Abstract
Sentences containing predicates of personal taste exhibit two striking features: (a) whether they are true seems to lie in the eye of the beholder and (b) whether they are true can be—and often is—subject to disagreement. In the last decade, there has been a lively debate about how to account for these two features. In this paper, I shall argue for two claims: first, I shall show that even the most promising approaches so far offered by proponents of so-called indexical contextualism fail to account for the disagreement feature. They might be able to account for some disagreement data, but they have trouble accounting for two kinds of disagreement data that caused the estrangement from indexical contextualism and the migration to relativism in the first place: the denial and the retraction data. Second, I shall show that we still do not have to abandon indexical contextualism, because what I shall call the superiority approach—a new pragmatically extended version of indexical contextualism—can very well account for the data.
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Notes
Moderate versions of relativism with respect to predicates of personal taste (sometimes called non-indexical contextualism or non-indexical relativism) take standards of taste to be among the parameters of the index supplied by the context of use; radical versions of relativism with respect to predicates of personal taste (sometimes called assessment or assessor relativism) take standards of taste to be among the parameters of the index supplied by the context of assessment.
I, as many other people in the debate, take standard semantics to be the classic two-dimensional semantics championed most prominently by Kaplan and Lewis which takes characters to map contexts of use to contents and contents to map indices of contexts of use to truth values. Furthermore, I take standard semantics not to include standards of taste as parameters of the index of the context of use. This latter assumption might be a bit controversial since it makes moderate forms of relativism not count as standard semantic approaches. Nothing of importance is going to depend on this decision, though.
Denial data have often been used to show that a moderate version of relativism has the edge over indexical contextualism; retraction data have often been used to show that a radical form of relativism has the edge over both moderate relativism and indexical contextualism. See, e.g., MacFarlane (2014, ch. 6).
See Kölbel (2002, 2003), Lasersohn (2005, 2008, 2009, 2011), Stephenson (2007), MacFarlane (2007, 2014), López de Sa (2007, 2008, 2009) and Egan (2010, 2014), to name but a few. Note that for the discussion to follow, it is not going to be relevant that by using ‘Licorice is tasty,’ people could be talking about different types of licorice (salty or sweet) or licorice of different brands or that they could be talking about licorice in general. To make this clear, I could have used sentences like ‘This piece of licorice is tasty’ (combined with a pointing gesture) or even ‘Alfred is tasty’ (where ‘Alfred’ is the name of a certain piece of licorice—see Egan (2010, p. 259) for this example). Since, in the debate, however, it is most common to use ‘Licorice is tasty,’ I shall stick to it for the discussion to follow.
For denial data, see, for instance, Kölbel (2002, p. 39) (and less explicitly: Kölbel (2009, p. 392)), MacFarlane (2007, p. 18; 2014, 9ff., 130f.), Stephenson (2007, p. 492), and Plunkett and Sundell (2013, 14f.). Note that the denial data discussed in the debate are often not about a denial response that one person gives regarding an utterance she has previously made, but about a denial response that one person gives in reaction to an utterance another person has made, as in: Hannah (to Sarah): ‘Licorice is tasty.’ Sarah (to Hannah): ‘What you just said is false. Licorice is not tasty.’ or as in: Hannah (to Mary): ‘Licorice is tasty.’ Sarah (having eavesdropped on the conversation between Hannah and Mary, to Polly): ‘What Hannah just said is false. Licorice is not tasty.’ Note furthermore that the data are sometimes about the felicity of slightly different denial responses, for instance: Hannah (to Sarah): ‘Licorice is tasty.’ Sarah (to Hannah): ‘No!/ I disagree./ That’s false./ Nope./ Nuh-uh. Licorice is not tasty.’ For retraction data, see, most prominently, MacFarlane (2007, p. 18; 2014, 13ff., 132; 2016, 197f.).
For skepticism with respect to the denial data, see Huvenes (2012, 175f.) and Raffman (2016, p. 172). For skepticism with respect to the retraction data, see von Fintel (2008, p. 81), Wright (2008, 179ff.), Marques (2015) and Raffman (2016, 172f.). It is not entirely clear to me to what extent these authors question the felicity of the responses given rather than their naturalness.
See Kneer (ms). See Marques (ms) for similar studies regarding epistemic modals.
I thank an anonymous reviewer of this journal for pushing me on this point.
See, for instance, the literature mentioned in footnote 4.
Note that this characterization of simple indexical contextualism only says something about the propositions expressed by ‘Licorice is (not) tasty’ at (1a) and (1b). It is thus compatible with many different views about what the sentences express at other contexts. Somewhat differently put: the characterization does not entail that it is always the speaker that is contained in the proposition. It could be spelled out in such a way that it is always the most salient subject, or that, at least sometimes, it is a (for instance: the most relevant) group of people that is contained in the proposition.
