1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910467425203321

Titolo

Subjective meaning : alternatives to relativism / / edited by Cécile Meier and Janneke van Wijnbergen-Huitink

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Berlin, [Germany] ; ; Boston, [Massachusetts] : , : De Gruyter, , 2016

©2016

ISBN

3-11-040211-4

3-11-040200-9

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (260 pages)

Collana

Linguistische Arbeiten, , 0344-6727 ; ; Volume 559

Disciplina

126

Soggetti

Subjectivity

Relativity

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references at the end of each chapters and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Preface -- Subjective meaning: An introduction -- If expressivism is fun, go for it! -- Doing without judge dependence -- Predicates of personal taste and the evidential step -- Contextualism and disagreement about taste -- Two kinds of subjectivity -- Evaluative propositions and subjective judgments -- Predicates of experience -- Propositions and implicit arguments carry a default general point of view -- Subjective meaning and modality -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

A dish may be delicious, a painting beautiful, a piece of information justified. Whether the attributed properties "really" hold, seems to depend on somebody like a speaker or a group of people that share standards and background. Relativists and contextualists differ in where they locate the dependency theoretically. This book collects papers that corroborate the contextualist view that the dependency is part of the language.

This volume contributes to the debate on relativism vs. contextualism. It comprises a collection of papers that take the problem of “faultless disagreement” as their starting point. The contributors all criticize the



relativist view that the variability in subjective judgments necessitates the variability of the notion of truth dependent on a judge or assessor. They investigate the problem of faultless disagreement by investigating differences and similarities between subjective judgments with epistemic modals on the one hand and predicates of personal taste on the other. Importantly, they also draw on data beyond taste and knowledge, including data from language acquisition. The theoretical analyses are quite diverse. But all proposals are compatible with the contextualist view – that the variability in subjective judgments is an effect of how the meaning of an expression is understood. The volume is relevant for linguists and philosophers of language interested in the problem of faultless disagreement and the semantics and pragmatics of modals and adjectives.