Disagreement about Taste: Commonality Presuppositions and Coordination1

This paper confronts the disagreement argument for relativism about matters of taste, defending a specific form of contextualism. It is first considered whether the disagreement data might manifest an invariantist attitude that speakers have pre-reflectively. Semantic and ontological enlightenment should then make the impressions of disagreement vanish, or at least leave them as lingering ineffectual Müller-Lyer-like illusions; but it is granted to relativists that this does not fully happen. López de Sa's appeal to presuppositions of commonality and Sundell's appeal to metalinguistic disagreement are discussed, and it is argued that, although they help to clarify the issues, they do not fully explain why such impressions remain under enlightenment. To explain it, the paper develops a suggestion that other writers have made, that the lingering impression of disagreement is a consequence of a practical conflict, appealing to dispositions to practical coordination that come together with presuppositions of commonality in axiological matters.


Introduction
Consider the following exchange between two seasoned and reflective food appreciators. They have refined their tastes by training as much as one can expect, and have considered the matter in optimal circumstances for appraisal. Let us assume further that only food appreciation is at stake in their evaluation of restaurants: Noma1 A: Noma is a better restaurant than Mugaritz. B: Noma is not a better restaurant than Mugaritz; Mugaritz is better. 1 Financial support for our work was provided by the DGI, Spanish Government, research project FFI2010-16049 and Consolider-Ingenio project CSD2009-00056; through the award ICREA Academia for excellence in research, 2008, and the AGAUR grant 2009SGR-1077, both funded by the Generalitat de Catalunya; by the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007À13 under grant agreement no. 238128; by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, Portuguese Government, research project Contextualism, Relativism and Practical Conflicts and Disagreement, EuroUnders/0001/2010-part of the collaborative research project: Communication in Context, Shared Understanding in a Complex World, supported by the European Science Foundation within the EUROCORES EuroUnderstanding programme), and also research project Online Companions to Problems of Analytic Philosophy, PTDC/FIL-FIL/121209/2010. Previous versions of this paper were presented at conferences in Cerisy-la-Salle and Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Thanks to Josep Corb ı, Andy Egan, Dan L opez de Sa, and Peter Pagin for helpful discussion, and to Michael Maudsley for the grammatical revision. contextualist contents, they are standard-neutral. For moderate relativists, the evaluation of acts such as assertions or judgments with those contents remains absolute. In the same way in which the context in which a statement is made provides a specific value for the world-parameter, the context also provides fixed values for the additional parameters (here, a standard of taste intended by the subject making the statement). Assessor relativism is a more radical proposal, on which the evaluation of the statement itself remains relative. The values for the standard-of-taste parameter are given by contexts where the statement is assessed for truth or falsity, which need not be any standards that the speaker might have intended. 5 L opez de Sa [2008] has offered an account of the disagreement data compatible with contextualism, by appealing to presuppositions of commonality. In this paper, we want to confront the disagreement argument and defend a specific form of contextualism along related lines. In the next section, we consider the possibility that the disagreement data manifests an invariantist stance we pre-reflectively have. Semantic and ontological enlightenment should then make the impressions vanish, or at least leave them as lingering ineffectual M€ uller-Lyer-like illusions; but we grant to relativists that this does not entirely happen. In the third and fourth sections we discuss different but related contextualist accounts of the data-L opez de Sa's [2008] account on the one hand, and Garc ıa-Carpintero's [2008] and Sundell's [2011] appeal to metalinguistic disagreement on the other-to see whether they might explain the lingering impression of disagreement. We argue that, although they help to clarify the issue, they do not fully explain why such impressions remain under enlightenment. In order to account for this, in the fifth section we develop a little further a suggestion other writers have made on behalf of contextualism, that the lingering impression of disagreement is a consequence of a practical conflict that often exists in these cases [Jackson and Pettit 1998: 251;Dreier 1999: 568;Huvenes 2012: 178]. We will appeal to dispositions to practical coordination that, we suggest, come together with presuppositions of commonality when axiological matters are at stake.
The disagreement argument is a main consideration for the recent forms of relativism. It is not an accident that MacFarlane [2014] begins with a chapter devoted to deploying it against alternative views focusing on the case of taste predicates. We hope to contribute to the ongoing literature by making clear the complexity of the data needed to properly confront the argument. We will show how the initial appeal of both relativist proposals and criticisms of non-relativist views depends on ignoring that complexity. 5 Evans [1983] contemplates the distinction between moderate and assessor relativism (in his terms, T 2 /T 3 vs T 1 ). He points out that the 'moderate' varieties are just semantic proposals which should be accepted or rejected on the basis of semantic evidence, and contends that T 1 (assessor relativism) is something else altogether, which prima facie is subject to a very serious a priori objection. Evans is very brief in stating the objection. Marques [2014b] elaborates on it, along these lines: If assessor relativism is to be normatively distinct from moderate relativism, then speakers should be obligated to retract when their standards change in relevant ways. But speakers are not under any such obligation: it is perfectly rational for reflective and sincere speakers not to accept the commitments with which assessor relativism saddles them.

The Relationalist View of Tastes
There are compelling reasons, we think, in favour of a relationalist metaphysical account of the nature of the properties expressed by 'is funny', 'is tasty', or 'is a good restaurant', of the kind articulated by Cohen [2009] for the case of colours. On Cohen's view, predicates like 'red' signify relational properties like being sister of b, more specifically 'response-dependent' ones such as looking red to subjects of kind S under circumstances C. A similar claim applies to taste predicates, but following usual practice we will speak of relations to a standard of taste. Cohen's Pyrrhonian 'master argument' for such a view notes first that a single colour stimulus can produce multiple, psychophysically distinguishable, perceptual effects in respect of colour, and then argues that there is no well-motivated reason for considering just one of those variants to be veridical. Corresponding considerations offer, mutatis mutandis, the main reason to take taste properties to be relational: Noma1 is a case in point.
