A Non-Alethic Approach to Faultless Disagreement

This paper motivates and describes a non-alethic approach to faultless disagreement involving predicates of personal taste (PPTs). In section 1 I describe problems faced by Sundell’s (2011) indexicalist approach, and MacFarlane’s (2014) relativist approach. In section 2 I develop an alternative, non-alethic, approach. The non-alethic approach is broadly expressivist in that it endorses both the negative semantic thesis that simple sentences containing PPTs do not semantically encode complete propositions and the positive pragmatic thesis that such sentences are used to express evaluative mental states. Finally, in section 3 I explain how the non-alethic approach explains faultless disagreement. The following conversational exchange is a paradigmatic instance of faultless disagreement: (A) John: (A1) Licorice is tasty. Mary: (A2) No, Licorice is not tasty. (A3) It tastes like medicine. In this exchange Mary denies John’s assertion, and thus the exchange manifests that John and Mary disagree as to whether or not licorice is tasty. Let us call this the disagreement intuition. Nonetheless, it seems that neither John nor Mary is wrong. Whether or not licorice is tasty is, as we say, a mere matter of opinion, or subjective, and thus it does not seem right to say that one of them must be wrong. Let us call this the faultless intuition. Taken together these intuitions are puzzling: If they disagree, how can it be that neither is wrong? The purpose of this paper is first to motivate and then to describe a non-alethic approach to faultless disagreement that contrasts with the alethic approaches of indexicalism (sometimes called contextualism) and semantic relativism. In section 1 I present a critical review of Sundell’s (2011) indexical approach and MacFarlane’s (2007, 2014) relativist approach. My goal in this first section is not so much to refute these alethic approaches as it is to illustrate the sorts of difficulties they face and thereby motivate a non-alethic approach. In section 2 I develop a non-alethic, broadly expressivist, account of predicates of personal taste † Department of Philosophy, Northern Illinois University. Email: [email protected] 1 For the sake of simplicity I have presented an example which involves two uses of the generic noun ‘licorice’. Such terms raise some issues that are independent of the questions I will consider; to avoid such issues one could replace both occurrences of ‘licorice’ in (A) with ‘this piece of licorice’ and further stipulate that the two uses of the complex demonstrative refer to the same piece of licorice. 2 The faultless intuition is often mischaracterized as being that both speakers say something true. The inference from “neither is at fault,” to “both speak truly” begs the question in favor of alethic approaches. 3 Here I use ‘faultless disagreement’ to designate such puzzling exchanges, without precluding the possibility that one or more of the puzzling intuitions is based upon some sort of error. 4 Limitations of space prevent me from considering a minimalist approach. (See Cappelen 2008.) Also, I consider nonindexical contextualism to be a form of relativism.