Emotional Disagreement
Résumé
The aim of this paper is to provide some insight into the semantics of expressions of emotional value (such as 'it is sad that'). Such expressions bear striking similarities to predicates of personal taste (such as 'delicious'); in particular, they also generate the so-called cases of faultless disagreement. In line with previous work, I will argue that genuine disagreement is never faultless. What happens is, rather, is that at a first glance, we get both the intuition that there is disagreement and the intuition that each of the disagreeing parties is right, but further scrutiny makes one intuition prevail over the other, on a case to case basis. This, I argue, can be explained by assuming that the lexical meaning of expressions of emotion underspecifies the truth-conditional content of judgments involving such expressions (i.e. the conditions on what the world must be like for the judgment to come out true). After developing and discussing this "underspecification hypothesis" in some detail, I will address the problem of residual disagreement, by which I mean the fact that even once the parties make it clear what is the intended interpretation of a judgment containing a predicate of emotion (or a taste predicate, more generally), it remains unclear on which grounds they could possibly resolve their disagreement. I will suggest that, in such a case, underspecification is even more extreme, in that the concepts themselves over which the disagreement bears are open-ended: whether the concept applies to a given instance or not is not yet settled by the previous uses of the concept. In this respect, residual disagreement can be viewed, or so I argue, as a kind of practical disagreement, where what is at issue is how to best shape concepts that are still under construction.