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A NON-RELATIVIST
TREATMENT OF PREDICATES OF PERSONAL TASTE
Pranav Anand University of California at San Diego Wednesday, May 23, 2:30pm, MJH Rm 126 Recent work in philosophical and semantic circles (e.g., MacFarlane 2003, Lasersohn 2005) has attempted to understand how certain predicates, such as `tasty', `fun', or `possible', can give rise to what Koebel (2003) terms 'faultless disagreement', such as witnessed in the following conversational fragment:
The dilemma discourses like (1) reveal is the following: a) on the one hand, there is a sense in which we assume that the truth of predicates like 'fun' is relativized to a perspectival center (what Lasersohn calls the ''judge''), possibly the speaker; b) however, if that is the case, how could A and B be disagreeing at all, if they are indicating their own preferences (compare the discourse if A had uttered ''That ride was fun for me.'')? Previous treatments have sought to escape the dilemma either by redefining disagreement (Lasersohn 2005, Stephenson 2006) or what the perspectival center is (Moltmann 2005). In this talk, I will present a series of problems for each of these approaches, and suggest treating such predicates in a non-relativist fashion, reanalyzing putative instances of knock-down relativism as a species of partial quotation. 
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