PhD Thesis by Sanna Hirvonen
Judgments of personal taste such as “Haggis is delicious” are puzzling. On the one hand they expr... more Judgments of personal taste such as “Haggis is delicious” are puzzling. On the one hand they express the speaker’s personal taste. On the other hand it is normal to disagree about the truth of such judgments. Giving semantics for predicates of taste that can accommodate both intuitions has proven challenging. Let us call the phenomenon that the truth of judgments of taste depends on variable tastes 'perspective dependence'.
The thesis discusses two most popular semantic accounts for predicates of taste. Contextualists hold that the speaker’s perspective is an element of the content of predicates of taste. However, the view has trouble explaining what disagreements of taste are about if speakers in fact make compatible judgments. Semantic relativism is a recent framework which is motivated by its alleged ability to explain both perspective dependence and disagreements. Relativists hold that whereas the content of a judgment of taste doesn’t refer to a perspective, it gets a truth-value only when evaluated relative to a perspective.
I argue that neither account is successful, and that their fundamental mistake is to hold that people know that judgments of taste are perspective-dependent. I argue that majority of speakers take judgments of taste to be true or false irrespective of their personal preferences. If such “folk objectivism” is true, perspective-independent semantics for predicates of taste becomes a plausible view. However, a metaphysical presupposition that all the theorists agree on is that taste properties are perspective-dependent. Therefore a perspective-independent semantics will be committed to an error theory. I question the metasemantics behind error theories and conclude that we should adopt a more externalist metasemantics. That allows us to explain how predicates of taste can be perspective-dependent despite of folk objectivism. The resulting 'perspectivist' view can thus account both for perspective dependence and for why people disagree about taste.
Papers by Sanna Hirvonen
A Philosophy of Recipes, 2022
Grazer Philosophische Studien, 2019
Contextualist accounts of aesthetic predicates have difficulties explaining why we feel that spea... more 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.
Subjective Meaning, 2016
Semantic relativists hold that disagreements of taste are " faultless disagreements &... more Semantic relativists hold that disagreements of taste are " faultless disagreements " , i.e. the speakers are expressing contradictory contents while neither of them is at fault. This paper argues that we should distinguish between subjec-tivist and objectivist uses of predicates of taste and only the former fits the pattern of faultless disagreements. Objectivist uses are made on the basis of an objectivist " folk " theory of taste which holds that there is an objective truth of the matter and hence, only one of the disagreeing parties can be right. Moreover, they constitute the majority of uses and hence the semantic theory should primarily be concerned with them. The problem is that objectivism as a metaphysical theory of taste is quite plausibly false. I argue that if one accepts the so-called " principle of semantic competence " (Stojanovic, 2007) as the recent theorists systematically do, the semantics of predicates of taste should be objectivist (i.e. non-judge-dependent). Objectivist semantics coupled with the falsity of metaphysical objectivism about taste leads to an error theory of taste discourses.
There is a long tradition in philosophy of treating morality and aesthetics alike when it comes t... more There is a long tradition in philosophy of treating morality and aesthetics alike when it comes to their metaphysics and philosophy of language. The anti-realist tradition has found both kinds of values problematic, leading to noncognitivist and error theoretic accounts. This paper investigates whether judgments of taste are evaluative, and if so, what kind of values they attribute. Based on Sibley’s (2001) distinctions between different kinds of evaluative expressions I argue that judgments of taste are inherently evaluative. Nevertheless, the values they attribute are not metaphysically problematic as they are response-dependent, thus reducing to perfectly natural properties and relations.
