LLS Colloquium: Whose fault is faultless disagreement?

On Wednesday 26th April 2023, Deniz Rudin (University of Southern California, USA) will be presenting on "Whose fault is faultless disagreement?".

Talk: Whose fault is faultless disagreement?
When we disagree about whether extra mature Wensleydale is delicious, there’s an intuitive sense in which neither party to the disagreement is “at fault”—nobody needs to have made an empirical mistake about how the world is in order to have arrived at their opinion. That is to say, discussions of Wensleydale deliciousness exhibit a property called faultless disagreement. This seemingly anodyne observation has motivated an outpouring of literature in formal semantics and philosophy of language. To see the problem it poses, consider that on standard semantic assumptions, sentences denote propositions, which are things that must be either true or false. It follows that, in our disagreement over extra mature Wensleydale, one of us has asserted something false. So how can it be that neither of us is at fault?
The responses to this problem have uniformly treated it as a problem for the semantics of subjective predicates, like delicious. Many have taken this problem to motivate a special semantics for subjective predicates, to avoid the guarantee that either a sentence or its negation must be false; some of these proposals require revision of the most fundamental assumptions of semantic theory, like the nature of truth. These proposals assume that the answer to this presentation’s title is: it’s the predicate’s fault. That is to say, there are two bins of predicates, the objective ones and the subjective ones, and faultless disagreement is due to semantic properties characteristic of the latter bin.
This conclusion is too hasty. Prior work has shown that intuitions of faultlessness are gradient across predicates: it doesn’t seem to be the case that predicates can be cleanly binned into the subjective ones, which generate faultless disagreement, and the objective ones, which don’t. In this talk I present ongoing work, much of it in collaboration with Elsi Kaiser, investigating the extent to which intuitions of faultless disagreement are sensitive to factors entirely independent of the choice of predicate. Intuitions of faultless disagreement vary with the choice of object of predication (e.g. chocolate vs. black liquorice); with the relative expertise of the interlocutors (e.g. wine experts vs. laypeople); and with the evaluator’s belief in the validity of that expertise. That is to say, far from being determined by the choice of predicate, these intuitions are sensitive to (1) lexical material other than the predicate (2) properties of the speech context, and (3) properties of the evaluator.
I show that these facts are incompatible with all major prior semantic accounts of faultless disagreement. Though they do not rule out the possibility of a suitably revised semantic account, I will argue for an alternative: that faultless disagreement isn’t about semantics at all. These facts all make sense if we say that the sense in which neither party in such a disagreement is “at fault” is the sense in which both have done the normatively correct thing to assess the situation, despite having come to different conclusions. The fact that that’s easier to do with delicious than with four feet wide or contains gluten is a fact about the world and our ability to assess it in an intersubjectively robust way, not a fact about the formal semantics of natural language. So, the answer to the presentation’s title that I will ultimately put forward is: it ain’t semantics’s fault.

The talk will take place at 3pm, and there will be an opportunity to ask questions at the end. There will also be an informal wine reception afterwards in the Department of Language and Linguistic Science (Deborah Hines Room, 2nd floor). Everyone is welcome!