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Indexical contextualism and the challenges from disagreement

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Abstract

In this paper I argue against one variety of contextualism about aesthetic predicates such as “beautiful.” Contextualist analyses of these and other predicates have been subject to several challenges surrounding disagreement. Focusing on one kind of contextualism—individualized indexical contextualism—I unpack these various challenges and consider the responses available to the contextualist. The three responses I consider are as follows: giving an alternative analysis of the concept of disagreement; claiming that speakers suffer from semantic blindness; and claiming that attributions of beauty carry presuppositions of commonality. I will argue that none of the available strategies gives a response which both (a) satisfactorily explains all of the disagreement-data and (b) is plausible independent of significant evidence in favor of contextualism. I conclude that individualized indexical contextualism about the aesthetic is untenable, although this does not rule out alternative contextualist approaches to the aesthetic.

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Notes

  1. See e.g. Lasersohn (2005), Kölbel (2004), MacFarlane (2007) and Brogaard (2008).

  2. See MacFarlane (2005), Lasersohn (2005), and Glanzberg (2007).

  3. This position has also been referred to as “indexical relativism” by López de Sa (2008) and Kölbel (2004, 2007).

  4. See e.g. Lasersohn (2005), Kölbel (2004), MacFarlane (2007) and Brogaard (2008). Another avenue of inquiry concerns the relative plausibility of contextualist and relativist accounts of disagreement—for this, see Stojanovic (2007), Stephenson (2007) and Montminy (2009). I will not address this issue here.

  5. From now on I will use “contextualism” and “contextualist” to refer to IIC and its proponents.

  6. The question of whether the disagreement is faultless or blameless would not be directly relevant to the dialectic I pursue in this paper. See Kölbel (2003) and Schafer (2010).

  7. The problem is compounded insofar as contextualism’s invariantist rivals (such as absolutism and relativism) have an easier time accounting for the intuitive disagreement. Absolutism seems well placed to make sense of the disagreement—if “beautiful” is invariant between contexts of use, then Luka and Ana’s assertions will conflict, and thus our intuitions about disagreement will be respected. However, there has been some controversy over whether the relativist can underwrite the disagreement data; see e.g. Francén (2009).

  8. Kölbel (2004, pp. 304–305); Kölbel (2007, pp. 285–286).

  9. It does not follow that Ana should be able to express her agreement with Luka by using a phrase like “I agree.” Von Fintel and Gillies (2008) point out that agree- and disagree-locutions sometimes target something other than the complete content of an assertion. They discuss an example where such locutions can target embedded content: if Luka says “I think it is raining” and Ana says “I agree,” we could reasonably interpret her as endorsing the embedded content rather than the propositional attitude report. Analogously, if Luka were to follow up Ana’s utterance in (1′) by saying “I agree,” we could easily hear this as expressing that Luka believes Dubrovnik to be beautiful according to his standard of taste when this is not in fact the case. This is not completely parallel to von Fintel and Gillies’ example, since “agree” here does not target embedded content; nevertheless, it is a case where “agree” targets something other than the complete content of the assertion. We should, then, continue to think of these data in terms of accepting what the other has said rather than being able to express agreement.

  10. cf. MacFarlane (2007).

  11. Jackson (1998, pp. 44–45).

  12. I do not want to place much emphasis on appeals to the folk conception of disagreement, as Jackson does with respect to free action. I make no claims about what the folk actually believe about disagreement; establishing this would presumably require us to perform experiments. Rather, I am concerned with the “intuitive conception” of disagreement which the first challenge depends on—i.e. the conception which requires semantic conflict.

  13. Kölbel (2004, p. 305). The label “doxastic non-cotenability” is due to MacFarlane (manuscript), who discusses several “varieties of disagreement.”

  14. I will not consider in detail potential candidates for a reconception of disagreement, since my purpose is to examine the place of this strategy in the dialectic. Exploration of potential candidates for reconceptions of disagreement requires enough attention to merit a separate paper.