As Cohen suggests, this metaphysical view can be given a contextualist semantic implementation. Uttered in context K, predicates like 'is red' or 'is tasty' express properties such as red for the perceivers relevant in context K under the perceptual circumstances relevant in context K or tasty for the standard relevant in K. 6 Given certain empirical preconditions, however, the relationalist ontology is compatible with an invariantist semantics. The precondition is that there is enough uniformity in the relevant human responses in sufficiently well defined situations, or at the very least in the responses within the group of language-users. If this uniformity obtained, it would be appropriate to take the predicates to invariantly denote across contexts that relational property, at least when used to predicate it of a given object in a public setting 7 (in contrast, say, to the case where a non-standard subject privately judges it to apply to a given object). Schafer [2011] argues for such an invariantist view, mostly for aesthetic predicates, but also for 'tasty' and 'delicious'.
Although Schafer makes a good case for the invariantist view, we do not think however that it ultimately succeeds. He might be right [2011: 285] that there is a widespread agreement among human beings on matters of taste about some basic sorts of things, explainable for evolutionary reasons. Nevertheless, our standards are determined by cultural and personal idiosyncrasies to a very important degree. 8 As a result, for many entities in the domain-say, raw whale blubber for breakfast, to use an example of MacFarlane's [2014: 4]-the empirical precondition would fail, and, under a natural semantic option (the one Schafer favours) the invariantist predicates would fail to have a determinate denotation. Because of this, we subscribe instead to a contextualist semantics, along the lines of Schaffer's [2011]. 9 How should the relationalist ontology be understood: as a descriptive proposal, or rather as a revisionary one? Cohen [2009: 146À50] tentatively advances a descriptive interpretation for the colour case. He correctly points out that the folk show some awareness of the main motivation for relationalism about colours, and notes methodological concerns about appeals to folk intuitions and phenomenological data to settle matters of constitution. Nonetheless, the existence of strong 'intuitions of disagreement'-like those in Noma1 for taste predicates-can be taken to show that, even if some folks are informed of the reasons for relativizing colour and taste predicates, that information does not penetrate the source of their most immediate prereflexive intuitions. 10 By taking those intuitions as indicators of the meaning of lexical items, we get an error theory: predicates of taste denote noninstantiated absolute invariant properties. This is just the view that philosophers like Schafer reflectively defend-in a much more elaborate way than can be ascribed to our folk intuitions. 11 Alternatively, following a familiar line on natural kind terms, it could be argued that what all relevant intuitions indicate is that predicates of taste are intended to signify natural properties, and that it turns out that the natural properties providing the closest fit are contextually variable relational ones. On this proposal, the folks' mistake manifested in the impressions of 8 Research about the evolution of taste and disgust, the education of taste, and eating customs illustrates this. As humans, we have a vast menu to choose from, but also a much higher risk of consuming poisonous and otherwise dangerous substances. We have evolved gustatory taste as a reaction to potentially edible things. According to Rozin [1996] and Rozin and Fallon [1987], disgust is the fear of incorporating an offending substance into one's body. Disgusting things are, mostly, those coming from animals (in particular, some animal parts, like tongues and other internal organs). But it seems there is a wide variability in what is found disgusting (and, conversely, tasty) from culture to culture, which suggests that there is a crucial learning period. Cashdan [1994] argues that there is indeed a sensitive period for learning about food in the first two to three years of a child's life. After three years, coinciding with growing independence, children's tastes diminish drastically. Coordinating eating habits with those of the immediate group may be one of the first requirements for survival. 9 On Schaffer's [2011: 192] contextualist account, the lexical semantics of taste predicates involves a covert variable argument, which is interpreted in context as referring 'to either (i) the speaker, via a covert de se pronoun (PRO), or (ii) the typical person, via a covert generic pronoun (PRO ARB )'. (He allows [2011: 184] for other technical possibilities to implement the proposal. Moltmann [2010] provides an elaboration of the generic interpretation.) Schaffer appeals to several linguistic tests to justify this [2011: 191À201]. Thus, the licensing test is based on the observation that taste predicates (unlike predicates like 'tall' or 'sharp') allow for prepositional phrases such as '(tasty) to me'. The binding test appeals to the existence of bound readings of sentences such as 'everyone got something tasty.' We cannot go into the debates that these tests have generated; we just mention that, as Schaffer himself notes, an invariantist like Schafer can argue that such prepositional phrases are not-mandatory adjuncts, as opposed to arguments. Besides, bare ascriptions could be always understood to include the covert generic pronoun and to be set to the standards of the typical person, in accordance with the sort of invariantist view that Schafer [2011] defends. 10 Of course, relativists offer an alternative account of the intuitions, but in the global balance we take relativist proposals not to be an option, and as a result we give their account no credit, on the basis of considerations that, in this paper, we have mostly consigned to footnotes. 11 Assuming Schaffer's contextualist semantics, we could explain the (mistaken) impressions of doxastic disagreement in cases such as Noma1 by interpreting speakers as setting the value of the variable to the generic interpretation. But the proponent of an invariantist semantics would then ask why speakers do not revise this initial assumption so that the impression goes away. disagreement would be a form of (exculpable) semantic ignorance. 12 The actual semantics of the predicates would be contextualist. We will not distinguish further between these two different sorts of error ascribed to the folk by the suggestion that the mistaken impressions of disagreement reflect invariantist assumptions.
Even if an error theory were preferable regarding folks' assumptions about the meanings that taste predicates in fact have, as Cohen [2009: 150À1] points out, this would not be worrying. As in the analogous case of the relativization of temporal expressions such as 'duration' or 'simultaneity' mandated by the true theory about space-time, 13 the true relational metaphysics of colours does provide real, actually instantiated, properties. Hence, many claims that folks make can be interpreted as correct with respect to such true metaphysics of colour. The point applies equally well to matters of taste.
MacFarlane [2014: 4] provides some reasons to question the ascription of error to our pre-reflective folk intuitions, as just contemplated. He argues that ascriptions of taste predicates are governed by the following principle: TP If you know first-hand how something tastes, call it 'tasty' just in case its flavour is pleasing to you, and 'not tasty' just in case its flavour is not pleasing to you.
Compare also Schafer's [2011: 273] Schafer [2011: 281À4] replies that the differences are smaller than MacFarlane makes them seem, and can in any case be explained without giving up invariantism. One might agree with Schafer when it comes to describing how taste predicates are understood, even if, as we have indicated, one disagrees with him about how they should be. MacFarlane also complains that, given TP, the invariantist view ascribes to the folk either chauvinism or overconfidence in their capacity to discern how things taste to the typical person, which is unwarranted by the available facts of taste disagreement. But, first, given that this is a chauvinism or overconfidence endorsed by reflective philosophers, it cannot be so out of the question to ascribe it to our intuitions. Second MacFarlane grants that sometimes 'tasty' simply means (both on invariantist and on contextualist views) tasty to me now; so that in any particular case, if challenged, one can take that retreat.
