Abstract
When two people disagree about matters of taste, neither of them is in the wrong: There is nothing contradictory in an exchange where one person says 'The rollercoaster was fun!' and the other responds 'No, it was not fun.' This is in sharp contrast to disagreements about objective facts. This phenomenon is known as faultless disagreement, and is at the heart of theorizing about subjective adjectives. Despite this fundamental role, little scrutiny has been given to the empirical profile of faultless disagreement. Our experiment addresses two questions: (i) Is faultless disagreement a property of predicates, or of pairs of a predicate and an argument? (ii) Is faultless disagreement a binary phenomenon? Our results show that judgments of faultless disagreement (i) are modulated by the choice of argument, reflecting the prevalence of opinions in the relevant population, and (ii) fall into at least three distinct tiers, suggesting that faultless disagreement is a gradient phenomenon.
Highlights
The finding that all three conditions do not pattern alike goes against the first possibility we considered— that faultless disagreement is a reflex only of the nature of the predicate, unrelated to the object of predication
We find a difference when we directly compare widely-liked foods and divisive foods: Widely-liked foods receive lower ratings than divisive foods (|t|=4.87, p
Our results show that even tasty, the poster child of subjective predicates, does not consistently license an intuition of faultless disagreement—disagreements about tastiness are judged faulty if there is enough consensus about theapplicability of tasty to what it is being predicated of
Summary
If faultless disagreement is purely a reflex of the subjective predicate itself (e.g. tasty, fun, etc), the object of predication should be irrelevant, and the prevalence of the relevant opinion in the population should be irrelevant. Implicitly assumed in prior work, we expect to see comparably high rates of faultlessness in all three conditions, regardless of whether the subject of the sentence refers to a divisive food, a widely liked food or a (nearly) inedible item—in other words, the object of predication should have no effect.
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