AN INTERPERSONAL APPROACH TO MATTERS OF PERSONAL TASTE

LAVI WOLF

Abstract

Proceedings of IATL 26

Predicates of personal taste give rise to faultless disagreements - disputes in which one individual disagrees with another while at the same time none can be blamed of uttering a falsehood. While the theories that deal with this phenomenon differ from each other, they all share the assumption that predicates of personal taste display perspectival information, essentially that of the speaker. This paper examines Lasersohn (2005) as a prime example of subjective theories and raises pragmatic, semantic and logical problems that beset them. Recanati (2007) is discussed as an example of an objective theory and it is shown that this theory also suffers from problems. A probabilistic objectivized account is then provided, which is neither fully subjective nor fully objective yet still manages to capture both the subjective and objective aspects, to explain the phenomenon of faultless disagreement and to avoid the problems of the other theories.



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