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In this paper I argue against one variety of contextualism about aesthetic predicates such as ''beautiful.'' Contextualist analyses of these and other predicates have been subject to several challenges surrounding disagreement. Focusing on one kind of contextualism-individualized indexical contextualism-I unpack these various challenges and consider the responses available to the contextualist. The three responses I consider are as follows: giving an alternative analysis of the concept of disagreement; claiming that speakers suffer from semantic blindness; and claiming that attributions of beauty carry presuppositions of commonality. I will argue that none of the available strategies gives a response which both (a) satisfactorily explains all of the disagreement-data and (b) is plausible independent of significant evidence in favor of contextualism. I conclude that individualized indexical contextualism about the aesthetic is untenable, although this does not rule out alternative contextualist approaches to the aesthetic.

This is a preprint of an article whose final and definitive form will be published in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy 2014; the Australasian Journal of Philosophy is available online at: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/.Arguments from disagreement often take centre stage in debates between competing semantic theories. This paper explores the theoretical basis for arguments from disagreement and, in so doing, proposes methodological principles which allow us to distinguish between legitimate arguments from disagreement and dialectically ineffective arguments from disagreement. In the light of these principles I evaluate Cappelen & Hawthorne's (2009) argument from disagreement against relativism, and show that it fails to undermine relativism since it is dialectically ineffective. Nevertheless, I argue that an alternative challenge to relativism based on disagreement is available. More generally, I argue that semantic theory is not answerable to data stemming from 'loaded' philosophical principles regarding the nature of disagreement. Rather, semantic theorists will exhaust their dialectical responsibilities regarding disagreement if they can demonstrate consistency with a minimal account of the concept.Arguments from disagreement often play an influential role in debates between semantic theories.In the recent debate over relativism, for instance, arguments from disagreement have been variously taken to provide evidence either for or against different forms of semantic relativity in expressions such as taste predicates and epistemic modals. This paper explores an aspect of these arguments which has not yet received the attention it deserves: namely, the role of philosophical assumptions about the nature of disagreement in arguments from disagreement. I explore what an argument from disagreement may legitimately assume about disagreement's nature whilst remaining dialectically effective in a debate over semantic theory-that is, to establish what should be considered data to be accommodated by a successful semantic theory, and the extent to which substantive philosophical assumptions about disagreement can be considered part of this data. The aim is not only to establish methodological constraints on the use of arguments from disagreement in semantic theory, but also to shed light on how we should theorise about disagreement more generally. 1 1 I focus solely on the notion of disagreement as a state, rather than as an activity (Cappelen & Hawthorne (2009: 60-61)). A state of disagreement is most naturally understood as a passive concept, arising out of some conflict between subjects' attitudes, and not necessarily involving any active behavioural features such as the presence of a dispute. In the stative sense, two subjects might disagree (e.g. in virtue of inconsistency between their beliefs) even though neither subject is aware of the existence of the state.

Some philosophers writing on the possibility of faultless disagreement have argued that the only way to account for the intuition that there could be disagreements which are faultless in every sense is to accept a relativistic semantics.In this article we demonstrate that this view is mistaken by constructing an absolutist semantics for a particular domain -aesthetic discourse -which allows for the possibility of genuinely faultless disagreements. We argue that this position (Humean absolutism) is an improvement over previous absolutist responses to the relativist's challenge and that it presents an independently plausible account of the semantics of aesthetic discourse.In recent years philosophers have paid a great deal of attention to the putative phenomenon of faultless disagreement. Some have argued that there are certain domains in which there are (or at least could be) instances of genuine disagreement in which neither party is (in some important sense we will explicate later) at fault.1 Popular candidate domains include disagreements concerning ethics and aesthetics, those involving epistemic modals (e.g. 'he might be in the car'), and, perhaps most prominently debates surrounding so called 'predicates of personal taste' such as 'fun' and 'tasty'. Such claims are, of course, controversial and some have expressed scepticism as to whether there could ever be disagreements which are faultless in any theoretically interesting sense.2 Others, though, have not only accepted these appearances at face value but have put them to work in the service of various theoretical goals, invoking the phenomenon of faultless disagreement as, among other things, a mandate for endorsing relativistic semantic theories. In this article we will have very little to say concerning the general debate over whether faultless disagreement -in the sense we will explicate belowis, or even could be, a genuine phenomenon. (Though we hope that the view we sketch will address some reservations which might arise regarding the phenomenon.) Rather we will focus on the claimed link between faultless disagreement and relativism. Arguing that, appearances to the contrary, an attractive non-relativist theory can be sketched which captures both the intuition that the disputes in question are genuine disagreements and the intuition that they are completely faultless. 4 Further, we will not attempt to establish that the view we will outline below provides the correct account of the semantics of the relevant disputes but merely argue that it manages to present an independently plausible non-relativist account of the semantics while also capturing the alleged phenomenon of faultless disagreement. Since the view of faultless disagreement we sketch below takes its inspiration from some of Hume's work in aesthetics our discussion will primarily focus on disputes concerning matters of aesthetic taste but the lessons we will draw are intended to be equally applicable to disputes in other domains where faultless disagreement may be present.In §1 we...