On the Insufficiency of Taste Expressivism

Abstract

It is possible to construct situations (with a suitable kind of setting) in which one speaker utters “This is tasty” and another one responds with “That’s not true.” The aim of this paper is to motivate the idea that typical (broadly) expressivist accounts of taste disagreements are unable to explain such situations (although some of them can successfully explain disagreements in which another kind of dissent phrase — like “Nuh-uh” — is employed). This is because utterances of “That’s not true” are typically used to ascribe falsehood to propositions. Taste expressivism has it, however, that when one utters “This is tasty,” one typically manifests her evaluative attitude (which is non-propositional) toward something rather than describes what attitude she bears toward that thing. Another aim of the paper consists in proposing an alternative account of taste disagreements. It is close to taste expressivism in the case of disagreements in which speakers respond with “Nuh-uh” but departs from it in situations in which they respond with “That’s not true.” The account is developed within a contextualist framework according to which taste utterances express contextually enriched propositions that contain judges who evaluate things as tasty or not.