Joanna Odrowąż-Sypniewska (Université de Varsovie)

Vendredi 10 mars 2017 de 11h30 à 13h

Joanna Odrowąż-Sypniewska (Université de Varsovie)
Associate Professor in the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Warsaw.

Title: "Faultless disagreement and vague assertions"

Abstract: In my talk I’ll focus on faultless disagreement as it appears in disputes involving vague predicates and predicates of personal taste. I’ll propose a contextualist conception of vagueness that combines indexical and nonindexical contextualism. It has been argued that the problem with contextualism concerning vague assertions is that while indexical contextualism makes impossible any genuine disagreement about ascriptions of vague properties, nonindexical contextualism either makes faultless disagreement about borderline cases impossible or else it leads to indexical contextualism. I’ll suggest a new account of unidimensional vague predicates, according to which the content of speech acts concerning clear cases is different than the content of speech acts involving clear cases. Roughly, in clear cases “a is F” means “a is F simpliciter”, whereas in borderline cases it means “a is F-according-to-me”. My solution allows to account for faultless as well as genuine disagreement. I’ll also try to address two possible objections: that faultless disagreement is spurious on my account and that the idea that speech acts concerning borderline and clear cases have different contents is ad hoc.