Experience, evaluation and faultless disagreement

Abstract

In the last decade there has been a torrent of work at the intersection of philosophy and linguistics on predicates of personal taste (ppts), subjective expressions like fun and tasty that are (often) used to express opinions rather than matters of fact. In each section of this paper I discuss a phenomenon that has been largely overlooked in the literature on PPTs. In Section 1, I identify a neglected experiential reading of these adjectives (in sentences like ‘That was fun!’). All other theories of expressions like fun take them to express some standing property (like a disposition or preference), but distributional and compositional considerations suggest that the basic meaning of fun adjectives is experiential. In Section 2, I discuss the relation between fun claims relativized to particular experiencers (‘The Texas Giant is fun for me’) and their unrelativized counterparts (‘The Texas Giant is fun’), arguing that previous theories fail to capture the evaluativity unique to the latter. Finally, I argue in Section 3 that it has been a mistake to look to semantic theory for an explanation of so-called faultless disagreement. There is pervasive variability in judgments about fault and faultlessness that undermines semantic approaches to faultlessness.