​DISAGREEMENT AND THE SEMANTICS OF PERSPECTIVAL EXPRESSIONS
(Lise Meitner project no. M 2226-G24) 


Synopsis

Disagreement is ubiquitous in everyday life. Sometimes it has negative effects, as when it is conducive to confrontation; sometimes it has positive effects, as when it brings about beneficial change. People disagree about many things and in many ways, too. Given our many worldviews and many aims in life, disagreement – with both its positive and negative aspect – seems unavoidable.
Another topic of crucial importance for us is that of semantic content. What do we mean when we utter sentences? How do we manage to communicate? What is the role of context in communication? All these questions involve, in one way or another, the notion of semantic content – a key notion in semantics.
This project investigates the intersection of these two notions. Disagreement has often played a significant role in various areas of philosophical inquiry. In recent years, disagreement has again surfaced as a central theme in semantics – in particular, in the debate surrounding the issue of the semantic content of a variety of natural language expressions. The project focuses on what can be called "perspectival expressions" (expressions for the interpretation of which appeal to perspectives is needed), such as "tasty", "beautiful", "good", the epistemic "might" and "know". In particular, it deals with two mainstream semantic views about such expressions - contextualism and relativism - by investigating recent contextualist answers to a challenge launched by relativists: the challenge from disagreement. In a nutshell, the challenge for contextualism is to explain disagreement in ordinary exchanges like “Avocado is tasty/No, it’s not.” The recent contextualist answers tackled vary from finding ways in which disagreement can be secured to rejecting the notion of disagreement used in the challenge.
By employing conceptual analysis as well as careful observation of disagreement-related linguistic phenomena, the chief goal of the project is to investigate those answers. This, in turn, will lead to a deeper understanding of the notion of disagreement itself, as well as the way in which it can be used in semantic arguments.

​
Outcome

The outcome of the project consists in three papers and a monograph on the topic of disagreement in semantics, as follows: 

PAPER 1: “Minimal Disagreement"
In this paper, I pursue a common, basic notion of disagreement that can be found below the multiplicity of notion recently prposed in the literature. Thus, I provide motivation for having a notion of "minimal disagreement", show how it can be forged and defend it from several natural, but ultimately unconvincing, objections.
 
PAPER 2: “Contextualism, Disagreement, and the Pragmatic Strategy”
An investigation and assessment of the contextualist construal of disagreement as pragmatic; a categorization of the various options (disagreement at the level of presuppositions, at the level of implicatures, about the context the interlocutors are in, meta-linguistic etc.).
 
PAPER 3: “Disagreement in Attitude”
An investigation and assessment of the contextualist appeal to “disagreement in attitude”; an inquiry of what exactly such disagreement amounts to; an exploration of its various facets: preferential (having to do with one’s desires or preferences), practical (having to do with courses of action) etc.
 
 MONOGRAPH: Disagreement in Semantics. Contextualism, Relativism and Disagreement in Contemporary Philosophy of Language. Forthcoming with Routledge (Focus on Philosophy series). 
The book has both an introductory character, elaborating on the nature of disagreement and the relativist challenge, as well as a polemical one, tackling the contextualist strategy described above. Thus, the expectation is that the monograph will clarify the notion of disagreement in semantics and further the debate between contextualism and relativism in significant ways. The book consists of seven chapters. Chapter 1, “Contextualism and Relativism”, describes in detail the views dealt with. Chapter 2, “The Challenge from Disagreement”, introduces the problem disagreement has been thought to raise for various semantic views, especially contextualism. Chapter 3, "Minimal Disagreement" puts forward a notion of disagreement that all parties to the debate can accept. Chapter 4, “Rejecting the Intuition of Disagreement", deals with a strand in contextualist literature that plays down the intuition of disagreement and thus seeks to dissolve the problem. Chapter 5, “Pragmatic Disagreement”, tackles contextualist strategies to treat disagreement in the relevant exchanges as pragmatic rather than semantic. Chapter 5, “Disagreement in Attitude”, investigates contextualist answers that embrace the notion of “disagreement in attitude” known from expressivism. Finally, in Chapter 7 I briefly discuss relativism's own problems with disagreement and point towards open issues in the debate.

Events

Workshop Disagreement in Semantics
University of Vienna
7-8.05.2018
Speakers: Isidora Stojanovic, Sanna Hirvonen, Alexander Davies, Joanna Odrowąż-Sypniewska, Julia Zakkou, Alexander Dinges, Mihai Hîncu & Dan Zeman
Commentators: Carlos Núñez, Tom Fery, Katharina Sodoma, Robin McKenna, Max Kölbel & Triinu Eesmaa, Delia Belleri, Victoria Lavorerio