Predicates of personal taste and normative meaning

Abstract

The main aim of the paper is to reject the idea that predicates of personal taste express normative meanings. According to a recent theory proposed by Daniel Gutzmann, predicates of personal taste express both a truth-conditional content and a use-conditional content, the latter being normative. The purported normativity of predicates of personal taste is supposed to consist in that when producing utterances containing such predicates, their speakers suggest how other people ought to experience the objects of taste under discussion. The paper provides a bunch of evidence to show there are utterances containing predicates of personal taste that cannot be used normatively in this sense. In particular, it is claimed that one can make such an utterance and then add a related normative piece of information without doing anything redundant; one can also make such an utterance and then deny the related normative piece of information without generating any contradiction or infelicity. At the same time, it is admitted there are situations in which the speakers do communicate something normative by producing utterances containing predicates of personal taste. We thus need an explanation to cope with such cases. Although the paper does not offer one, it provides some reasons to the effect that a correct explanation has to be pragmatic rather than semantic.

Judge-Specific Sentences about Personal Taste, Indexical Contextualism, and Disagreement

“…See(Gutzmann 2016). For some criticism regarding the deontic force account, see(Zouhar 2019(Zouhar , 2022.20 I do not wish to imply that one could not enrich the dual-proposition theories with some other theoretical resources to explain disagreements about matters of personal taste in judge-specific conversations. Apparently, one could do so.…”