Is relativity a requirement for mind-dependence?

In François Recanati, Isidora Stojanovic & Neftali Villanueva (eds.), Context-Dependence, Perspective and Relativity. Mouton de Gruyter. pp. 317–332 (2010)
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Abstract

According to a common intuition, a property is subjective or mind-dependent if it is a matter of taste whether an object possesses it or not and such matters are open to so-called faultless disagreement. For instance, assuming that funniness is subjective, two people may disagree about whether something is funny, yet both be right. If this intuition is correct, the possibility of subjective properties seems to depend on the possibility of faultless disagreement, which again seems to depend on some type of relativism about truth or facts. Given that relativism is a contested view, this reliance is not a fortunate one for subjective properties. Those rejecting the possibility of faultless disagreement include indexical relativists. In this paper, I argue that the mind-dependence of properties does not require faultless disagreement and that indexical relativism, or contextualism, has the resources needed for a coherent notion of a subjective property. While contextualism may have its flaws, failure to account for subjective properties is not one of them.

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Eyja M. Brynjarsdóttir
University of Iceland

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