On Hybrid Expressivism about Aesthetic Judgments

Abstract

Contextualist accounts of aesthetic predicates have difficulties explaining why we feel that speakers are disagreeing when they make true and compatible but superficially contradictory aesthetic judgments. One possible way to account for the disagreement is hybrid expressivism, which holds that the disagreement happens at the level of pragmatically conveyed, clashing contents about the speakers’ conative states. Marques (2016) defends such a strategy, combining dispositionalism about value, contextualism, and hybrid expressivism. This paper critically evaluates the plausibility of the suggested pragmatic mechanisms in conveying the kind of contents Marques takes to explain disagreements. The positive part suggests an alternative account of how aesthetic judgments are sources of information about speakers’ conative aesthetic states.

Rethinking the Acceptability and Probability of Indicative Conditionals

“…taste predicates, modal operators). This is undoubtedly true but as far as I know, neither of these proposals is uncontroversial (see e.g., Hirvonen, Karczewska, and Sikorski, 2019). Even if it was the case that these proposals were uncontroversial, it is not clear why their success should tell us anything about conditionals.…”