Similarity indexicalism, propositional anaphora and semantic pluralism

JAIMES, FEDERICO JAVIER

Ciudad de Buenos Aires

Workshop; ICSO IV: Issues in Contemporary Semantics and Ontology; 2018

Sociedad Argentina de Filosofía Análitica (SADAF)

The debate of predicates of personal taste is about the semantic behavior of predicates which extension depends on the subjective assessment of a person. These are predicates like ?tasty?, ?cute?, ?fun?, etc. There are different theories in the market to explain this kind of predicates, and which to choose will depend on the part in the semantics when we want to put the feature that allows us to show that the truth value of a particular proposition is grounded on the subjectivity of the speaker. One of the more popular theories to explain this is indexicalism. This theory claims that the semantic feature that denotes the subjectivity of the speaker is included in the proposition expressed. This kind of position has been attacked. One of the central critics is that this kind of theories cannot explain propositional anaphora that include predicates of personal taste. The aim of this talk will be showing that indexicalism; precisely, the theory known as similarity indexicalism (López de Sa (2007, 2008, 2015); is able to explain propositional anaphora including predicates of personal taste. To do this, I will appeal to a pluralistic account of the propositions that are expressed when we utter a sentence.