Linguists such as Lasersohn [2005] and Stephenson [2007] report 'exocentric' uses, as in the following example from von Fintel that Stephenson reports: John, watching his cat enjoying cat food, utters, 'The cat food must be tasty.' But John of course might find such food disgusting. Examples like this manifest awareness of the basis for the relationalist metaphysics (of which we agree that minimally reflective speakers are aware, at least in cases like 'is tasty'). Does this question the error-theoretic hypothesis we are considering? We do not think so. Linguistic recourses include the distinction between 'it is tasty' and 'it is tasty to X' (whether 'to X' is an argument or is an adjunct), and hence a measure of sensitivity to the facts. But this by itself does not question the possibility of an invariantist understanding of 'is tasty'. Moreover, examples like von Fintel's might involve a sort of pretence. John might well go on: 'but, of course, it is really disgusting.' Sarkissian et al. [2011] present evidence that also appears to gainsay the modest form of semantic error posited by the present hypothesis for interpreting our intuitions. 14 They suggest that previous results establishing invariantist folk intuitions can be accounted for by the fact that relevant disparities in the judges were not made salient. By the same token, they suggest, people might feel that one of A and B must be wrong when A asserts 'January is a Winter month' and B rejects it, simply because the possibility that A lives in Canada and B in Australia has not been made salient to them; the impression would vanish when it is. Sarkissian et al. [2011] investigated whether people feel that at least one of the following two judgments is wrong: A's judgment that an action (say, stabbing a passerby to test the sharpness of a new knife) is wrong; and B's judgment that it is permissible, when these three conditions are made salient: (i) A and B belong to the same contemporary Western culture; (ii) A as in (i), but B belongs to an Amazon tribe that has preserved a traditional warrior culture; (iii) A as in (i), and B is an extraterrestrial with a different sort of psychology, not interested in friendship or love, but interested just in increasing the total number of equilateral pentagons in the universe. They found that their subjects (for whose culture they controlled, studying first university students in the US, and then ones in Singapore) strongly agreed (mean 5,5 in a scale from 1 D fully disagree to 7 D fully agree) that one of A's and B's judgments must be wrong when the issue was factual (say, whether pasta is made of flour and water, or rather grows in trees), and also in the first condition. However, they tended to disagree (mean 3,2) in the third condition, and were doubtful in the second (mean 4,4).
The results of these experiments, however, do not provide good indicators about the dispositional basis for the unreflective judgments constituting the disagreement intuitions invoked in the debate confronting contextualists and truth-relativists. Imagine that we ask the same university students whether at least one of the following two judgments is wrong: A's judgment that events a and b are simultaneous; and B's judgment that they are not, making it salient that A's and B's judgments concern different spatiotemporal frames of reference. We doubt that the mean of agreement with the claim that at least one of the judgments is wrong would be very high. But this would at most witness the scientific culture of the subjects, not the pre-reflective dispositions they share with not-so-well-informed speakers vis-a-vis 'being simultaneous with'. Similarly, the proponent of the invariantist semantics might suggest, the results of the described experiments merely manifest the extent of moral relativist sensitivities. It would not be advisable to conclude just from them that there is an indexical for frame of reference or moral standards hidden in the subjects' corresponding lexical entries.

Commonality Presuppositions and Challenges from Disagreement
L opez de Sa [2008] has defended indexical relativism from criticisms based on disagreement data, by pointing out that the proper semantic implementation of the proposal should envisage some presuppositions of commonality that assertions expressing judgments of taste should carry. According to him, the failure of these presuppositions accounts for the data, but Baker [2012] disputes L opez de Sa's proposal. L opez de Sa's proposal will later play a role in the presentation of our own proposal, and because of that we want to examine Baker's criticism. When appraising the issue, it will be relevant whether we take indexical relativism to be a descriptive (as L opez de Sa appears to believe) or a revisionary proposal along the lines envisaged in the previous section.
In our view, L opez de Sa grants too much to intuitions of faultlessness, and as a result he discusses a too subjectivist version of indexical relativism. As Cappelen and Hawthorne [2009: ch. 4] point out, relativists are too quick to invoke data of the sort of Noma1 against indexical relativism, in fact betraying too simplistic a conception of these disputes, one that then jeopardizes their own proposals. 15 As we indicated above, even minimally reflective speakers would distinguish 'is tasty', 'is fun', or 'is a good restaurant' from 'feels tasty to me now', 'entertains me now', or 'provides me with a satisfying gustatory experience now'. Relationalist accounts capture this by ascribing to the former predicates ('is tasty') in default contexts a relation between objects and experiences like those expressed by the latter ('feels tasty to me now'), caused under certain circumstances in a plurality of subjects sharing some relevant features. As a result, within default contexts such as the one in Noma1, those predications have both dispositional and generic features. This allows for a measure of ignorance and error, and hence for straightforward doxastic disagreement. When informed about the reasons for a relational view of taste properties, we are aware that things that are in fact tasty or fun may not feel so (and the other way round) under certain personal or external circumstances. We are thereby prone to engage in arguments on that basis.
Nonetheless, the indexical relativist acknowledges that there must be cases of pointless disputes, in which the subjects are in fact (and perhaps even are aware of) deploying contrasting sensibilities and thereby either expressing different relational properties-or wrongly purporting to express a nonexistent one shared by both of them. Otherwise, the view would not be a genuine form of relativism. We have selected Noma1 as an example of such a case of a 'faultless' dispute-hence, on our view, one not involving any real doxastic disagreement, since it is not the case that they cannot both be right. 16 How should the indexical contextualist react to lingering intuitions of disagreement with respect to such cases? L opez de Sa [2008: 304À5] appeals to an explanation in terms of presuppositions of commonality, on which taste predicates 'trigger the presupposition that the participants in the conversation are similar' in the relevant standard. L opez de Sa assumes a Stalnakerian account of presuppositions as requirements on the 'common ground' (the class of propositions that participants in the conversation take to be known by all, known to be known by all, and so on), which may be triggered by specific expressions or constructions. Utterances carrying presuppositions are not felicitous unless the common ground does indeed include them; or, if it does not, they are 'accommodated' by the conversational participants, i.e., included in the common ground as a result of the utterance. 17 Impressions of disagreement about Noma1 are then explained in that 'in any non-defective conversation . . . it would indeed be common ground' that the participants are relevantly alike, and then one would be right and the other wrong. Of course, the presupposition fails in the Noma1 case, and as a result both claims are infelicitous. Baker [2012] criticizes this proposal. He invokes three commonly accepted tests for presuppositions, and points out that they do not appear to support L opez de Sa's claims. Let us first consider von Fintel's [2004: 271] hey, wait a minute test. Cleft constructions such as 'it was John who infected the PC' carry the presupposition that someone infected the PC. This is shown in that, while it does not feel proper to object to the assertoric content as in (2), it feels adequate to object to the presupposition as in (3): (1) It was not John who infected the PC.
