Predicates of personal taste have attracted a great deal of attention from philosophers of language and linguists. In the intricate debates over PPT, arguably the most central consideration has been which analysis of PPT can best account for the possibility of faultless disagreement about matters of personal taste. I argue that two models of such disagreement—the relativist and absolutist models—are empirically inadequate. In their stead, I develop a model of faultless taste disagreement which represents it as involving a novel incompatibility (...) relation between preferences that I call type-noncotenability. This model is available to all parties in the ongoing debates about PPT, but it points up an advantage enjoyed by expressivist accounts of PPT. In closing, I consider four objections against the model that, while failing to fully undermine it, open up promising avenues of inquiry about the nature of disagreement. (shrink)

Relativists make room for the possibility of “faultless disagreement” by positing the existence of subjective propositions, i.e. propositions true from some points of view and not others. We discuss whether the adoption of this position with respect to a certain domain of discourse is compatible with a realist attitude towards the matters arising in that domain. At first glance, the combination of relativism and realism leads to an unattractive metaphysical picture on which reality comprises incoherent facts. We will sketch the (...) contours of a realist-relativist position called “subjectivism”, which avoids this result by giving up the assumption that the points of view of different subjects are all metaphysically “on a par”. (shrink)

The idea that there can be cases of faultless disagreement, cases of disagreement in which neither party is making a mistake, is frequently discussed in connection with relativist views in philosophy of language. My goal is to argue that we can make sense of faultless disagreement without being committed to any form of relativism if we recognise that disagreement sometimes involves attitudes other than belief, such as desires or preferences. Furthermore, this way of making sense of faultless disagreement allows us (...) to avoid some of the problems that have been raised in connection with relativist accounts of faultless disagreement. (shrink)

Some have argued that the possibility of faultless disagreement gives relativist semantic theories an important explanatory advantage over their absolutist and contextualist rivals. Here I combat this argument, focusing on the specific case of aesthetic discourse. My argument has two stages. First, I argue that while relativists may be able to account for the possibility of faultless aesthetic disagreement, they nevertheless face difficulty in accounting for the intuitive limits of faultless disagreement. Second, I develop a new non-relativist theory which can (...) account for the full range of data regarding faultless disagreement. This view—‘Humean Absolutism’—integrates two of Hume’s central principles from Of the Standard of Taste into a truth-conditional framework, resulting in a non-bivalent theory of aesthetic truth. I argue that Humean Absolutism can underwrite the possibility of faultless disagreement whilst retaining reasonable limits around the phenomenon. I close by relating this positive account of faultless disagreement to broader issues concerning the cognitive role of truth-value gaps. -/- *NB - this is an unpublished paper and is no longer in progress.*. (shrink)

The essay is an attempt to offer a version of conceptual relativism that escapes Donald Davidson’s decisive criticisms of the notion of “conceptual scheme”. Two variants of relativism are distinguished, a weaker and a stronger one, and a clear formulation of what a strong version amounts to is put forward. The concrete proposal involves accepting a version of alethic pluralism. After discussing alethic pluralism in general, and after exploring both strong and weak versions of it, a suitable version is presented: (...) alethic functionalism. The final part offers an illustration of how embracing alethic functionalism may help the relativist. (shrink)