Abstract
Mark Richard argues for truth-relativism about claims made using gradable adjectives. He argues that truth-relativism is the best explanation of two kinds of linguistic data, which I call: true cross-contextual reports and infelicitous denials of conflict. Richard claims that such data are generated by an example that he discusses at length. However, the consensus is that these linguistic data are illusory because they vanish when elaborations are added to examples of the same kind as Richard’s original. In this paper I defend the reality of Richard’s data. I show that, in trying to make their point, Richard’s critics have focused upon examples that are similar in some respects to Richard’s original but which lack a crucial feature of that original. When we ensure that this feature is in place, elaborations which make the data vanish are not possible. Richard’s critics therefore fail to show that the data generated by Richard’s original example are illusory.
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Notes
I go along with Garcia-Carpintero (2008) and Marques and Garcia-Carpintero (2014) in this interpretation of Richard (2004, 2008). But I doubt that this interpretation is correct. My doubt arises for reasons acknowledged by Garcia-Carpintero (2008, p. 147). Yet, whatever Richard's intended position actually is, it's clear what data he uses to defend his position and this paper is about that data.
Most analyses of gradable adjectives do not attribute this semantic value directly to the adjective. Rather, the adjective is assigned a function from objects to degrees which combines with degree morphology to produce something like the semantic value described above. The positive form of an adjective (which does not combine with any explicit degree morphology) combines with an aphonic morpheme to produce something like the semantic value described above. See, for example, Cresswell (1977) and Kennedy (1999).
Garcia-Carpintero also considers felicitous retractions. I set them aside for ease of exposition but I assume that what's said here for infelicitous denials of conflict also applies to felicitous retractions.
Notably, the example which Marques and Garcia-Carpintero (2014, p. 701) think does give rise to true cross-contextual reports is an example in which it has been stipulated that the context is permissive.
Kennedy denies that comparative adjectives allow faultless disagreement when those comparative adjectives have a dimensional—rather than an evaluative—reading. The example discussed in this section clearly involves the use of a comparative adjective with a dimensional reading.
I call this “the uncertainty account” because Barker and Kennedy speak as follows: they say that if two equally competent speakers diverge in their views about the value of a contextual parameter of an expression in context then there is “uncertainty” about the value.
I think this assumption is incorrect. I strongly suspect that there is often (perhaps normally) an interesting politics to the settling of context-sensitive content in context. For example, see Davies' (2014) study of one way in which a cross-examiner can control the contents of context-sensitive terms employed by a cross-examined witness.
I say that this is consistent with the account, rather than that the account entails it, because the relevant norms might be constructivist. This would close the gap between the two accounts.
Barker (2013, p. 249) acknowledges one exception to this constructivism: he provides evidence that a speaker must be consistent in her use of a vague predicate during the same discourse and that this can undermine the appearance of faultless disagreement. Nonetheless, he does not acknowledge either the role played by normative contextual factors (as opposed to previous uses of the same vague predicate), or the role of contemporaneous context (as opposed to prior discourse) in fixing the correct value of a contextual parameter.
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Acknowledgments
For helpful comments on older versions of this paper, thanks are due to Solveig Aasen, Daniel Cohnitz, Dan Zeman, and the audiences at the KCL Language and Cognition Seminar, at the 8th Semantics and Philosophy in Europe colloquium and at the Tartu Philosophy Department Summer Work-In-Progress Seminar. I thank an anonymous referee of this journal for pushing me to explain the relation of the ideas in this paper to work by Chris Barker and Chris Kennedy.
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Davies, A. Elaboration and intuitions of disagreement. Philos Stud 174, 861–875 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0710-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0710-7