(2) # Hey, wait a minute, I had no idea that John did not infect the PC. 18 (3) Hey, wait a minute, I had no idea that someone infected the PC. 16 Schafer [2011] offers an epistemic account of the 'faultlessness' intuition, consistent with his invariantist view. He suggests that aesthetic judgments are guided by second-order norms (described above) requiring thinkers to project their aesthetic reactions into aesthetic judgments under adequate circumstances. He then argues that, while invoking these norms on the basis of our own sensibilities in making judgments, we might be aware that other thinkers with different sensibilities invoke the same norm with disparaging results. 17 Included in a way that still distinguishes presuppositions from assertoric contents. One of us has argued [Garc ıa-Carpintero 2013] that Stalnaker's reductive view cannot properly account for this, and has argued for an account of presuppositions closer to the one assumed by theorists in the 'Dynamic Semantics' tradition. We will come back to this below. 18 We use '#' to signal infelicity that is not necessarily grammatical.
It is not felicitous to object to the assertoric content with the hey, wait a minute, I had no idea construction, because such a content is precisely intended to be news to the audience. But it is appropriate to object in that way to the presupposition, because it is taken to be information already possessed by participants in the conversation. In so doing, we signal our unwillingness to accommodate the presupposition. As Baker points out, however, this does not fit L opez de Sa's proposed presupposition: (4) A: Noma is a better restaurant than Mugaritz.
B: #? Hey, wait a minute, I had no idea that we shared taste standards.
Further tests for presuppositions are illustrated for the cleft construction in (5) and (6): (5) # It was not John who infected the PC; and what is more, someone infected the PC.
(6) # I have no idea whether someone infected the PC, but it was not John who infected it.
The and what is more test can be justified along the lines of the hey, wait a minute test: it hardly makes sense to purport to convey as additional information something that was already assumed to be known. (6) shows that attempts to cancel presuppositions make for awkward discourses. 19 Again, alleged presuppositions of commonality do not fit the pattern, even though, as before in (4), to us at least the following speeches sound a bit peculiar: (7) A: ? Noma is a better restaurant than Mugaritz; and what is more, we share taste standards.
(8) A: ? I have no idea whether we share taste standards, but Noma is a better restaurant than Mugaritz.
In previous examples, presuppositions have their source in the linguistic properties of some expressions or constructions, and this is the way L opez de Sa thinks of presuppositions of commonality. Presuppositions might also have a purely contextual ('pragmatic') source, as when a foreign colleague e-mails us the day after the 2012 Champions League final: 'Surely you 19 There are contexts where nothing wrong would be felt with related utterances, as shown in the literature on presupposition 'disappearance' or 'cancellation', as in the following variation on an example originally given by Keenan [1971]: 'You say that somebody infected the PC. It was not me who infected it, it was not Mary who infected it, it was not John who infected it . . . in fact, I do not know that anybody infected the PC.' Given that the presuppositions of clefts are, we think, conventionally triggered (more on this below), we do not accept that they can be contextually cancelled in the way that conversational implicatures can. We agree with Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet's [1990: 314À15] diagnosis of these cases: the presuppositions are (semantically speaking) still there; the speaker rhetorically utters their almost direct contradiction, for the purposes of pragmatically challenging and eventually changing contextual assumptions. celebrated long into the night.' Here he is presupposing that Chelsea won the Champions League, that we are happy about it, that we are interested in football, etc. Although these presuppositions are not signalled by lexical properties of the expressions he uses, we somehow infer them through Gricean conversational mechanisms. However, the tests also apply to these purely pragmatic cases, and thus L opez de Sa cannot reply to Baker by revising his assumption about the source of the alleged commonality presuppositions: (9) Hey, wait a minute, I had no idea that there was something to celebrate last night.
(10) ?# Surely you celebrated long into the night; and what is more, Chelsea won the cup.
(11) ?# I have no idea whether Chelsea won the cup, but surely you celebrated long into the night.
These data can be taken to support the error/ignorance invariantist proposal that was canvassed in the previous section to characterize the assumptions that are manifested by our most immediate and less reflective linguistic intuitions about taste predicates. While L opez de Sa assumes a descriptivist interpretation of the relationalist ontology and of the indexical contextualism that goes with it, on this proposal the disagreement data evince invariantist pre-reflective folk assumptions. It is hence not surprising that such folk intuitions do not reveal the presuppositions of commonality that L opez de Sa's account posits. Baker [2012: sec. 4] considers this response and presents two objections. First, he objects that it is not an advisable view on general methodological grounds. Secondly, he suggests that there might be a tension between arguing for contextualism and positing semantic ignorance (because the evidence for contextualism would suggest semantic enlightenment). Against the latter point, we have indicated in the previous section that relationalist claims of the sort we defend are based on data that in no way inform our most immediate intuitions. Along the history of philosophy, claims that some properties are secondary have typically been presented as somehow revisionary, even when based on evidence that ordinary folks are in a position to acquire. Against the former, we have already indicated why this form of error/ignorance is not methodologically catastrophic. The relationalist account offers real, actually instantiated, properties with respect to which many folk claims are good approximations to the truth.
Let us take stock. The best ontology for the properties expressed by taste predicates is a relationalist one, and the best semantics that goes with it is contextualist. On these assumptions, there is no doxastic disagreement in Noma1. An explanation for why people feel otherwise is that they are semantically deluded, by assuming that predicates express properties such as (when understood from our enlightened perspective) tasty for one under proper conditions of appreciation. This also explains why usual tests do not detect the presence of the presuppositions. In the next section, we argue that this set of views, which we find persuasive given the data we have taken into consideration so far, cannot be the full picture.