  15. Discussion of semantic blindness with respect to epistemological contextualism can be found in Schiffer (1996) and DeRose (2006).

  16. Note that defenders of IIC must be careful here—evidence which merely supports AC (i.e. the thesis that aesthetic predicates are context-sensitive) may not be sufficient to support IIC, since AC does not entail IIC.

  17. See DeRose (2004, 2009).

  18. López de Sa (2007, 2008). His examples are framed in terms of humor and the predicate “is funny.”

  19. López de Sa (2008, p. 304).

  20. Lewis (1989, p. 128).

  21. Thus Stalnaker: “it is part of the concept of presupposition that a speaker assumes that the members of his audience presuppose everything that he presupposes” Stalnaker (1999a). See also Stalnaker (1999b).

  22. There is a further question about the precise content of the presupposition of commonality. Does the presupposition involve assuming that my standard and the standard of my interlocutors match perfectly, or merely that they match to a level which meets a certain threshold of commonality? Both precisifications of the view have their problems. However, I do not believe that any of the arguments I present below against the presuppositional view turn on the exact content of the presupposition, so I will not explore the precisifications in detail here.

  23. More cases like these are found in Egan (2010).

  24. von Fintel (2004) and Yablo (2006).

  25. Yablo (2006, p. 165). Yablo notes that while this test works best for semantic presuppositions, there is reason to think that a version of it is applicable to at least some non-semantic presuppositions. With respect to presuppositions of commonality: since the intuition of conflict and disagreement is supposed to be driven by the presence of the presupposition, it is reasonable to think that the test applies in the cases I am discussing.

  26. von Fintel (2004, p. 317).

  27. One limitation of my application of these tests is the highly theoretical way in which the putative presupposition is expressed (i.e. “alike with respect to beauty-judgements”). It is difficult to find a useful alternative natural-language phrase with which to express the presupposition. Nevertheless, I do not believe that expressing the putative presupposition in different terms would alter the results of these tests.

  28. Yablo (2006, p. 165 n. 7).

  29. A’s assertion in (9) need not be read as a claim about lack of normativity, i.e. “Dubrovnik is beautiful, but since we are different with respect to beauty you need not pay attention to my opinion.” If read this way it may seem infelicitous to make the unqualified beauty-attribution; a qualified attribution seems more appropriate. Rather, the second clause of (9) can be thought of merely as a descriptive claim about the state of A and B’s standards—a claim which might be accompanied by the additional belief that B’s standard is somehow mistaken. (Thanks to an anonymous referee for helping to clarify this point.)

  30. In the light of the failure of the presuppositional defense, the contextualist may wish to locate another aspect of the conventional usage of “beautiful” to do the same work. For example, Kölbel (2007, p. 286) suggests that the contextualist could appeal to an implicature of commonality as opposed to a presupposition. I do not believe this alternative approach to be promising, however, since implicatures of commonality will still fall foul of the “…And What’s More…” test: following up an assertion with “…and what’s more, I,” where I denotes the implicature of the original assertion, is infelicitous.

  31. This example is borrowed from López de Sa (2008).

  32. This example is borrowed from Schaffer (forthcoming). For more on epistemic modals, see Egan et al. (2005), Egan (2007), MacFarlane (forthcoming), Stephenson (2007), and von Fintel and Gillies (2007).

  33. I do not take these considerations, by themselves, to be arguments against contextualism about “funny” or “might”; all I intend to show is that these positions cannot be backed up by the “presuppositions of commonality” approach.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks are due to Matthew Kieran, Aaron Meskin, Jonathan Robson, Alice Kay, Robbie Williams, Pekka Väyrynen and Wouter Kalf. I am also grateful to audiences at the SIFA Graduate Conference, the Western Michigan University Graduate Conference and the University of Leeds Postgraduate Seminar. Finally, I wish to thank an anonymous referee for this journal for valuable comments and suggestions.

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    Carl Baker

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Baker, C. Indexical contextualism and the challenges from disagreement. Philos Stud 157, 107–123 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9621-1

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