Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

In earlier work I have defended a version of contextualism according to which predicates like ‘is funny’ contribute different properties in different contexts—funny for me and my mates, funny for the likes of you, say—and trigger a presupposition of commonality—to the effect that the addressees are relevantly like the speaker (roughly) (López de Sa 2008, 2015). The proposal has recently received some criticisms, among which: (i) it fails to account facts about disagreement, given that disagreement can occur even if people are not (presupposed to be) similar (Egan 2013, MacFarlane 2014, Marques & García-Carpintero 2014); (ii) the posited presupposition of commonality fails standard tests, notably “Hey, wait a minute” (Baker 2012, Marques & García-Carpintero 2014, Pearson 2013); and it is simply empirically inadequate in its basic predictions (MacFarlane 2014, Marques & García-Carpintero 2014). In response, I argue that: (i) contextualism, in general, is compatible with themetaphysical question concerning the existence of disagreement, as disagreement can be constituted by contrasting attitudes; and the presupposition of commonality approach, as opposed to others, is in a good position with respect to the semanticquestion concerning facts about the expression of (existing) disagreement in ordinary conversations; (ii) the naïve formulation of the “Hey wait a minute” test is independently problematic, and the presupposition of commonality seems to pass tentative refined reformulations thereof; (iii) recent studies concerning folk metaethics seem to partially confirm the predictions of the presupposition of commonality approach (Khoo & Knobe 2016, Sarkissian et al 2011), against what the critics contend. I hope the interest of the discussion to be broader, as it connects with general questions about the very notion of disagreement, how to detect presuppositions, and methodological issues concerning ways philosophical disputes are to be resolved.

References

Baker (2012): “Indexical Contextualism and Challenges from Disagreement”, PhilStudies

Egan (2013): “There’s Something Funny about Comedy”, Erkenntnis

Khoo & Knobe (2016): “Moral Disagreement and Moral Semantics”, Noûs

López de Sa (2008): “Presuppositions of Commonality”, in García-Carpintero & Kölbel: Relative Truth, OUP

López de Sa (2015): “Expressing Disagreement”, Erkenntnis

Mac Farlane (2014): Assesment Sensitivity, OUP

Marques & García-Carpintero (2014): “Disagreement about Taste”, AJP

Pearson (2013): “A Judge-Free Semantics for Predicates of Personal Taste”, Journal of Semantics

Sarkissian et al (2011): “Folk Moral Relativism”, Mind and Language