scholarly journals Predicates of personal taste: empirical data

Synthese ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Markus Kneer
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Data ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Taste Preferences ◽  
Personal Taste ◽  
Predicates Of Personal Taste ◽  
Truth Value ◽  
Linguistic Behaviour ◽  
John Macfarlane ◽  
Context Of Utterance

AbstractAccording to contextualism, the extension of claims of personal taste is dependent on the context of utterance. According to truth relativism, their extension depends on the context of assessment. On this view, when the taste preferences of a speaker change, so does the truth value of a previously uttered taste claim, and the speaker might be required to retract it. Both views make strong empirical assumptions, which are here put to the test in three experiments with over 740 participants. It turns out that the linguistic behaviour of ordinary English speakers is consistent with contextualist predictions and inconsistent with the predictions of the most widely discussed form of truth relativism advocated by John MacFarlane.

scholarly journals Indexical Relativism?

Philosophia ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eduardo Pérez-Navarro
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Personal Taste ◽  
Faultless Disagreement ◽  
Predicates Of Personal Taste ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Truth Value ◽  
The One

AbstractThe particular behavior exhibited by sentences featuring predicates of personal taste such as “tasty” may drive us to claim that their truth depends on the context of assessment, as MacFarlane does. MacFarlane considers two ways in which the truth of a sentence can depend on the context of assessment. On the one hand, we can say that the sentence expresses a proposition whose truth-value depends on the context of assessment. This is MacFarlane’s position, which he calls “truth relativism” and, following Weatherson, I rebrand as “nonindexical relativism”. On the other hand, we can say that what proposition a sentence expresses depends on the context of assessment. MacFarlane calls this position “content relativism” and rejects it on the grounds that it leads to implausible readings of certain sentences and is unable to account for the speaker’s authority over the content of her assertions. In this paper, I too argue against content relativism, which, again following Weatherson, I rebrand as “indexical relativism”. However, my arguments against the theory are different from MacFarlane’s, which I prove unsound. In particular, I show that any version of indexical relativism will be unable to account for at least one of the phenomena that have been standardly used to motivate nonindexical relativism—faultless disagreement and retraction—in most of the ways in which it has been proposed to understand them.

scholarly journals Predicates of personal taste in communication: A case of disagreement

2018 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-38
Author(s):  
Marián Zouhar
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
Personal Taste ◽  
Predicates Of Personal Taste ◽  
Semantic Point ◽  
Context Of Utterance

Abstract The aim of the paper is to defend the idea that, from the semantic point of view, predicates of personal taste behave in communication like ordinary indexical expressions (pronouns, demonstratives, etc.). It means that they express different semantic contents relative to relevantly different contexts of utterances. This is a consequence of the claim that “tasty” (which is our paradigm example of a predicate of personal taste) and “tasty for (someone)” (where “someone” is a placeholder for an agent) express the same, or very similar, semantic contents relative to the same context of utterance. Now this idea can be challenged by pointing to certain communicative phenomena, such as disagreements about matters of personal taste. It is argued, however, that there is an explanation of taste disagreements that is compatible with the indexical nature of predicates of personal taste. Moreover, it is shown that an explanation along these lines is rather natural because it seems to be necessitated by communication-based evidence.

scholarly journals A Sensibilist Explanation of Imaginative Resistance

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Nils Franzén
Keyword(s):  
Actual World ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Recent Discussion ◽  
Personal Taste ◽  
Predicates Of Personal Taste ◽  
Imaginative Resistance ◽  
The World ◽  
The Right ◽  
Evaluative Terms ◽  
The Way

Abstract This article discusses why it is the case that we refuse to accept strange evaluative claims as being true in fictions, even though we are happy to go along with other types of absurdities in such contexts. For instance, we would refuse to accept the following statement as true, even in the context of a fiction: (i) In killing her baby, Giselda did the right thing; after all, it was a girl. This article offers a sensibilist diagnosis of this puzzle, inspired by an observation first made by David Hume. According to sensibilism, the way we feel about things settles their evaluative properties. Thus, when confronted with a fictional scenario where the configuration of non-evaluative facts and properties is relevantly similar to the actual world, we refuse to go along with evaluative properties being instantiated according to a different pattern. It is the attitudes we hold in the actual world that fix the extension of evaluative terms, even in nonactual worlds. When engaging with a fiction, we (to some extent) leave our beliefs about what the world is like behind, while taking our emotional attitudes with us into the fiction. To substantiate this diagnosis, this paper outlines a sensibilist semantics for evaluative terms based on recent discussion regarding predicates of personal taste, and explains how, together with standard assumptions about the nature of fictional discourse, it makes the relevant predictions with respect to engagement with fictions.

scholarly journals Cultural Mediators Seduced by Mad Men: How Cultural Journalists Legitimized a Quality TV Series in the Nordic Region

2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 257-274 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nete Nørgaard Kristensen ◽  
Heikki Hellman ◽  
Kristina Riegert
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Culture Industry ◽  
Taste Preferences ◽  
Professional Expertise ◽  
Personal Taste ◽  
Nordic Region ◽  
Mad Men ◽  
Cultural Mediators

Based on theories about the role of cultural mediators in cultural production and using the TV series Mad Men as a case, this article investigates how cultural journalists in the Nordic countries have contributed to legitimizing “quality TV series” as a worthy field of aesthetic consumption. Key analytical points are as follows: (1) cultural journalists legitimize Mad Men’s quality by addressing aspects internal (aesthetic markers) and aspects external (culture industry markers) to the series, as well as the series’ broader social and historical anchoring; (2) Nordic cultural journalists position themselves positively toward the TV series based on their professional expertise and their personal taste preferences and predilections; (3) these legitimation processes take place across journalistic genres, pointing to the importance not only of TV criticism, epitomized by the review, but of cultural journalism more broadly in constructing affirmative attitudes toward popular culture phenomena such as TV series.

scholarly journals Relativism about predicates of personal taste and perspectival plurality

2016 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Markus Kneer ◽  
Agustin Vicente ◽  
Dan Zeman
Keyword(s):  
Personal Taste ◽  
Predicates Of Personal Taste
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