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Objective truth in matters of taste

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Abstract

In matters of personal taste, faultless disagreement occurs between people who disagree over what is tasty, fun, etc., in those cases when each of these people seems equally far from the objective truth. Faultless disagreement is often taken as evidence that truth is relative. This article aims to help us avoid the truth-relativist conclusion. The article, however, does not argue directly against relativism; instead, the article defends non-relative truth constructively, aiming to explain faultless disagreement with the resources of semantic contextualism. To this end the article describes and advocates a contextualist solution inspired by supervaluationist truth-value gap approaches. The solution presented here, however, does not require truth value gaps; it preserves both logical bivalence and non-relative truth, even while it acknowledges and explains the possibility of faultless disagreement. The solution is motivated by the correlation between assertions’ being true and their being useful. This correlation, furthermore, is used not only to tell which assertions are true, but also to determine which linguistic intuitions are reliable.

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Notes

  1. Depending on what is at issue, the truth conditions can also be relativized to further parameters: \(\langle {\mathrm {possible\, world}},\;\hbox {taste standard},\;\ldots \rangle .\) In this paper, however, at issue is only personal taste.

  2. Depending on the version of moderate relativism, \(\sigma\) could coincide with Amelie’s personal preferences, or it could be something more complex.

  3. Note that DeRose is writing primarily about knowledge attributions, not about personal taste; he does, however, state his view as a theory about more than just knowledge attributions, and in any case one would be free to adopt it as such.

  4. A logically similar but otherwise unrelated approach is suggested by A. N. Prior to deal with future contingents (1957, pp. 94–103).

  5. Notice that this concerns naive assertions. Sophisticated assertions can easily be useful even when the speakers have dissimilar tastes, as for instance, in restaurants with semantically sophisticated waiters and customers.

  6. These truth conditions—let me reiterate—are for the kind of naive taste assertions that occur in cases of faultless disagreement; for sophisticated assertions such as the ones Lasersohn calls exocentric, the truth conditions may look different.

  7. Imperative uses of the indicative mood are discussed by Ruth Millikan (1984, Chap. 3).

  8. To simplify the exposition, I am assuming that the asserted sentence has the form \(\ulcorner\) subject is taste-predicate.\(\urcorner\) The model is easily generalized to arbitrary sentence forms.

  9. Recall that the interval \([a,\, b]\) is the set of all real numbers x such that \(a\le x\le b\).

  10. But not below the horizontal axis.

  11. But not left of the vertical axis.

  12. Note, though, that McKenna is still contextualist, in a different way.

  13. See, e. g., MacFarlane (2014, pp. 8–15).

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Acknowledgments

This article originates in a dissertation chapter funded by a fellowship at the Syracuse University Humanities Center. The earliest draft was conceived at the Central European University's summer school in 2010. I am grateful to Kevan Edwards, Mark Heller, Jaklin Kornfilt, Tom McKay, Ruth Millikan, Jon Nissenbaum, Bob Van Gulick, and to the anonymous referee for reading my drafts, as well as to Ray Buchanan, Michael Caie, John Hawthorne, and Lisa Miracchi for useful conversation.

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Correspondence to Mihnea D. I. Capraru.

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Capraru, M.D.I. Objective truth in matters of taste . Philos Stud 173, 1755–1777 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0577-z

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