Abstract
I argue for the possibility of substantive aesthetic disagreements in which both parties speak truly. The possibility of such disputes undermines an argument mobilized by relativists such as Lasersohn (Linguist Philos 28:643–686, 2005) and MacFarlane (Philos Stud 132:17–31, 2007) against contextualism about aesthetic terminology. In describing the facts of aesthetic disagreement, I distinguish between the intuition of dispute on the one hand and the felicity of denial on the other. Considered separately, neither of those phenomena requires that there be a single proposition asserted by one party to an aesthetic dispute and denied by the other. I suggest instead that many such disputes be analyzed as disputes over the selection or appropriateness of a contextually salient aesthetic standard.
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Notes
Following Lasersohn (2005), Stephenson (2007), Egan (2007), MacFarlane (2007), and others, I focus on words like delicious rather than beautiful in order to set aside for the moment as much philosophical baggage as possible. I leave open the possibility that there is a great deal of heterogeneity within the class of aesthetic predicates, and that beautiful may be quite different from delicious in other important respects.
See, for example, Kennedy (1999) and the works cited there.
The situation is not quite as simple in the case of deliciousness as it is in the case of height. Speakers may situate the threshold for tallness differently, but they typically agree on the linear scale along which that threshold varies. By contrast, speakers may situate the threshold for deliciousness differently along a single scale, but they may just as easily employ different scales—possibly incommensurable and not obviously linear—altogether. As I hope will become clear below, these added degrees of freedom are all to the advantage of the view I defend here. Thanks to Ken Walton for emphasizing this point to me.
SD requires that Speaker B’s utterance entail that not-p rather than express that not-p because of dialogues like the following:
(i) Nobody’s home.
(ii) Nuh uh, John is at home.
Such dialogues are clear cases of disagreement despite the fact that (ii) is not a simple negated form of (i).
Of course, certain choices of F and G could still guarantee that the propositions are inconsistent. Those are not the properties we have in mind however. In the cases that are relevant, F will be a property like delicious-for-Alphie and G will be a property like delicious-for-Betty.
See von Fintel and Gillies (2008) for a generalized discussion of relativist proposals.
As van der Sandt and Meier (2003) observe, denials need not take the form of negative sentences. In response to (i), for example, (ii) is a perfectly effective denial.
(i) The cat is not on the mat.
(ii) Yes he is. The cat is on the mat.
Most of my examples of denial involve negative sentences, but nothing in my argument depends on that fact.
The expressions nuh uh and nope are well suited to this discussion because they do not bias the question of which feature of an utterance is being objected to. No I don’t, no it isn’t, and similar expressions explicitly target the propositional content of the utterance by negating a shortened version of the same expression, and are therefore less useful. Some English speakers do not have clear intuitions about the felicity of nuh uh. Such speakers may find nope more familiar, and are welcome to substitute it for nuh uh throughout the paper.
Following the convention of the semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language literatures, I use # to indicate pragmatic infelicity.
SD** cannot be quite right as stated because of dialogues like the following.
(i) I think it’s raining.
(ii) Nuh uh, it is not raining.
As (i)–(ii) show, denials can target the embedded clause of a propositional attitude claim. (See von Fintel and Gillies (2008) for a discussion). Having noted this phenomenon, I assume that SD**, a principle I hope to critique for other reasons, could be tweaked to account for these data, and set this issue aside.
One issue with the above definition is that because it focuses on the felicity of denial exclusively, it rules out some cases of conflicting attitudes. (Disputes like that in (4) (I like Dave/I don’t like Dave) do not qualify as disagreement on the definition above). Issues like this do not undermine my argument, however. The felicity of denial on the one hand and our intuitions of conflict on the other are the phenomena standing in need of explanation. So long as a semantic theory can explain the patterning of those two things, it does not matter which particular combination of phenomena we refer to as disagreement. The definition I employ here is useful because it provides a particularly clear way to explore the felicity of denial which serves as the basis of a usable version of SD if anything does. The question of what disagreement really means is an interesting project in lexical semantics or conceptual analysis, but it is not my project here. See Cappelen and Hawthorne (2009) for a nice discussion of various uses of disagreement.
I ignore here the distinction between descriptive negation and metalinguistic negation, described in Horn (1989), ch. 6. That distinction must play an important role in a complete discussion of the various categories of disagreement. However, it does not affect my arguments here. Metalinguistic negation is non-obligatory in many cases of Presupposition and Implicature Disagreement, including (18), (19), and (20). In cases of Character and Context Disagreement, discussed below, it is not even permitted. If recent work, such as van der Sandt and Meier (2003) is correct—a question on which I remain neutral—then there is no distinction, and the point is moot.
