ILLOCUTIONARY DISAGREEMENT IN FAULTLESS DISAGREEMENT

The debates over the problem of faultless disagreement have played a major role in shaping the landscape of today’s semantic theories. In my paper, I argue that even though the existent of contextualism-friendly proposals explain a lot of disagreement data by specifying various ways in which speakers may use subjective predicates, neither provides a satisfactory account which would explain what all the subjective disagreements have in common. In particular, what is lacking is an explanation of the persistent auto-centric cases (Lasersohn 2004), i.e., disagreements in which each speaker utters a subjective sentence while openly and knowingly occupying his or her own perspective. In my paper, I offer a solution which consists in supplementing the standard contextualist semantics with an explanation of this most problematic class of cases, which is possible due to re-describing the phenomena in speech act nomenclature.