See again the literature mentioned in footnote 4. For a presentation of the argument that, structurally, comes closest to my presentation, see MacFarlane (2011, 146ff.) on indexical contextualism for epistemic modals.
Here and in the following, I am taking Hannah to neither have forgotten about what she liked at t1 nor to be what could be called semantically incompetent, i.e. she does not have false beliefs about what she expressed at (1a).
Note that I assumed eternalist propositions as opposed to temporalist ones. That is, metaphorically speaking, it is not only the speaker of the context of use that goes into the proposition but also the time of the context of use. Nothing of importance depends on this decision.
For this line of reasoning, see, for instance, MacFarlane (2007, 2014, ch. 1.2 and 6) and Egan (2011, 230ff.). Note that Egan is concerned with sentences containing epistemic ‘might.’ For explicit criticism of the claim that a moderate form of relativism cannot account for retraction data, see Brogaard (2008).
Here and in that follows, I use ‘pragmatic conveying’ in a broad sense so that it may comprise conversational and conventional implicatures, semantic and pragmatic presuppositions, and other related phenomena.
Another trend in the debate is to modify indexical contextualism in such a way that it shows the assumed genericity of sentences like ‘Licorice is (not) tasty.’ According to such approaches, ‘Licorice is (not) tasty’ does not express propositions that contain (only) the speaker (not even at (1a) and (1b)). See Moltmann (2010), Pearson (2013) and Snyder (2013). I concede that some such modifications can (semantically) account for the denial and retraction data. But I hold that, just like so-called group or communitarian approaches that take the propositions to contain all members of the conversation, they can only do so at the expense of not fully accounting for the ‘in the eye of the beholder’ feature. To put the point somewhat differently: utterances of ‘Licorice is tasty. I’m aware that most people hate it, but they just don’t have a good palate for sweets’ and ‘Licorice is tasty. I know that people in general disagree, but they are just wrong there’ seem fine in a context such as (1). According to genericity-based approaches, though, they should sound strange. For a similar objection, see Lasersohn (2005, p. 654). Following Schaffer (2011, 218f.), one might argue that given enough contextual details, we either lose the ‘in the eye of the of the beholder’ impression or the intuition that denial and retraction is felicitous, and so theories only have to account for one of these features per case. I agree that this might be the case given certain ways to specify the background, but I still believe that on certain other (very natural) ways to spell out my case (1), we keep both impressions.
I am leaving aside defenses of indexical contextualism that highlight the idea that Hannah expresses different conative attitudes at the t1 and t2 (that she likes licorice at t1 and that she does not like licorice at t2)—what MacFarlane (2014, 122f.) calls practical noncotenability—and that this suffices to account for the correctness of descriptions like ‘Hannah is disagreeing with her former self.’ For this line of reasoning, see, for instance, Weatherson (2009, p. 347), Sundell (2011, 271 ff.), Huvenes (2014, 147f.), MacFarlane (2014, 122f., 131), and Marques (2014). Such views don’t seem to explain the denial and the retraction data outlined above. For instance, differences in attitude don’t seem to warrant ascriptions of falsity.
For the commonality approach, see primarily López de Sa (2008, 2009, 2015). For expressions of sympathy to approaches along these lines, see Kölbel (2007, 2008) and Egan (2007, 2010, 2012). For the metalinguistic approach, see Sundell (2011) and Plunkett and Sundell (2013). For expressions of sympathy, see Barker (2002, 2013) and Egan (2014). For an expression of sympathy to pragmatic explanations of disagreement features in general, see Schaffer (2011, 219f.).
Note that both (CA) and (MA) only say something about what Hannah pragmatically conveys by her use of the sentence ‘Licorice is (not) tasty,’ not about what she might pragmatically convey by her use of sentences like ‘I (don’t) like licorice’ or ‘To me, licorice is (not) tasty.’
One motivation for Hannah to think at (1b) that, at (1a), she and Sarah should have used ‘tasty’ in such a way that it applies to licorice could simply be that she thinks that since licorice was tasty to her at t1 and since, at (1a), she and Sarah were alike in matters of taste, at (1a), she and Sarah should have used ‘tasty’ in such a way that it applies to licorice.
Here, I am assuming that Hannah is neither semantically incompetent nor what one could call pragmatically incompetent, i.e. she does not have false beliefs about what she pragmatically conveyed at (1a).
Note, though, that to account for so-called eavesdropper data, or disagreements across contexts more generally (see, e.g., MacFarlane (2007, p. 21) and Egan (2014, p. 76, p. 83), the approaches would have to be modified even further: they would have to hold that the proposition pragmatically conveyed at (1a) is that everybody is alike in matters of taste at all times (in the case of (CA)) and that everybody should at all times use the term ‘tasty’ in such a way that it applies to licorice (in the case of (MA)).
Similar worries do not apply to the approach I will suggest. The basic reason is that what I will call the superiority proposition is not cancellable (see footnote 41).