Two notes on naming the categories of disagreement. First, Character Disagreement is of course meant to invoke character in the sense of Kaplan (1989). This is to emphasize that character disagreements concern those aspects of word meaning that do not vary from context to context, but it is not to commit myself to the details of a Kaplanian understanding of word meaning and metasemantics. Secondly, as I discuss below, cases of Character Disagreement involve speakers who disagree about what the character of a word is, or should be. Likewise, cases of Context Disagreement involve speakers disagree about what the linguistically relevant features of the context are, or should be. By contrast, in cases of Content Disagreement, speakers do not disagree about what the content is; rather they disagree about whether the content is true. This disanalogy aside, I think the labels effectively flag the important features of the categories they name.
Ludlow (2008).
This usage of metalinguistic is not to be confused with other uses in philosophy of language—for example, discussions of Stalnaker’s metalinguistic or metasemantic understanding of semantic matrices. See Stalnaker (1978).
In the framework of dynamic semantics, Barker gives a formal analysis of how this information is conveyed. However only the existence of sharpening uses matter for my purposes.
For those keeping track, both Character Disagreement and Context Disagreement seem totally incapable of licensing metalinguistic negation. Although in some ways they reflect disputes about language, they only make available the most robust, proposition-denying (as opposed to assertibility-denying) form of negation. Insofar as the distinction is sound, that fact may play some role in explaining speaker blindness about the nature of such disputes.
MacFarlane introduces a principle very much like SD, called Accept/Reject, and in fact rejects it almost immediately. However, his reasons for rejecting it are orthogonal to the issue here, and the principle that replaces Accept/Reject is similar to SD in the respects that matter. MacFarlane observes that Accept/Reject fails to allow for the relativization of propositional truth to times and to worlds. He goes on to replace Accept/Reject with an alternative principle, Can’t Both Be Accurate, not subject to that problem. According to the improved principle, for there to be a disagreement it must be that “(a) there is a proposition that one party accepts and the other rejects, and (b) the acceptance and the rejection cannot both be accurate.” (p. 24, emphasis MacFarlane’s) MacFarlane’s notion of accuracy in turn builds in sensitivity to times and to worlds: an acceptance of a proposition is accurate just in case the proposition is true at the circumstance of evaluation relevant to the assessment of the acceptance. Despite this added nuance, MacFarlane’s principle requires precisely the thing that I argue is unnecessary: that a real disagreement involve some single proposition the acceptance or rejection of which is literally expressed (as opposed to implicated or expressed metalinguistically) by the speakers. For that reason, the objections I’ve raised to SD speak directly to MacFarlane’s anti-contextualist argument, despite his rejection of Accept/Reject. Thanks to John MacFarlane (pc) for highlighting this issue.
One caveat: depending on how contextual parameters are actually set in discourse, cases of Context Disagreement may or may not provide examples of just this type. In (27a) and (27b), if Alphie and Betty’s intentions to use tall in a certain way are enough to determine the proposition they’ve actually expressed, then Alphie and Betty have indeed expressed mutually consistent propositions. If the parameter is set in some more complicated way, that could turn out not to be the case.
It turns out that containing the speaker is not a strict requirement. That said, such cases present no problem for the contextualist, so I set them aside. See DeRose (1991) for discussion.
There are available to the contextualist more sophisticated versions of group-standard views. See, for example, Glanzberg (2007). The strongest defense of contextualism will show that even the simplest version of the group-standard view is immune to the relevant criticisms, so I set those views aside here.
Though the contextualist can appeal to metalinguistic usage even in these simple cases. It may be that in practice disputes can go either way.
Lasersohn 2005, p. 651.
Similar explanations apply if we opt for more sophisticated versions of the group-standard story. If the group standard is an idealized one, for example, we might say that Alphie, knowing full well what Betty’s actual tastes are like, suggests that an idealized standard must be insensitive to those tastes. Such an explanation posits a parallel disanalogy between (1) and (34) as that suggested above.
Why situations like this generate the intuition of conflict is a question that I don’t have the answer to. (See Gibbard (2008), Schroeder (2010), and Egan (2010) for discussions of attitude-based disagreement). Fortunately, for my purposes it makes no difference why we have those intuitions. It is enough to observe that we do have them across a wide range of cases where speakers express mutually consistent propositions.
Thanks to Thony Gillies for emphasizing this point to me.
For an even simpler example of such sensitivity, consider “John put the rough lens on the smooth table.” Clearly, standards for gradable adjectives must be able to shift over the course of a sentence. (Thanks to Andy Egan, who attributes the example to Ned Hall). See Cappelen and Hawthorne (2009) for more discussion of this type of example.
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Acknowledgements
I am greatly indebted to Andy Egan, Sam Epstein, Thony Gillies, Peter Ludlow, John MacFarlane, Alex Plakias, David Plunkett, Peter Railton, and Ken Walton for commentary, feedback, and helpful conversations about this material. Thanks also to an anonymous reviewer for Philosophical Studies for helpful comments and suggestions.
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Sundell, T. Disagreements about taste. Philos Stud 155, 267–288 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9572-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9572-6