30 juin-2 juil. 2025 Nantes (France)
Predicates of taste as event-modifiers and the problem of disagreement
Dan Zeman  1@  , Mihai Hincu  2@  
1 : University of Porto
2 : Valahia University of Targoviste [Roumanie]  (UVT)
B-dul Unirii 18-20, 130082, TargovisteUniversitatea VALAHIA din TargovisteBd. Carol I, Nr. 2, 130024, Targoviste, Dambovita, ROMANIA -  Roumanie

Matters of taste have oftentimes been thought to not be the topic of (serious) dispute. However, in the literature on the semantics of expressions like “tasty” and “fun”, appeal to disagreement amounts to a familiar argument, based on the intuition that in exchanges like

(1) A: Skiing is fun.

(2) B: No, skiing is not fun.

the interlocutors both disagree and are without fault. A lively debate between various views on the market has unfolded in the last decades, with various solutions to the problem of faultless disagreement being proposed.

In this debate, predicates of taste have been mostly taken to form a unitary class. More recently, however, the unitary character of such expressions has been questioned. John Collins (“Disunity of Personal Taste”, Mind & Language, 2024), for example, takes there to be two types of predicates of personal taste: the T-type (from “tasty) and the F-type (from “fun”). As other authors before him (e.g., Pearson or Moltmann), Collins notes that, while predicates of the T-type are predicates of objects, predicates of the F-type are predicates of events, specifying a way the experiencer of the event they modify is experiencing it. According to Collins, the logical form of (1) couched in event semantics is

(3) (∃


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