Scholarship at UWindsor

Diagreement, Internalism and Genuine Assertions of PPTs

University of Windsor

The problem of lost disagreement is seen as a problem for contextualists when it comes to providing an account of predicates of personal taste (further referred to as PPTs). If Mary says, “The chili is tasty” and John says “The chili is not tasty” we would take there to be a disagreement between them. However, if what Mary means is “The chili is tasty [for Mary]” and what John means is “The chili is not tasty [for John]” then it seems like the disagreement between them simply vanishes. Peter Lasersohn argues that the problem of lost disagreement causes intractable problems for contextualists who appeal to speaker indexicalism or group indexicalism in explaining how PPTs function. Contra Lasersohn, Michael Glanzberg believes that contextualists are able to provide an account of PPTs that is able to skirt around the problem of lost disagreement. However, a problem remains for Glanzberg in that the only disagreement his account allows for arises in cases where both speakers are not making genuine assertions of PPTs. In order to show where Glanzberg’s account goes wrong, I use the work of R.M. Hare to motivate an account of the nature of genuine assertions of PPTs that is based on motivational judgment internalism. After arguing why we should accept such an account of genuine assertions of PPTs, I then go on to show why Glanzberg’s account does not give us disagreement in cases involving them. Viewed in such a way, we find that Glanzberg has not given us a contextualist account that can overcome the challenge posed by Lasersohn.