R., & Venneman, T. (1972). Semantic structures: Semantic structures: A study in the relation between syntax and semantics. Frankfurt: Athenäum Verlag.
Bierwisch, M. (1989). The semantics of gradation. In M. Bierwisch & E. Lang (Eds.), Dimensional adjectives (pp. 71–261). Berlin: Springer.
Buekens, F. (2011). Faultless disagreement, assertions and the affective-expressive dimension of judgments of taste. Philosophia, 39(4), 637–655.
Burnett, H. S. (2012). The grammar of tolerance on vagueness, context-sensitivity, and the origin of scale structure. Ph.D. thesis, UC Los Angeles.
Crespo, I., Karawani, H., & Veltman, F. (2018). Expressing expectations. In D. Ball & B. Rabern (Eds.), The science of meaning (pp. 253–276). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Crespo, M. I. (2015). Affecting meaning: Subjectivity and evaluativity in gradable adjectives. Ph.D. thesis, ILLC, University of Amsterdam.
Doetjes, J. S., Constantinescu, C., & Součková, K. (2009). A neo-Kleinian approach to comparatives. Semantics and Linguistic Theory, 19, 124–141.
Dummett, M. (1975). Wang’s paradox. Synthese, 30(3–4), 201–32.
Égré, P. (2015). Vagueness: Why do we believe in tolerance? Journal of Philosophical Logic, 44(6), 663–679.
Égré, P., & Cova, F. (2015). Moral asymmetries and the semantics of many. Semantics and Pragmatics, 8, 1–45.
Fara, D. G. (2000). Shifting sands: An interest relative theory of vagueness. Philosophical Topics, 28(1), 45–81. Originally published under the name “Delia Graff”.
Fernando, T., & Kamp, H. (1996). Expecting many. Semantics and Linguistic Theory, 6, 53–68.
Fine, K. (1975). Vagueness, truth, and logic. Synthese, 30(3–4), 265–300.
Ginsborg, H. (1990). Reflective judgment and taste. Noûs, 24(1), 63–78.
Glanzberg, M. (2007). Context, content, and relativism. Philosophical Studies, 136(1), 1–29.
Groenendijk, J., & Stokhof, M. (1984). Studies on the semantics of questions and the pragmatics of answers. Ph.D. thesis, University of Amsterdam.
Guyer, P. (1979). Kant and the claims of taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Kamp, H. (1981). The paradox of the heap. In U. Mönnich (Ed.), Aspects of philosophical logic (pp. 225–277). Berlin: Springer.
Kamp, H., & Sassoon, G. W. (2017). Vagueness. In P. D. M. Aloni (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of formal semantics (pp. 389–441). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Kant, I. (1790). Critique of the power of judgment. P. Guyer (Ed.), The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, trans. by P. Guyer and E. Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2000).
Kennedy, C. (2007). Vagueness and grammar: The semantics of relative and absolute gradable adjectives. Linguistics and Philosophy, 30(1), 1–45.
Kennedy, C. (2013). Two sources of subjectivity: Qualitative assessment and dimensional uncertainty. Inquiry, 56(2–3), 258–277.
Kennedy, C., & McNally, L. (2005). Scale structure, degree modification, and the semantics of gradable predicates. Language, 81(2), 345–79.
Lasersohn, P. (2005). Context dependence, disagreement, and predicates of personal taste. Linguistics and Philosophy, 28(6), 643–686.
MacFarlane, J. (2007). Relativism and disagreement. Philosophical Studies, 132(1), 17–31.
MacFarlane, J. (2014). Assessment sensitivity–Relative truth and its applications. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Moltmann, F. (2010). Relative truth and the first person. Philosophical Studies, 150(2), 187–220.
Morzycki, M. (2015). Modification. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ninan, D. (2014). Taste predicates and the acquaintance inference. Semantics and Linguistic Theory, 24, 290–309.
Pearson, H. (2013). A judge-free semantics for predicates of personal taste. Journal of Semantics, 30(1), 103–154.
Sæbø, K. J. (2009). Judgment ascriptions. Linguistics and Philosophy, 32(4), 327–352.
Sassoon G.W. (2010). Restricted quantification over tastes. In M. Aloni, H. Bastiaanse, T. de Jager, & K. Schulz (Eds.), Logic, language and meaning. 17th Amsterdam Colloquium. Revised selected papers (pp. 163–172). Berlin: Springer.
Sassoon, G. W. (2013). A typology of multidimensional adjectives. Journal of Semantics, 30(3), 335–380.
Siegel, M. (1976). Capturing the Adjective. Ph.D. thesis, University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Smith, B. C. (2007). The objectivity of taste and tasting. In B. C. Smith (Ed.), Questions of taste: The philosophy of wine (pp. 41–76). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stephenson, T. (2006). Towards a theory of subjective meaning. Ph.D. thesis, MIT.
Stephenson, T. (2007). Judge dependence, epistemic modals, and predicates of personal taste. Linguistics and Philosophy, 30(4), 487–525.
Umbach, C. (2016). Evaluative propositions and subjective judgments. In C. Meier & J. van Wijnbergen-Huitink (Eds.), Subjective meaning: Alternatives to relativism (pp. 127–168). Berlin: De Gruyter.
Veltman, F. (1996). Defaults in update semantics. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 25(3), 221–261.
Weiss, S. E. (1976). The sorites fallacy: What difference does a peanut make? Synthese, 33(2–4), 253–272.
Wittgenstein, L. (1958). Philosophical investigations (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell.
Yalcin, S., & Rothschild, D. (2017). On the dynamics of conversation. Noûs, 51(1), 24–48.
Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge support from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) to the VAAG-Project “Vagueness, approximation and granularity” (231-80-004). This project was a component of the EUROCORES Programme “Modelling Intelligent Interaction—Logic in the Humanities, Social and Computational Sciences” coordinated by the European Science Foundation. The ideas underlying this paper have been presented at various venues: University of Tilburg, University of Utrecht, Peking University, the TARK summerschool at the University of Maryland, University of Barcelona, Rutgers University, Université Paris-Diderot. We are grateful to the audiences for the feedback they provided. We also want to thank Robert van Rooij and Martin Stokhof, whose questions and comments were constitutive for the development of our thoughts. Finally, the feedback of the two anonymous reviewers made us change our mind on a number of issues and forced us to be a lot clearer than we originally were.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
OpenAccess This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
About this article
Cite this article
Crespo, I., Veltman, F. Tasting and testing. Linguist and Philos 42, 617–653 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-019-09260-z
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-019-09260-z