Disagreement and the Semantics of Perspectival Expressions

Disagreement is ubiquitous in everyday life. Sometimes it has negative effects, as when it is conducive to confrontation; sometimes it has positive effects, as when it brings about beneficial change. People disagree about many things and in many ways, too. Given our many worldviews and many aims in life, disagreement with both its positive and negative aspect seems unavoidable. Another topic of crucial importance for us is that of semantic content. What do we mean when we utter sentences? How do we manage to communicate? What is the role of context in communication? All these questions involve, in one way or another, the notion of semantic content a key notion in semantics. The project proposed here investigates the intersection of these two notions. Disagreement has often played a significant role in various areas of philosophical inquiry. In recent years, disagreement has again surfaced as a central theme in semantics in particular, in the debate surrounding the issue of the semantic content of a variety of natural language expressions. The project focuses on what can be called "perspectival expressions" (expressions for the interpretation of which appeal to perspectives is needed), such as "tasty", "beautiful", "good", the epistemic "might" and "know". In particular, it deals with two mainstream semantic views about such expressions - contextualism and relativism - by investigating recent contextualist answers to a challenge launched by relativists: the challenge from disagreement. In a nutshell, the challenge for contextualism is to explain disagreement in ordinary exchanges like Avocado is tasty/No, its not. The recent contextualist answers tackled vary from finding ways in which disagreement can be secured to rejecting the notion of disagreement used in the challenge. By employing conceptual analysis as well as careful observation of disagreement-related linguistic phenomena, the chief goal of the project is to show that such answers are inadequate. This, in turn, will lead to a deeper understanding of the notion of disagreement itself, as well as the way in which it can be used in semantic arguments. In concrete terms, the expected outcome of the project is the production of three papers and a monograph on the topic of disagreement in semantics (first of its kind) based on them. The present project stands out in comparison with extant work in the area in two respects: i) it offers a systematization of recent contextualist answers to the challenge from disagreement; ii) it engages, both in a detailed and wholesome way, with those answers, thus furthering the debate between contextualism and relativism.

Disagreement is ubiquitous in everyday life. Sometimes it has negative effects, as when it is conducive to confrontation; sometimes it has positive effects, as when it brings about beneficial change. People disagree about many things and in many ways, too. Given our many worldviews and many aims in life, disagreement with both its positive and negative aspect seems unavoidable. Another topic of crucial importance for us is that of semantic content. What do we mean when we utter sentences? How do we manage to communicate? What is the role of context in communication? All these questions involve, in one way or another, the notion of semantic content a key notion in semantics. The project presented here has investigated the intersection of these two notions. It has done so in connection to perspectival expressions" (expressions for the interpretation of which appeal to perspectives is needed), such as "tasty", "beautiful", "good", the epistemic "might" and "know". In particular, it has focused on two mainstream semantic views about such expressions contextualism and relativism by investigating recent contextualist answers to a challenge launched by relativists. The challenge is to account for disagreement in ordinary exchanges like Avocado is tasty/No, its not. The main results of the project are two. First, it lead to the development of a notion of minimal disagreement that underscores the many senses in which disagreement has been used in the debate focused on, and which corresponds to the intuitive disagreement data (exchanges like the one above). Second, it has offered a thorough systematization of the recent contextualist answers to the problem of disagreement, and a detailed criticism. By this, the project has moved forward the debate and has provided a more comprehensive picture of disagreement and its role in semantics.