Elaboration and intuitions of disagreement

Abstract

Mark Richard argues for truth-relativism about claims made using gradable adjectives. He argues that truth-relativism is the best explanation of two kinds of linguistic data, which I call: true cross-contextual reports and infelicitous denials of conflict. Richard claims that such data are generated by an example that he discusses at length. However, the consensus is that these linguistic data are illusory because they vanish when elaborations are added to examples of the same kind as Richard's original. In this paper I defend the reality of Richard's data. I show that, in trying to make their point, Richard's critics have focused upon examples that are similar in some respects to Richard's original but which lack a crucial feature of that original. When we ensure that this feature is in place, elaborations which make the data vanish are not possible. Richard's critics therefore fail to show that the data generated by Richard's original example are illusory.

Faultless Disagreement Contextualism

“…But notice that in this elaboration a distinction of the reasons why the two assertions are being made is drawn: A was making an assessment for 'purposes of coffee talk' whereas C was making an assessment presumably for other purposes-or else there would be little point in A drawing attention to her own. In other words, the elaboration offered as evidence against Richard makes the whole scenario better resemble example 2 than Richard's original example 1 (For further discussion see Davies 2017).…”

Occasion-sensitive semantics for objective predicates

“…Assuming the context of an utterance is 20 In those cases communication will be at cross-purposes (unless more information is explicitly provided). For discussion of the notion of disagreement by talking at cross-purposes, see Davies (2017). 21 Notice that pragmatic competence doesn't require that the agent knows how to achieve every single goal in all of its aspects (that's too strong, of course) only to be able to c-evaluate partitions of worlds in light of that aspect of the goal concerning which enough common-sense knowledge can be presupposed.…”