Semantic relativists hold that disagreements of taste are " faultless disagreements " , i.e. the ... more Semantic relativists hold that disagreements of taste are " faultless disagreements " , i.e. the speakers are expressing contradictory contents while neither of them is at fault. This paper argues that we should distinguish between subjec-tivist and objectivist uses of predicates of taste and only the former fits the pattern of faultless disagreements. Objectivist uses are made on the basis of an objectivist " folk " theory of taste which holds that there is an objective truth of the matter and hence, only one of the disagreeing parties can be right. Moreover, they constitute the majority of uses and hence the semantic theory should primarily be concerned with them. The problem is that objectivism as a metaphysical theory of taste is quite plausibly false. I argue that if one accepts the so-called " principle of semantic competence " (Stojanovic, 2007) as the recent theorists systematically do, the semantics of predicates of taste should be objectivist (i.e. non-judge-dependent). Objectivist semantics coupled with the falsity of metaphysical objectivism about taste leads to an error theory of taste discourses.
Lodz Papers in Pragmatics, 2011
Moderate relativists such as and have motivated the semantic framework by arguing that unlike con... more Moderate relativists such as and have motivated the semantic framework by arguing that unlike contextualism, it can explain why there appear to be disagreements of taste. The solution relies on the relativist notion of a proposition whose truth depends on a judge parameter. This notion coupled with the view that contradicting propositions create an appearance of disagreement allegedly enables them to secure the right predictions. This paper questions the argumentative strategy by showing that there are no basis to infer pragmatic data (an appearance of disagreement) from formal semantics (locating an element of truth-conditions to the circumstance rather than propositional content). I then present a way to understand the relativist framework from the point of view of mental representation. The view put forward explains the missing relation between the semantic framework and pragmatics, and predicts why there is an appearance of disagreements about taste.
Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics, 2013
Uploads
PhD Thesis by Sanna Hirvonen
The thesis discusses two most popular semantic accounts for predicates of taste. Contextualists hold that the speaker’s perspective is an element of the content of predicates of taste. However, the view has trouble explaining what disagreements of taste are about if speakers in fact make compatible judgments. Semantic relativism is a recent framework which is motivated by its alleged ability to explain both perspective dependence and disagreements. Relativists hold that whereas the content of a judgment of taste doesn’t refer to a perspective, it gets a truth-value only when evaluated relative to a perspective.
I argue that neither account is successful, and that their fundamental mistake is to hold that people know that judgments of taste are perspective-dependent. I argue that majority of speakers take judgments of taste to be true or false irrespective of their personal preferences. If such “folk objectivism” is true, perspective-independent semantics for predicates of taste becomes a plausible view. However, a metaphysical presupposition that all the theorists agree on is that taste properties are perspective-dependent. Therefore a perspective-independent semantics will be committed to an error theory. I question the metasemantics behind error theories and conclude that we should adopt a more externalist metasemantics. That allows us to explain how predicates of taste can be perspective-dependent despite of folk objectivism. The resulting 'perspectivist' view can thus account both for perspective dependence and for why people disagree about taste.
Papers by Sanna Hirvonen
The thesis discusses two most popular semantic accounts for predicates of taste. Contextualists hold that the speaker’s perspective is an element of the content of predicates of taste. However, the view has trouble explaining what disagreements of taste are about if speakers in fact make compatible judgments. Semantic relativism is a recent framework which is motivated by its alleged ability to explain both perspective dependence and disagreements. Relativists hold that whereas the content of a judgment of taste doesn’t refer to a perspective, it gets a truth-value only when evaluated relative to a perspective.
I argue that neither account is successful, and that their fundamental mistake is to hold that people know that judgments of taste are perspective-dependent. I argue that majority of speakers take judgments of taste to be true or false irrespective of their personal preferences. If such “folk objectivism” is true, perspective-independent semantics for predicates of taste becomes a plausible view. However, a metaphysical presupposition that all the theorists agree on is that taste properties are perspective-dependent. Therefore a perspective-independent semantics will be committed to an error theory. I question the metasemantics behind error theories and conclude that we should adopt a more externalist metasemantics. That allows us to explain how predicates of taste can be perspective-dependent despite of folk objectivism. The resulting 'perspectivist' view can thus account both for perspective dependence and for why people disagree about taste.