Note also that both commonality and metalinguistic approaches have been criticized on independent grounds. See Baker (2012) and (Zakkou, forthcoming).
Note that, just like (CA) and (MA), (SA) only says something about what Hannah pragmatically conveys by her use of the sentence ‘Licorice is (not) tasty,’ not about what she might pragmatically convey by her use of sentences like ‘I (don’t) like licorice’ or ‘To me, licorice is (not) tasty.’
I think this is completely in line with our ordinary notion of standards of taste: we say such things as that people share a, or have the same, standard of taste.
As MacFarlane (2014, p. 144) puts it: ‘For the purposes of semantics, we need not say much more about the metaphysics of tastes: for example, about what makes it the case that someone has a particular taste, or how tastes differ from each other.’ Note also that Grice (1989, 39f.), for instance, acknowledges that what we pragmatically convey may often be indeterminate to a considerable degree. In a similar vein, we might not have to be able to pin down one exact proposition to the effect that one’s taste standard is the best to get (SA) going. A cloud of roughly equivalent propositions may do. I thank an anonymous reviewer of this journal for suggesting this possibility.
See, e.g., Pearson (2013, p. 137) for the idea that disputes of the above kind may involve a certain degree of pretense.
Recall also Lasersohn’s remark ‘I’ve actually heard people many times say things like Most people have no idea of what real fun is [...]’ So it’s not that we only assume that there is something like a superior standard of taste when the realm of fine art is concerned. We seem to assume it in more mundane realms as well.
I thank two anonymous reviewers of this journal for pushing me on this point.
For particularized conversational implicatures, see, most prominently, Grice (1989, ch. 2).
For generalized conversational implicatures, see again Grice (1989, ch. 2).
If you find this restriction ad hoc, note that it is generally agreed in the literature that certain denial devices cannot target particularized implicatures. See, for instance, Chapman (1996).
Note that (CA) and (MA) might be taken to be subject to the just outlined worry too. To refute it, proponents of them might want to draw on a defense strategy similar to the one given above. So they at least should be sympathetic to it.
Note in this context that, to my knowledge, Plunkett and Sundell, the two major proponents of the metalinguistic approach, have stayed neutral on this question as well.
My argument in a nutshell: the superiority proposition is detachable since speakers do not convey it with ‘Licorice is tasty to me’ and ‘I like licorice’ (i.e. they do not convey it by using sentences which, according to the version of indexical contextualism presupposed here, semantically express the same proposition as ‘Licorice is tasty’); it is non-cancellable since sentences such as ‘It’s not only that I like licorice. Licorice is tasty. But my sense of taste for sweets is no better than yours’ sound strange. (Leaving out the first phrase—‘It’s not only that I like licorice’—makes the sentences sound better. But this, I argue, can be explained by the fact that ‘Licorice is tasty’ has both an egocentric and an exocentric use. For this distinction, see, e.g., Lasersohn (2005, p. 672; 2008, p. 316; 2009, p. 364), Stephenson (2007, p. 498), Cappelen and Hawthorne (2009, 104f.), Egan (2010, 251f.), Moltmann (2010, p. 197), Pearson (2013, p. 106) and MacFarlane (2014, 155f.).)
For a similar verdict, see Cappelen and Lepore (1997) and Schaffer (2012, p. 147). For the more general claim that people’s intuitions tend to be insensitive to the difference between the proposition expressed and the proposition pragmatically conveyed, see, for instance, Bach (2002) and Schaffer (2004, p. 146).
This, again, is not to say that there could not be any other data threatening a standard semantic treatment of predicates of personal taste. It is only to say that those data that have been the topic of this paper do not seem worrisome.
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Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this material were presented at various events including the workshop Mind, World and Action in Dubrovnic, the Joint Session in Stirling, the workshop Tiefe Meinungsverschiedenheiten in Berlin, a masterclass on relativism at the NIP in Aberdeen, Tobias Rosefeldt’s research seminar in Berlin, Benjamin Schnieder’s research seminar in Hamburg, and the GAP-Doktorandenworkshop. I am grateful to all these audiences for helpful feedback. Special thanks to Carl Baker, Ralf Busse, Catharine Diehl, Alexander Dinges, Andy Egan, Filippo Ferrari, Suki Finn, Vera Flocke, Thomas Kroedel, John MacFarlane, Giulia Pravato, Tobias Rosefeldt, Thomas Sattig, Isidora Stojanovic, Maik Suehr, Tim Sundell, Richard Woodward, Crispin Wright, Dan Zeman as well as two anonymous referees of this journal. Endless and eternal gratitude to Dan López de Sa for invaluable input and support. My research on this paper was conducted within the context of the DFG Emmy Noether Research Group Ontology After Quine (WO-1896/1-1). Many thanks to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft for supporting this project.
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Zakkou, J. Denial and retraction: a challenge for theories of taste predicates. Synthese 196, 1555–1573 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1520-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1520-y