Enlightened Impressions of Disagreement
In this section, we address what we take to be the main problem with L opez de Sa's proposal, beyond the one that Baker discusses. We will present it by considering the related case of gradable adjectives, for which Richard [2004] advances a relativist account. 20 Examples such as (12) and (13) below suggest the indexicality of gradable adjectives-adjectives that admit the comparative and superlative degrees, intensifiers like 'much' and 'very', and so on: (12) (A, assuming Yasser is 1.96 metres tall, discussing the height of basketball players): Yasser is short.
(13) (B, assuming the same about Yasser, discussing the height of Moroccans): Yasser is not short. The information about differential standards of shortness which accounts for the intuition that different contents are being affirmed and denied in (12) and (13) This evidence can be handled by means of a contextualist proposal, following suggestions about the semantics of gradable adjectives in the literature, such as from Kennedy and McNally [2005]. On a version of this view, 'short' denotes a measure function-a function from objects to degrees on a scale (in this case, of height), itself an ordering of degrees. This allows a natural account of the truth conditions of comparative claims like 'Chicago is larger than Rome.' 'More' (or the corresponding suffix) is interpreted so that the sentence is true just in case the degree that the interpretation of the adjective ascribes to the interpretation of 'Chicago' exceeds the degree that it ascribes to the interpretation of the phrase headed by 'than'. Similarly natural truthconditions are given for sentences such as 'John is 2 metres tall' and 'Chicago is very large.' To deal with the positive form of the adjective, the account posits an absolute morpheme in the syntax of a sentence such as (12), which combines with the measure function denoted by 'short' to yield a function from individuals to truth-values. The function takes an individual x to True just in case the degree of height of that individual is at least as great as the average degree for the reference class, contextually given or, in (14)À(15), made explicit by the 'for a SN' PP.
On this contextualist view, the content of the predicate 'is rich' in an utterance of 'A is rich (for an N)' divides the domain (in any possible world) into two mutually incompatible and jointly exhaustive classes. How this divide is brought about depends on how the line in the scale of degrees of height is contextually drawn, i.e., on what counts as greater than the average for the N in the context. 21 Now, ordinary speakers have impressions of disagreement in analogues of Noma1, which Richard [2004: 225] discusses, advancing an alternative truth-relativist theory. 22 He suggests that the truthevaluation of assertions such as (12) is relativized to 'contexts of evaluation' providing different standards of precision, 'ways of drawing the line'. Thus, to return to our example, consider that C replies with (16) to A in (12), aware that the height of basketball players is discussed, because he has a different very precise perspective on how to draw the line of height for players, which has led him to draw the line for shortness at 1.956 metres.
(16) (C, assuming the same about Yasser as A): Yasser is not short.
The most immediate impressions of ordinary speakers signal that a disagreement between A and C has been expressed. In order to appeal here to L opez de Sa's proposal, we would posit 'presuppositions of commonality' concerning how to draw the line for 'short (for a basketball player)'. The account of the perception of disagreement is then that, in felicitous contexts where the presupposition is fulfilled, there would indeed be a straightforward disagreement between A and C. But the three tests suggest that such presuppositions are not present: (17) A: Yasser is short C: #? Hey, wait a minute, I had no idea that we shared standards of precision for 'short'.
(18) A: ? Yasser is short; and what is more, we share standards of precision for 'short'.
(19) A: ? I have no idea whether we share standards of precision for 'short', but Yasser is short.
Once more, an alternative explanation for the intuitions can perhaps be provided in terms of error/ignorance: the content-relativity to 'ways of drawing 21 See Kennedy [2007] for an interesting and detailed elaboration of Fara's [2000] epistemicist view to deal with the vagueness of gradable adjectives. We prefer supervaluationist accounts, but we are putting aside issues of vagueness for our purposes here. 22 Egan, Hawthorne, and Weatherson [2005: 150] defend a similar view. Richard in fact distinguishes two kinds of context-dependence for gradable adjectives: the one to a reference class, which lends itself to a contextualist treatment, and a different one to 'ways of drawing the line' in the given class. We do not need to go into this for present purposes. the line' in a given class is not manifest to ordinary intuitions. 23 Be that as it may, we can ask this: Will the semantically enlightened (by which we mean those who are aware of the data, embracing a semantic explanation along contextualist lines, even if in broad outlines) still have impressions of disagreement, and, if so, could (the analogue of) L opez de Sa's proposal account for them? With many writers-even some who are otherwise sympathetic to relativism-we think that the relevant judgment of disagreement (i.e., the perception that both parties cannot be right) simply vanishes, once the semantic situation has been made clear. 24 A might well correctly react to (16) thus: (20) (A reacting to C's assertion): That does not contradict what I said; I was just saying that Yasser is short for a basketball player on rough estimates for the purposes of coffee talk. I was not contemplating your own estimate; thus I was not wrong.
