Context Dependence , Disagreement , and Predicates of Personal Taste

This paper argues that truth values of sentences containing predicates of ‘‘personal taste’’ such as fun or tasty must be relativized to individuals. This relativization is of truth value only, and does not involve a relativization of semantic content: If you say roller coasters are fun, and I say they are not, I am negating the same content which you assert, and directly contradicting you. Nonetheless, both our utterances can be true (relative to their separate contexts). A formal semantic theory is presented which gives this result by introducing an individual index, analogous to the world and time indices commonly used, and by treating the pragmatic context as supplying a particular value for this index. The context supplies this value in the derivation of truth values from content, not in the derivation of content from character. Predicates of personal taste therefore display a kind of contextual variation in interpretation which is unlike the familiar variation exhibited by pronouns and other indexicals. 1. PERSONAL TASTE AND RELATIVE TRUTH To many of us who teach introductory semantics courses, the following may be a familiar experience: Early in the course, when one introduces the idea of truth conditions, and of trying to formulate rules assigning truth conditions to sentences in a systematic way, students will frequently ask, ‘‘But what about sentences that aren’t about matters of fact, but are really just matters of opinion?’’ And generally they have in mind sentences like (1) or (2): (1) Roller coasters are fun. (2) This chili is tasty. w Most of the work for this paper was completed before I became aware of Kölbel (2002), which argues for a very similar position (though without the Kaplan-style formalization I develop here). Readers are referred to Kölbel’s book for a fuller philosophical defense of this position, and for programmatic suggestions of a slightly different approach to formal implementation. Linguistics and Philosophy (2005) 28:643–686 Springer 2005 DOI 10.1007/s10988-005-0596-x