Abstract
This paper argues for contextualism about predicates of personal taste and evaluative predicates in general, and offers a proposal of how apparently resilient disagreements are to be explained. The present proposal is complementary to others that have been made in the recent literature. Several authors, for instance (López de Sa, 2008; Sundell, 2011; Huvenes, 2012; Marques and García-Carpintero, 2014; Marques, 2014a), have recently defended semantic contextualism for those kinds of predicates from the accusation that it faces the problem of lost disagreement. These authors have proposed that a proper account of the resilient disagreement in the cases studied is to be achieved by an appeal to pragmatic processes, and to conflicting non-doxastic attitudes. It is argued here that the existing contextualist solutions are incomplete as they stand, and are subject to objections because of this. A supplementation of contextualism is offered, together with an explanation of why failed presuppositions of commonality (López de Sa), disputes over the appropriateness of a contextually salient standard (Sundell), and differences in non-doxastic attitudes (Sundell, Huvenes, Marques, and García-Carpintero) give rise to conflicts. This paper claims that conflicts of attitudes are the reason why people still have impressions of disagreement in spite of failed commonality presuppositions, that those conflicts drive metalinguistic disputes over the selection of appropriate standards, and hence conflicting non-doxastic attitudes demand an explanation that is independent of those context dependent pragmatic processes. The paper further argues that the missing explanation is 2-fold: first, disagreement prevails where the properties expressed by taste and value predicates are response-dependent properties, and, secondly, it prevails where those response-dependent properties are involved in evolved systems of coordination that respond to evolutionarily recurrent situations.
Highlights
When people have disagreements about taste, or about aesthetic or moral values, what is their disagreement about? What explains the apparent fact that it is legitimate for people to hold on to their views about the issue under discussion? And what explains that the disagreements at stake are often resilient and persistent? Is there an account of this kind of disagreement that can capture the perspective dependence of a given domain while preserving the sense of resilient disagreement between those with different perspectives?In the recent debate that has opposed contextualists to relativists about predicates of personal taste, aesthetics, and morality, contextualists have tried to resist objections raised by non-indexical contextualists and assessment-relativists by adopting two distinct strategies
Disagreement prevails where the properties expressed by taste and value predicates are responsedependent properties, and, second, it prevails where those response-dependent properties are (i) de nobis;5 and (ii) involved in evolved systems of coordination that respond to evolutionarily recurrent situations
The aim of this paper is to show that a contextualist can explain the resilient cases of disagreement, and, in so doing, take the wind out of the relativist’s sails
Summary
When people have disagreements about taste, or about aesthetic or moral values, what is their disagreement about? What explains the apparent fact that it is legitimate for people to hold on to their views about the issue under discussion? And what explains that the disagreements at stake are often resilient and persistent? Is there an account of this kind of disagreement that can capture the perspective dependence of a given domain while preserving the sense of resilient disagreement between those with different perspectives?. Contextualists have added a more thorough explanation of the practical dimension of the disagreements at stake, for instance appealing to conflicts of non-doxastic attitudes4 Neither of these approaches—the pragmatic or the attitudinal—have been sufficiently developed so far. A further problem for both pragmatic explanations is that we have the impression that there are disagreements between subjects who are not part of the same conversational setting, or do not even interact in any form Both presuppositions of commonality and metalinguistic disputes seem to require that some interaction exists. My conjecture is that the kind of coordination problems that the different types of dispute pose are at the root of our having, as humans, evolved to have the emotional responses we have, to make value judgments about matters of taste, aesthetics or morality, and, crucially, to hear conflicts in the expressions of different personal preferences. Disagreement prevails where the properties expressed by taste and value predicates are responsedependent properties, and, second, it prevails where those response-dependent properties are (i) de nobis; and (ii) involved in evolved systems of coordination that respond to evolutionarily recurrent situations
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