List of Past Events
Taste Predicates and the Acquaintance Inference
Dr. Dilip Ninan
Tuesday, April 21, 2015, 01:00pm - 02:00pm
Tufts University, Department of Philosophy
Simple sentences containing predicates like “tasty" and “beautiful" typically suggest that the speaker has first-hand knowledge of the item being evaluated. I consider two explanations of this 'acquaintance inference': a presuppositional approach and a pragmatic-epistemic approach. The presuppositional approach has a number of virtues, but runs into trouble because the acquaintance inference has a very different projection pattern from that of standard presuppositions. The pragmatic-epistemic approach accounts for the main data I consider, but faces challenges of its own.