2007) “Talking about Taste: Disagreements, Implicit Arguments and Relative Truth

A number of proposals have been recently made that converge towards the idea that the truth value of an utterance, even once its indexicals and other overt context-sensitive elements have been resolved, still depends on more parameters than just a possible world. Expressions whose semantics arguably requires such a relativization include knowledge ascriptions, epistemic modals, future tense, deontic expressions, and predicates of personal taste. My goal in this paper is to take issue with certain arguments meant to establish that the correct semantics for these expressions must use contents that are functions of further things, such as taste standards, in addition to possible worlds, and that the relevant parameter cannot be seen as an implicit argument lexically triggered by the expression. I will focus on predicates of personal taste, and will try to show that the two prima facie rival accounts are pretty much notational variants of one another. In the first half of the paper, I will argue that the account of faultless disagreement should work alike on the two accounts, and that any case of what seems to be faultless disagreement is either an instance of genuin