Relativism and Disagreement
نویسنده
چکیده
It has often been proposed that claims about what is funny, delicious, or likely are “subjective,” in the sense that their truth depends not only on how things are with the objects they explicitly concern, but on how things are with some subject not explicitly mentioned. This thought is supported by the striking degree to which we differ in our judgements about these matters. If there are wholly objective properties of funniness, deliciousness, or likelihood, then most of us must be defective in our capacity to detect them. We are humor-blind, or taste-blind, or likelihood-blind, in much the same way that some of us are color-blind. But this diagnosis clashes with the way we think and talk about these domains. In our judgements about what is delicious, we lack the humility color-blind people show in their judgements about what is red or green. We do not seem to regard the fact that many others disagree with us as grounds for caution in calling foods delicious. We readily judge things to be funny in light of our own senses of humor, even though when challenged we can offer no grounds for thinking our senses of humor are the “right” ones. We readily judge things to be likely in light of what we know, even while acknowledging that our knowledge is only partial, and that others may know more than we do. There is more to say to the hard-core objectivist, but for purposes of this paper let us dismiss her here. Let us also dismiss the philosopher who denies that claims about what is funny, delicious, or likely are in the right line of work to be counted true or false.
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