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Is Relativity a Requirement for Mind-Dependence?

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter › peer-review

Abstract

According to a common intuition, a property is subjective or minddependent if it is a matter of taste whether an object possesses it or not, and such matters are open to so-called faultless disagreement. For instance, assuming that funniness is subjective, two people may disagree about whether something is funny, yet both be right. If this intuition is correct, the possibility of subjective properties seems to depend on the possibility of faultless disagreement, which again seems to rely on some type of relativism about truth or facts. Given that relativism is a contested view, this reliance is not a fortunate one for subjective properties. Those rejecting the possibility of faultless disagreement include indexical relativists. In this paper, I argue that the mind-dependence of properties does not require faultless disagreement and that indexical relativism, or contextualism, has the resources needed for a coherent notion of subjective property. While contextualism may have its flaws, failure to account for subjective properties is not one of them.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationContext-dependence, Perspective, and Relativity in Language and Thought
EditorsFrançois Recanati, Isidora Stojanovic, Neftalí Villanueva
PublisherWalter de Gruyter GmbH
Pages317-332
Number of pages16
ISBN (Print)1-282-78409-9, 9786612784095, 3-11-022777-0, 3-11-022776-2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2010

Publication series

NameMouton Series in Pragmatics
Volume6

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright: © 2010 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Genthiner Str. 13, 10785 Berlin.

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