In the previous section we assumed an account of presuppositions in the Stalnakerian tradition, on which speech acts are made in a context constituted by a set of propositions taken to be 'common ground', and presuppositions are requirements on that set. In this tradition, assertion is understood as a proposal to update the common ground. On this view, given contextualist assumptions about the semantics of gradable adjectives, the presence of presuppositions of commonality about where to draw the line follows from general requirements of rationality ensuing from this conception of assertion, which Stalnaker [1999: 88À92] articulates. 25 The Baker-like intuitions in (17)À(19) might simply reflect the folk semantic ignorance. We submit that enlightened speakers will either simply lack them, or reject them as M€ uller-Lyer like illusions ensuing from an unenlightened competence, the way A does in (20). Now, we have cautiously qualified as 'relevant' the judgments of disagreement we take to vanish on becoming semantically enlightened, because one might nonetheless still perceive some disagreement between A and C. A proposal along the lines of L opez de Sa's might contribute to explaining such perceptions in some cases. Garc ıa-Carpintero [2008] offers a related alternative 'metalinguistic' explanation of the remaining impressions of disagreement. It goes as follows. Barker [2002] points out that sentences such as 'Yasser is short' could be used in contexts where Yasser's height is common knowledge, in reply to a question about what counts as being tall in such a context. These 'metalinguistic uses', as Barker calls them, are intended to provide information about the contextual standards of precision for 'short'. This is complementary to L opez de Sa's proposal, in that the goal might be 23 As a referee pointed out, another explanation is that the presupposition is stated in a complicated technical jargon including metalinguistic references. Note, however, that a similar point can be made regarding the previous cases (4)À(8). Presuppositions are taken to be common knowledge, so L opez de Sa is committed to their being somehow accessible to speakers. In any case, it will transpire, our interest in this section has to do with the responses of 'enlightened' speakers, capable of understanding the semantic proposals. 24  to secure its being true that 'commonality presuppositions' are in place. Similar uses of 'Yasser is short' might be intended instead as an invitation for conversational participants to fix the contextual standard of precision along the lines of the speaker's, by accommodating its presupposed standards of precision. 26 Mutatis mutandis, we can understand a negative reply, 'Yasser is not short,' as a refusal to accommodate, as sticking to alternative standards. 27 These are uses of negation with some of the features of the phenomenon that Horn [1989] characterizes as 'metalinguistic negation'. 28 This is a pragmatic form of objecting to different aspects of a statement (presuppositions, implicatures, even intonation or pronunciation), without necessarily objecting to its content: 'I do not have a car, I have a Ferrari.' Hence our previous caution: the two complementary proposals we have contemplated in order to account for a remaining sense of disagreement among semantically enlightened speakers-L opez de Sa's, and something akin to metalinguistic negation-are not intended to capture an impression of doxastic disagreement, on which both parties cannot be right about the semantic content at stake. 29 We have already claimed that any such impression would vanish under enlightenment. Now, this is precisely what we take to be the main objection to L opez de Sa's proposal (of which he is well aware: L opez de Sa [2008: 307À8]). 30 Once it is clear that an apparent doxastic disagreement is explained by mistakes about contextual presuppositions, the impression of disagreement vanishes. Thus, imagine that A asserts 'He is Scottish' because she takes a visible male to be the salient one referred by 'he' in that context; and that B objects, 'He is not Scottish,' because she rather takes the salient one to be the person the previous discourse was about. The relevant impression of disagreement 26 Richard [2004: 226] makes a similar proposal in reply to what we take to be the central objection to assessment-relativism we mentioned above [cf. Marques 2014b]. As our discussion shows, by themselves these alternative interpretations of assertions are compatible with contextualist and with relativist proposals; we do not think they offer a sufficient response to the challenge for assertion-relativists, but we are not focusing on this here. 27 Richard [2004: 221À2] considers and rejects this 'metalinguistic' account of the disagreement. He has three objections. (i) The parties need not be part of the same conversation. L opez de Sa [2008: 307] has a good reply: in perceiving the disagreement along the lines that the proposal suggests, we are imagining the subjects as being part of a common conversation. (ii) The proposal does not capture the phenomenology of speakers, who would not think of themselves to be sharpening indeterminate usage. But while this might be right about the phenomenology accompanying pre-reflective impressions, we are only considering remaining impressions of disagreement among the enlightened. (iii) The proposal does not capture any disagreement in the fundamental sense (on which one party affirms, and the other denies, the semantic content of the utterances). This we grant, but it begs the question simply to insist that there remains some such disagreement for which to account. 28 Cf. Carston's [1998] illuminating discussion. 29 Sundell [2011] rejects the disagreement-based arguments against contextualist accounts along lines we find congenial: both intuitive impressions of disagreement, and disagreement indicated by uses of linguistic denial, are compatible with the absence of some forms of doxastic disagreement-where what one party asserts contradicts what the other asserts. He illustrates this with Barker's metalinguistic uses of gradable adjectives. Sundell [2011: 276n, 279n;cf. Plunkett and Sundell 2013] provides good reasons for accepting that the relevant cases differ significantly from paradigm examples of metalinguistic negation. 30 L opez de Sa (forthcoming) indicates that he agrees with us that there is a form of disagreement that cannot be explained by his proposal, because such disagreement remains among the enlightened when it is manifest that the context does not meet presuppositions of commonality, while the disagreement goes away in analogous cases such as that of gradable adjectives. He also agrees with us that such remaining disagreement is to be explained along practical lines, perhaps like those discussed in the next section. His paper clarifies that the discussion in L opez de Sa [2008: 307À8] was not an attempt to explain correct impressions of disagreement (impressions that do track some disagreement), but merely disagreement expressible in the 'it is tasty-no, it isn't' format. would vanish when the non-alignment of their referential presuppositions is made clear. A disagreement about a 'metalinguistic proposition' expressible with A's utterance (concerning who is the salient male in the context, and thus who is the referent of 'he') might still remain, specially if participants have common knowledge about the nationalities of the visible male and the one previously spoken about, and if B places a proper emphasis on her token of 'he'. B's objection would be similar to the one metalinguistically expressed with 'He is not Scottish, because he is not the person we were speaking about,' with the proper intonation on the first token of 'he' required to make the interpretation clearer.
Nevertheless, there is another form of disagreement present in cases like Noma1, which has not yet been accounted for. The case for relativism ultimately rests on the persistency of the impression of disagreement, which we grant exists, even under enlightenment about the relativity to standards of the denoted properties, the significant difference in the standards at stake, and the absence of an explicit intention to be making a conflicting metalinguistic claim. 31 To sum up, intuitions of disagreement do not call for any truth-relativization. Pre-reflective impressions that speakers cannot both be right do not have theoretical authority, and vanish among the enlightened: what one asserts and the other denies are independent claims. There might remain a 'metalinguistic' disagreement, but this is irrelevant for the debate confronting contextualists and truth-relativists, because the former can easily accommodate it. Nevertheless, we think that a full account of disagreements involving taste predicates as in Noma1 has not yet been given. We plan to point, in the next section, to what is missing.

Presuppositions of Commonality and Coordination Problems
Let us, then, go back to impressions of disagreement among the enlightened regarding the cases on which we are focusing-predicates of taste. As we just said, we feel that those impressions remain, and that neither the metalinguistic nor the presuppositional account does them full justice. We want to account for them by appealing to a distinction Stevenson [1963: 1À2] makes between 'disagreement in belief' and 'disagreement in attitude'.
