Illocutionary Disagreement in Faultless Disagreement

Abstract

: The debates over the problem of faultless disagreement have played a major role in shaping the landscape of today’s semantic theories. In my paper, I argue that even though the existent contex-tualism-friendly proposals explain a lot of disagreement data by specifying various ways in which speakers may use subjective predicates, neither provides a satisfactory account which would explain what all the subjective disagreements have in common. In particular, what is lacking is an explanation of the persistent autocentric cases (La-sersohn 2004), i.e., disagreements in which each speaker utters a subjective sentence while openly and knowingly occupying his or her own perspective. In my paper, I offer a solution which consists in supple-menting the standard contextualist semantics with an explanation of this most problematic class of cases, which is possible due to rede-scribing the phenomena in speech act nomenclature.