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Notes
Responses to several others of Cappelen and Hawthorne’s arguments are given in Lasersohn (2008).
Some caution is necessary in using the term ‘opinion’ in a way which opposes it to ‘fact’, since we can certainly have (and express) opinions about issues of fact. But it seems to me that the longer phrase ‘matter of opinion’, more than the lone word ‘opinion’, suggests an independence from purely factual issues; it seems perfectly normal, for example, to say that it is a matter of opinion whether the licorice is tasty, but it would be quite odd to say that it was a matter of opinion whether the licorice contains sugar.
As many people have pointed out to me, people often drop a debate as soon as it becomes clear that it is over a matter of taste. It seems to me, however, that we do not drop such debates because our sense of disagreement has disappeared, but rather because we know that it is not resolvable.
Oddly, Cappelen and Hawthorne also class ‘filling’ and ‘spicy’ as predicates of personal taste. It may be that these predicates also give rise to faultless disagreement, but only, I think, because they are scalar; it hardly seems a matter of taste whether something is filling or spicy. (Of course one person may find filling or spicy food to his or her taste, and another person not, but this is an entirely separate question.) For more discussion, see Lasersohn (2008).
The term ‘faultless disagreement’ is a handy one, but one that has the potential for causing confusion, not only because of the ambiguity that Cappelen and Hawthorne point out, but also because in ordinary, pretheoretic talk, we understand the word ‘disagreement’ more broadly than what is at issue in recent debates about relativism. If for example John says “I like roller coasters” and Mary responds by saying “Well, I don’t,” we intuitively take them to be disagreeing in some sense (and presumably neither is making an error of fact); but such examples do not pose any obvious problem for conventional semantic theories or provide any obvious motivation for relativist theories. In contrast, examples like “Roller coasters are fun”/“Roller coasters are not fun,” provoke a sense of direct contradiction, and not merely “disagreement” in the broad sense. The challenge for semantic theory is in accounting for this intuition of direct contradiction and simultaneously for the intuition of faultlessness which such examples produce.
I do not intend this as implying that I accept the conclusions which Travis draws from such examples.
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Lasersohn, P. Context, relevant parts and (lack of) disagreement over taste. Philos Stud 156, 433–439 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9625-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9625-x