A recent view about disagreement (Karczewska 2021) takes it to consist in the tension arising from proposals and refusals of these proposals to impose certain commitments on the interlocutors in a conversation. This view has been proposed with the aim of solving the problem that “faultless disagreement” – a situation in which two interlocutors are intuited to be both in disagreement and not at fault – poses for contextualism about predicates of taste.In this paper, I consider whether this view a…
Read moreA recent view about disagreement (Karczewska 2021) takes it to consist in the tension arising from proposals and refusals of these proposals to impose certain commitments on the interlocutors in a conversation. This view has been proposed with the aim of solving the problem that “faultless disagreement” – a situation in which two interlocutors are intuited to be both in disagreement and not at fault – poses for contextualism about predicates of taste.In this paper, I consider whether this view applies equally well to disagreements involving aesthetic adjectives. I show, first, that it applies quite straightforwardly to predicates like “beautiful,” which presumably generate faultless disagreement. However, aesthetic adjectives like “beautiful” don’t exhaust the aesthetic sphere. A term like “balanced,” for example, while still perspectival, is said to have a more “objective” feel and usually doesn’t generate faultless disagreement: when the novice and the expert disagree on using such a term, we take it that the expert is right and the novice is wrong. I argue that Karczewska’s view has trouble explaining this difference in the profile of the two types of aesthetic predicates vis-à-vis the generation of disagreement. I also consider possible ways of coping with this problem, but I then reject them and propose a different one that is suitable for most views in the debate.