Lost Disagreement: On Predicates of Personal Taste and the Superiority Approach

Abstract

Indexical contextualism has trouble explaining disagreements between utterances of “X is tasty” and “X is not tasty” because it treats them as semantically expressing propositions containing perspectives (e.g., judges) as their constituents. They are thus not incompatible. To overcome the problem, some philosophers suggested extending indexical contextualism with a pragmatic explanation of disagreements according to which the speakers of “X is tasty” and “X is not tasty” disagree because they pragmatically convey incompatible propositions by their respective utterances. The main aim of the present paper is to show that at least some pragmatically extended indexical contextualist theories face a serious problem. This is because the pragmatically conveyed propositions turn out to be inherently perspective-dependent, which means that the alleged incompatibility between them does not arise. Moreover, it is by no means easy to overcome the problem of the inherent perspective-dependence of pragmatically conveyed propositions. Although the discussion primarily focuses on Julia Zakkou’s superiority theory, which is rather novel and has not yet been subjected to thoroughgoing critical examination, its outcomes apply to some other theories too.