Predicates of personal taste, semantic incompleteness, and necessitarianism
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ORIGINAL RESEARCH
Predicates of personal taste, semantic incompleteness, and necessitarianism Markus Kneer1
Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract According to indexical contextualism, the perspectival element of taste predicates and epistemic modals is part of the content expressed. According to nonindexicalism, the perspectival element (a standard of taste, an epistemic situation) must be conceived as a parameter in the circumstance of evaluation, which engenders ‘‘thin’’ or perspective-neutral semantic contents. Echoing Evans, thin contents have frequently been criticized. It is doubtful whether such coarse-grained quasi-propositions can do any meaningful work as objects of propositional attitudes. In this paper, I assess recent responses by Recanati, Ko¨lbel, Lasersohn and MacFarlane to the ‘‘incompleteness worry’’. None of them manages to convince. Particular attention is devoted to an argument by John MacFarlane, which states that if perspectives must be part of the content, so must worlds, which would make intuitively contingent propositions necessary. I demonstrate that this attempt to defend thin content views such as nonindexical contextualism and relativism conflates two distinct notions of necessity, and that radical indexicalist accounts of semantics, such as Schaffer’s necessitarianism, are in fact quite plausible. Keywords Indexical contextualism Nonindexical contextualism Predicates of personal taste Relativism Thin contents Necessitarianism
& Markus Kneer [email protected] 1
Department of Philosophy, Centre for Ethics, University of Zurich, Zollikerstr. 118, 8008 Zurich, Switzerland
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M. Kneer
1 Introduction The mainstream view of propositions is that they are the semantic values of declarative sentences, the objects of propositional attitudes and illocutionary acts, and the bearers of truth values.1 In order to fulfil these roles, propositions must be minimally specific. That is to say, there are certain types of information that propositions must contain in order to serve as the content of belief or assertion, or to be evaluated with respect to truth and falsity. Debates regarding how much information is required arise across different domains. The locus classicus is time: Following Frege (1979), eternalists contend that all propositions must contain temporal information and must thus be time-specific. Temporalists, by contrast, hold that at least some propositions are time-neutral.2 The last few decades have witnessed a broad variety of related disputes: whether meteorological propositions must be location-specific,3 whether propositions regarding epistemic modality require an epistemic perspective4 or whether the content expressed by claims of personal taste must contain a standard of taste.5 Advocates of a thin content view (concerning a particular domain) think that the relevant type of proposition can be neutral with respect to a particular feature F. Advocates of a rich content view (with respect to a particular domain) conte
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