Relativism and Bound Predicates of Personal Taste: An Answer to Schaffer's Argument from Binding

Abstract

In this paper I put forward and substantiate a possible defensive move on behalf of the relativist about predicates of personal taste that can be used to block a recent contextualist argument raised against the view: the 'argument from binding' proposed in Schaffer (2011). The move consists in adopting Recanati's (2002;2004) "variadic functions" apparatus and applying it to predicates of personal taste like 'tasty' and experiencer phrases like 'for John'. I substantiate the account in a basic relativistic framework and reply to several objections to the variadic-functions approach in general and to its application to the expressions at hand.The aim of this paper is to put forward and substantiate a possible defensive move on behalf of the relativist about predicates of personal taste that could be used to block a recent contextualist argument raised against the view -the 'argument from binding' proposed in Jonathan Schaffer's article 'Perspective in Taste Predicates and Epistemic Modals'. This argument has the same form as that used by defenders of truth-conditional semantics against truth-conditional pragmatics about, for example, locations. The argument proceeds as follows: we start from examples of complex sentences that have bound readings, and, by appeal to certain syntactic and semantic assumptions we are drawn to conclude that simple sentences containing the target expressions have a corresponding variable in their logical form 1 that is responsible for the bound reading. The answer I will propose in this paper has the peculiarity that it grants all the syntactic and semantic assumptions the proponent of the argument resorts to, while still offering an escape route for the relativist by employing a certain view about the expressions involved in the argument.I will proceed as follows. In section 1 I will give a brief characterization of predicates of personal taste and then present the data Schaffer relies on, together with various instances of the argument from binding -including the one I claim is implicit in Schaffer's paper. In section 2 I will sketch the solution to Schaffer's . 1 'Logical form' will be understood in this paper as referring to the level of syntactic representation of sentences that is free from ambiguities and constitutes the input to semantics. The logical form of a sentence is (at least partially) determined by the syntactic configuration of the expressions it contains, where 'syntactic configuration' refers to a level of representation that, at minimum, specifies the number of an expression's argument places.

Multiple Indexing Relativism About Predicates of Taste

“…I ignore his criticisms in what follows, not because they are not important, but because I want to focus on showing how index binding can be implemented in a Multiple Indexing Relativist framework. For an alternative way to handle binding in a relativist-friendly manner, using variadic operators, see Zeman (2015). plying any contextual information relevant for the truth evaluation of an utterance of (8), including the values for the two parameters for perspectives postulated-the template for its truth conditions (simplifying greatly) looks like this:…”

The use of the Binding Argument in the debate about location

“…4 A principle Recanati (2007: 34) dubs "Distribution". For a discussion of this principle in the context of employing the Binding Argument against relativism, see Zeman (2015). 5 A similar schema, with roughly the same premises, can be extracted from Sennet's (2008) discussion of the argument.…”