Indexical Relativism?

The 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.

In search of the narrator

The chapter proposes a semantic analysis of narrators in fiction, addressing three main issues: (a) in fiction, we cannot rely on reality to determine the identity of the narrator, (b) there are linguistic items beyond pronouns to introduce a narrator, and (c) narrators can be unreliable. It shows how narrators in fiction can be modeled by discourse referents (drefs) in dynamic semantics. At the core of the analysis is the assumption that hearers derive subjective meanings by taking into account all contexts c that could be the context they are in. Combined with dynamic semantics, this captures the intuition that a narrator can be both unique and indefinite. Different types of narrator introduction are surveyed: apart from first-person pronouns, speaker-oriented items like exclamatives, questions, and evidentials trigger the accommodation of a narrator dref. Other items, like predicates of personal taste, can but need not refer to the narrator dref. The analysis is extended to unreliable narrators and narrations about humanless worlds.

A Sensibilist Explanation of Imaginative Resistance

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.

Predicates of personal taste: empirical data

According 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.

Shifty behavior: Investigating predicates of personal taste and perspectival anaphors

Many expressions in language are perspective-sensitive, including predicates of personal taste and some anaphoric forms. This paper reports experiments testing sentences like Nora told/heard from Amy about the frightening photograph of her/herself, with two perspective-sensitive elements, to see whether and how identification of the judge of predicates of personal taste relates to identification of the antecedent of pronouns and reflexives in picture-NPs. This allows to us test if they follow a shift-together constraint requiring them to be interpreted relative to the same perspectival center. Our results corroborate earlier findings on the source/perceiver biases of reflexives and pronouns, and reveal a strong preference to interpret the individual who is the source of information as the judge, but do not provide clear evidence for a shift-together constraint on the interpretation of PPTs and pronouns and reflexives in picture-NPs.

Metalinguistic Negotiations and Two Senses of Taste

This paper defends the claim that the traditional Kantian division between two different types of judgments, judgments of personal preference (subjectively valid) and judgments of taste (intersubjectively valid), does not apply to some contexts in which metalinguistic negotiations take place. To begin, I first highlight some significant similarities between predicates of personal taste and aesthetic predicates. I sustain that aesthetic predicates are gradable and multidimensional, and that they often produce metalinguistic negotiations, characteristics that have motivated an individual treatment for predicates of personal taste. Secondly, contrary to Kant’s claim, I maintain that there are cases where judgments of personal preference are intersubjectively valid; in some contexts of metalinguistic negotiation, judgments of personal preference direct universality to a similar extent as judgments of taste. Some examples of real-life conversations will be presented to illustrate this point.

The notion of “progress” from the philosophy of language perspective

This paper discusses the notion of progress and the idea proposed by Alexander Nikiforov that the term “progress” belongs to the same class of words as predicates of personal taste. This claim is based on the observation that our assessment of progress depends on our subjective point of view. The paper argues that there is a substantive difference between terms of personal taste and the term “progress”. Specifically, it is shown that “progress” does not necessarily make reference to a personal point of view. The subjectivity of our assessment of “progress” in certain areas seems to be rooted in the choice of the scale and our ideas of the ideal state of an object that is the endpoint of that scale. The paper also discusses A. Nikiforov’s idea that the evolution of the Universe can provide us with the objective scale for evaluation of progress in all areas. I argue against this idea by showing that it does not help us overcome the subjectivity of progress assessment in many cases.