GRADABLE ADJECTIVES AND DISAGREEMENT ABOUT PERSONAL TASTE
GRADABLE ADJECTIVES AND DISAGREEMENT ABOUT PERSONAL TASTE

Summary/Abstract: Contextualism and Relativism offer competing semantic accounts of personal taste predicates. I argue in this paper that Michael Glanzberg’s defense of contextualism from one relativist argument—the Lost Disagreement Argument—is not successful. I show that Glanzberg’s scalar analysis of the adjectives from which personal taste predicates are built fails to capture the characteristic subjectivity of these predicates. I propose an alternative analysis according to whicheach personal taste adjective denotes multiple functions from a set of objects to an ordered scale of measurement of the appropriate dimensional property. This analysis succeeds where Glanzberg’s fails and it favors a relativist treatment of personal taste predicates.

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