Gutzmann, Daniel. 2016. If expressivism is fun, go for it! Towards an expressive account of predicates of personal taste. In: van Wijnbergen-Huitink, Janneke & Cécile Meier (eds.): Subjective Meaning. Alternatives to Relativism. Berlin: de Gruyter. 21–46.
Abstract
Predicates of personal taste like tasty give rise to the puzzle of faultless disagreement: with taste predicates, two speakers can disagree while both saying something true. In an influential paper, Lasersohn (2005) dismisses various approaches to the puzzle of faultless disagreement, before coming up with a contextualist solution. This paper examines expressivism, one of the dismissed options, and argues that the arguments Lasersohn provides against it are not conclusive. It then develops a hybrid expressive approach that combines a simple indexical semantics in the truth-conditional dimension with a deontic attitude in the use-conditional dimension. The first dimension accounts for the faultlessness, as both speaker express what is tasty for them, while the disagreement happens at the use-conditional layer which concers what should count as tasty in the context of use.