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Expressivism and Crossed Disagreements

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 September 2019

Javier Osorio  and
Neftali Villanueva
Javier Osorio*
Affiliation:
University of Granada
Neftali Villanueva*
Affiliation:
University of Granada
*
javiosorm@gmail.com
nef@ugr.es
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Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to explore the connection between expressivism and disagreement. More in particular, the aim is to defend that one of the desiderata that can be derived from the study of disagreement, the explanation of ‘crossed disagreements’, can only be accommodated within a semantic theory that respects, at the meta-semantic level, certain expressivistic restrictions. We will compare contemporary dynamic expressivism with three different varieties of contextualist strategies to accommodate the specificities of evaluative language –indexical contextualism – truth-conditional pragmatics –, pragmatic strategies using implicatures, and presuppositional accounts. Our conclusion will be that certain assumptions of expressivism are necessary in order to provide a semantic account of evaluative uses of language that can allow us to detect and prevent crossed disagreements.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 86: Expressivisms, Knowledge and Truth , October 2019 , pp. 111 - 132
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2019 

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