Given that beliefs are attitudes too, we will speak of doxastic disagreement and disagreement in pro-attitudes, which corresponds very roughly to what Stevenson has in mind, 'any psychological disposition of being for or against something . . . love and hate are relatively specific kinds of attitudes, as are approval and disapproval, and so on.' What Stevenson refers to with 'disagreement in belief' corresponds, also roughly, to the notion of doxastic disagreement we described in the introduction: the relation between two agents that holds when they cannot both be right about something. We believe that what explains the residual impression of disagreement among the enlightened is that disagreements about taste are often partly non-doxastic. We cannot offer a full account of non-doxastic disagreement here, but we will offer a brief explanation.
Let us look again at the disagreement between enlightened subjects in Noma1: Noma1 A: Noma is a better restaurant than Mugaritz.
B: Noma is not a better restaurant than Mugaritz; Mugaritz is better.
The resilient disagreement that remains between A and B cannot be doxastic, as described here. If what they assert counted as a doxastic disagreement, then either A would be absolutely right about Noma's quality, or B would be absolutely right, but not both. At first sight, A and B hold a dispute about the relative quality of two restaurants along a particular value scale for gourmet restaurants. Since A and B are enlightened experts, they realize that they do not share the same value scale, i.e., they do not presuppose that they share a common standard. We are assuming here a relational dispositional account of value (as illustrated in section 2, by analogy with the case of colour). On this understanding of values, A states that Noma is the restaurant favoured by subjects of a certain kind (A's kind, presumably) in circumstances C, and B states that Mugaritz is favoured by subjects of a certain kind (B's kind) in circumstances C. We, A, and B know that each kind of person favours different kinds of restaurants. Notice here that if the dispositional account of value required only the self-ascription of a de se disposition (the speaker's self-ascription of the disposition to favour such and such kinds of restaurants, say), then we still would not have a doxastic disagreement, since each speaker is presumably right (qua expert) to self-ascribe the disposition to favour one restaurant.
The possibility that enlightened speakers continue to discuss, even though they realize that they are differently disposed towards restaurants, because they are attempting to negotiate a common or shared standard, is thus plausible. The question that arises when we realize that speakers may engage in metalinguistic negotiations as to what response is adequate is this: Why do people try to converge on a common response, and enter into conflicts when this does not occur?
Like other authors, we submit that what remains is a non-doxastic disagreement or conflict, and that such a conflict of attitudes is what drives negotiations and disputes over the selection of standards. The alternative notion of disagreement we are contemplating is a conflict of pro-attitudes. 32 But it is one thing to point towards conflicting pro-attitudes; it is another to explain why pro-attitudes conflict. Invoking Lewis's [2000] distinction between desiring alike and agreeing in desire, we can appreciate that the fact of two people having different desires and dispositions does not by itself amount to a conflict of pro-attitudes. There are cases where people desire alike and are in conflict: for instance, two people who both desire to have the last piece of cake desire alike, but are in conflict. And there are cases of people who do not desire alike and are not in conflict: for instance, if one desires to have the last piece of cake and the other could not eat any more cake. This indicates that having different desires is not a necessary condition of conflicting attitudes.
Our suggestion is that, as Lewis indicated, it is the preclusion of joint satisfaction (at the same world) that amounts to a conflict of desires. However, a problem with disagreement in desires in this sense is that, for instance in Noma1, the fact that A and B individually have different dispositions and desires towards food does not preclude the satisfaction of their desires at the same world. If they disagree in desires, it must be because what is desired precludes satisfaction. This requires that we rethink the content of the desires. Note that A and B cannot both be satisfied at the same world if the relevant desires are about them collectively: A desires that we find Noma a better restaurant, B desires that we find Mugaritz a better restaurant. Their desires would not be de se, but de nobis (as we might call them, by analogy with the individual case). If A's desire is satisfied, then they both find Noma the best restaurant. If B's desire is satisfied, then they both find Mugaritz the best restaurant. If A finds Noma the best, and B finds Mugaritz the best, they disagree in desires, since it is not the case that 'exactly the same world' satisfies them.
It was not the focus of this paper to explain why we have such de nobis desires and dispositions. We offer nonetheless some support for the hypothesis below. The suggestion is that, in specific cases involving evaluations, we tend to use the invariant form 'x is better than y' because we assume that others share the same dispositions. It may turn out that that is not the case, and nonetheless there is the perception, we grant, that there is a resilient sense of disagreement. The present suggestion is that people desire that others respond in similar ways (in some specific kinds of cases).
In a similar vein, several authors claim that first-person plural intentions, i.e., intentions in the we-mode, play a fundamental role in interaction, cooperation, and shared agency. Recently, for example, Gallotti and Frith [2013: 161], in the context of considering the role of collective intentionality in group agency and interpersonal understanding, propose that 'individuals engaged in joint action have a broader understanding of the behavior of their partners, and thus of options available for action, by representing aspects of the interactive scene in the we-mode.' Gallotti and Frith defend the thesis that interacting agents represent their contributions to joint action as contributions to something that they are going to pursue together, as a 'we'.
Bacharach [2006] and Gold and Sugden [2007] have argued that decision-theoretic reasoning irreducibly involving a group with which agents identify (typically by expressing their attitudes with an irreducibly firstpersonal 'we') is needed to account for humans' distinguishing tendency to cooperation. This is manifested by actual behaviour in, and normative judgment about, situations game-theoretically modelled by schemas such as Hi-Lo, Stag/Rabbit Hunting, Battle-of-the-Sexes, and, most famously, the Prisoner's Dilemma. Thus, in Hi-Lo players have to choose one of two labels, A and B; if they both choose A, they get €100; if they both choose B, they both get €10; otherwise, they get nothing. Outcomes <A, A> and <B, B> are both Nash equilibria (a sequence of strategies, one for each player, such that it is optimal for each player to follow the corresponding strategy in the sequence, given that the other players follow theirs). As Bacharach [2006, 44À7] shows, on ordinary decision-theoretic assumptions about subjective rationality, it cannot be explained why the former should be preferred to the latter. Both Bacharach [2006] and Gold and Sudgen [2007] show how 'team thinking' (reasoning concerning what we should do) assuming group identification deals with this problem (and the other game-theoretical situations previously mentioned) in agreement with our intuitions and practice. 33 Recent work on shared agency and on the rationality of team reasoning posit, then, attitudes about us, i.e., about a group with which an agent identifies. We may call these de nobis intentions. The present suggestion extends these de nobis attitudes to desires and dispositions. Just as collective de nobis intentions play a role in the explanation of shared agency and cooperation, de nobis desires can be presumed to play a similar explanatory role. The explanatory hypothesis is that having de nobis desires are conducive to the coordination of behaviour towards common goals. 34 As an illustration, in Noma1, A and B as expert food critics may have the common goal of preparing the ranking of the world's 50 best restaurants, and hence it is relevant that they come to have the same, or at least converging, preferences.
Note however that this is a simplified caricature of the view. We cannot expect that, as a matter of fact, whenever two people have conflicting dispositions, preferences, or desires, they have a specific common goal that requires the coordination of their actions. Moreover, it may be unclear what group the relevant group is, i.e., who we are. The hypothesis about why we have de nobis desires should then dig deeper than the sketch suggests. We should look into the work of evolutionary psychologists to support the explanatory hypothesis: we have these collective attitudes because this has proved evolutionarily advantageous, as Tooby and Cosmides [2010], for instance, claim. According to them, alliances pose a series of adaptive problems, where the two main ones are the problem of free riders and the problem of coordination: 'gravitation towards common evaluations' and 'aversion to dissonance in groups' are evolved systems of coordination that 33 Gilbert [2009] advocates the irreducibility of the collective attitudes of joint commitment supporting team thinking, questioning proposals by other writers such as Bratman [1993]; see Ludwig [2007] and List and Pettit [2010] for two opposing recent discussions. We do not need to commit ourselves here to the irreducibility of team thinking. 34 These shared desires are shared values, along the lines suggested by Bratman [2004]: shared policies for treating the relevant features as reasons in joint deliberations. respond to evolutionarily recurrent situations, for example contamination or nourishment. 35 As to the second problem, regarding who 'we' are, we defer to Lewis. By default, we tend to assume that 'we' is everyone else (sufficiently similar, in some fundamental respect, to the speaker). Beyond this, 'we wait and see' [Lewis 2000: 85]: In making a judgment of value, one makes many claims at once, some stronger than others, some less confidently than others, and waits to see which can be made to stick . . . How much am I claiming?-as much as I can get away with . . . What I mean to commit myself to is conditionally relative: relative if need be, but absolute otherwise.
In sum, our hypothesis about the attitudinal disagreements about taste is as follows. Presuppositions of commonality constitute joint commitments manifesting group identification of the kind posited by the authors mentioned above, which might result in coordinated action with respect to an indefinite plurality of projects. To put that in a simple-minded way: By judging in the way she expresses in Noma1, A manifests her being prepared (in a felicitous context where the commonality presuppositions are indeed part of the common ground) to endorse directives such as Let us promote more Noma-eating, even at the expense of Mugaritz-eating! 36 The core of the attitudinal agreement between participants in such a conversation (or between a thinker and others sharing her views) lies in their sharing those de nobis collective preferences.
Explicit indication that the presuppositions fail, as in the metalinguistic reading of expressions of disagreement in such cases, manifests the absence of such preferences-of such collective dispositions. This is missing in other semantically similar cases, such as the disagreement about being rich. 37 In a nutshell, people who converge in their collective de nobis dispositions have a non-doxastic agreement: they agree in their collective desires. This agreement inclines them to coordinate their actions toward an indefinite plurality of related projects, by sharing preferences of the kind just mentioned. People in non-doxastic disagreement (who disagree in desires) have dispositions that may be obstacles to the coordination of their actions. 35 As they put it [Tooby and Cosmides 2010: 250], there seems to be a psychophysics of mutual coordination and coregistration . . . The benefits of coregistration and mental coordination can explain . . . an appetite for coexperiencing (watching events is more pleasurable with friends and allies), the motivation to share news with others, for emotional contagion, for gravitation in groups toward common evaluations, for aversion to dissonance in groups, for conformity, for mutual arousal to action as with mobs (payoffs shift when others are coordinated with you), and so on. 36 This is to add a collective, group-involving, twist to expressivist themes. But one does not need to subscribe to expressivism to justify the move; other forms of motivational internalism (such as the one advanced by Wedgwood [2007]) will do, adding the collectivist twist. 37 It might also be present there, for instance if we are discussing tax obligations; our prediction is that a lingering impression of disagreement will then be felt in such cases. It should be clear that we are only aiming to account for some remaining impressions of disagreement, which we think are more easily felt in cases involving predicates of taste than in cases involving 'rich'. Impressions of disagreement might simply evaporate in the former cases among the enlightened; and some may remain in the latter cases, ascribable to practical aspects too.
Both Huvenes [2012] and Sundell [2011] point out that people may use markers of disagreement even in cases where it is manifest to them that they are not in doxastic disagreement: 'I like this chilli'-'I disagree/Nuh-uh/No, it is too hot.' This shows that there is no immediate argument from disagreement against contextualism. Huvenes suggests an account in terms of nondoxastic disagreement, as we have done. We try to go a bit further than he does in suggesting how to elaborate the nature of the non-doxastic disagreement.
To conclude, we hope to have made clear both the complexity of the issues and the plurality of resources available to a sensible form of contextualism in order to deal with them. Relativists do not do justice to a good portion of the data (as pointed out by Cappelen and Hawthorne [2009: 122À6] and Schaffer [2011: 220À3]). They mostly ignore the generic and dispositional elements in an adequate form of contextualism, the distinction between prereflective and enlightened intuitions, metalinguistic disagreements, and the rich role of non-doxastic and practical aspects. 38 When the problems incurred by the more radical and interesting variety of relativism-assessor relativism-are added to the balance, the verdict is, we think, clear.

University of Lisbon and University of Barcelona
it makes the wrong predictions about what we should do when the presupposition of similarity fails. On the sort of contextualist proposal . . . , once the presupposition of similarity fails, it should be clear that we are in a situation where the parties to the dispute are simply talking past one another, and their assertions are not really in conflict . . . But this seems wrong. The right reaction to the failure of the presupposition of similarity is not for each party just happily to accept the other's assertion. The right reaction is to stop asserting those sentences.
As we have pointed out, however, on the one hand folk intuitions are not consistent with what Egan takes to be the right reaction. On the other hand, disagreements about matters of taste involve de nobis dispositions and desires; and the failure of a presupposition of commonality is a possible source of conflict.